The "Ocean of Gnosis" in "Stranger Than Fiction"

Stranger Than Fiction (2006) explores the deep symbolism of the "Ocean of Gnosis" and the limits of a Writer / Demiurge, unable to solve the limits of time and becoming. It's the old battle of man against Gnostic Demiurge one that wants to impose a narrative fatalistic, gnosis that struggle for the awakening of free will within the realm of necessity.

Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is an IRS auditor who leads a lonely life, rigid ruled by numbers (it always counts the number of times you brush your teeth vertically and horizontally) for his wristwatch and routine. His apartment is as impersonal as a hotel room with no personal objects, photographs, memories or disorder.

But one morning, Harold starts hearing a voice narrating his actions, "a modest element of his life as normal could be the catalyst for a new life." Immersed in daily data and figures for the first time creates a target level (or awareness of spiritual transcendence?) In your life: Who is this omniscient narrator? That plan comes? Harold becomes haunted by that voice off, until you discover your purpose: to chronicle the impending death of Harold.

After quitting to seek therapeutic support, Harold seeks an unorthodox solution: seeking the assistance of an eminent professor of Literary Theory, Professor Jules Hebert (Dustin Hoffman). From there the film provides an interesting narrative irony: more than concern for his mental state, Harold realizes that his life seems to be inside a larger purpose, as the narrative of a literary work. So with the help of Julius, must find out which plot and literary genre is concerned, for by doing so, discover how the outcome would be deadly to avoid it.

The voiceover is the writer Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson performed on - famous for killing all the protagonists in his books). His initial images in the film are symbolically suggestive (the protagonist observes the top of buildings such as the Gnostic Demiurge creating a cosmic plot to confine the protagonist anthropos).

Initially, two elements of the films Gnostics are present in "Stranger Than Fiction": the strength and regularity of the reality that crumbles to find that everything is a literary narrative and an arbitrary Demiurge and ironic deconstruction of filmic narrative itself - in story is constantly creating target levels, for example, discussion of the very elements of the script of the movie (Dramatic Irony, God "ex machina" etc.). and the search for Harold and Julius to determine to what genre the film that the viewer assists falls (comedy? Drama? tragicomic?).

Karen Eiffel is the Demiurge who is so intoxicated by the power to kill his players, enters into crisis and suffering a creative block: do not know now how to kill Harold creatively. As in the Gnostic mythology, all the power of the Demiurge is not able to solve the major flaw of his material universe: the becoming, over time. The publisher sends an assistant to help her overcome the lock and press it on the deadlines for delivery of documents.

For the Gnostic myth, the Demiurge imprisons man in his physical cosmos with one main goal: steal the light particles, reminiscent of the true top of the Pleroma plan contained in the human, this plan that is beyond the powers of the Demiurge. This is represented in shyness and naivety of Harold, who will increasingly writer Karen fascinated by its own protagonist to the point of reluctant to kill him. Gradually, freeing them from the rigidity of the bureaucratic world and right things (in that it discovers the artificiality of the world we lived).

That purity of feeling the "first look" is symbolically worked with several biblical symbolism of Genesis. The apple in the mouth of the exit Harold rushed to the bus stop every morning, the meeting with Anna Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal - baker audited by Revenue) that offers cookies taste which will further open up to Harold a world of new sensations (the original sin of biblical Paradise), the attraction to an old Fender guitar in the same color of the apple in his mouth every morning is Harold so.

Moreover, the character Anna Pascal occupies an important role to gnosis Harold. As in the Gnostic mythology female character of Sophia occupies an important role to bring wisdom to the physical cosmos, the character of Ana Pascal offering the "apple of original sin" (cookies) that opens the mind of Harold.

The "Ocean's Gnosis"

The main theme of the film is the gnosis of Harold. He has an empty life, bureaucratic and repetitive (typical characterization of the character "The Traveler" in the Gnostics films) in the process of gnosis should be through a game (the process of discovery of the plot metalinguistic narrative of his life) where the boundaries between fiction and reality are confused, like a journey through which the protagonist wakes up. Such ambiguity is the open path to gnosis.

This gnosis Harold begins on symbolic scene where Harold flips through the cards from the drawer of a huge file room Internal Revenue. The voiceover of Karen Eiffel narrates "The sound of paper against the separator was the same tone of a wave to break on the sand. And when Harold noticed it, he realized that the waves had already heard enough to be what he envisioned as a deep and endless ocean. " Here we have the symbolism of the "Ocean of Gnosis," the core of many metaphysical teachings Sufis (Sufism, mystical and contemplative stream of Islam that Westernized through Hinduism), for example, the Muslim mystic and poet Jalal Al-Din Rumi. For him, we see God not through teaching but the "heart", as if we were "in an ocean."

Harold knows he is dying, the struggle against this fate narrative imposed by writer / demiurge. As in the movie "Blade Runner" (film 1982, based on the novel of the Gnostic writer Philip K. Dick where a replicating robot struggles to find its creator to claim for longer life), Harold meets his creator, writer Karen Eiffel. Shocked, she confronts her own creation.

Professor Julius Harold and read the original writer and come to the conclusion: Harold has to accept death, after all, the new book is a masterpiece of Karen Eiffel. Again, the use of meta-narrative of the story: as in any screenplay, the protagonist must sacrifice for a greater cause in this case, the masterpiece of Eiffel. Julius Hebert, Professor of Literary Theory, Harold tries to convince the inevitability of death. It's about a "Greater Plan, the outcome of a great literary work, the high point of career Writer / Demiurge.

With so many biblical references and mystical that the film does, is the inevitable comparison with the Passion of Christ. Harold, as Christ knows who will die. Jesus Christ must die for a cause greater (the salvation of mankind) and Harold must die because of a "Greater Plan" means the necessity imposed by a clever narrative. But we are in a movie Gnostic: as in Gnosticism not where Christ came to save us (his death had nothing to do with it), but for the "cure" (bring gnosis to show that being in the world is not to be him ), Harold did not come to earth to die for a "Greater Plan", but to achieve gnosis.

By discovering the "oceanic feeling" in the banality of everyday gestures, Harold bringing the element of chance in causal narrative: the fragment of the clock halts bleeding which would be fatal to the protagonist in an accident ironically genial prepared by Eiffel. Again limiting the power of the Demiurge: the time, represented by the broken clock.

"Stranger Than Fiction" explores Gnosticism in both content and in form: the reality that imprisons Harold as a "constructu" arbitrary and deconstruction of metalinguistic own itinerary along the filmic narrative.

Credits:

• Original title: (Stranger than Fiction)
• Release: 2006 (U.S.)
• Director: Marc Forster
• Actors: Will Ferrell, Denise Hughes, Tony Hale, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Emma Thompson
• Running Time: 113 min
• genre: Comedy
• Studio: Mandate Pictures / Three Strange Angels / Crick Pictures LLC
• Distributor: Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures Entertainment
• Director: Marc Forster
• Screenplay: Zach Helm
• production: Lindsay Doran

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Why Gnostic Movies Are An American Trend? (Final Thoughts)

While the Fantastic in the Old Continent has always been associated with the artistic avant-garde, the U.S. will permeate the forms of popular culture came in the twentieth century, creating a "sub-zeitgeist" represented by a whole literature of comic books, magazines, pulp fictions and filmic genres like sci-fi, horror and fantasy. The process of mass fantastic culminates with Gnosticism pop movies like Matrix and Thirteenth Floor where gnosis associate with the new computing technologies.

Continuing the previous post (click here to read), we reach the following conclusions about the marked differences between Europe and the United States not only about the developments of the elements of the Fantastic in art as the destinies of several Gnostic movie:

1 - While in Europe the Fantastic was always associated with great artistic and literary avant-garde (Romanticism, Gothic, Expressionism, Surrealism, German Expressionism in film etc..) In the U.S., by contrast, the Fantastic from the start associated whether popular cultural forms (Puritan narratives about miracles in everyday life in the eighteenth century, bizarre or sensational stories in magazines and pocket books of the nineteenth century - which will equip authors like Poe and Emerson - rebirths mystical / religious as Mormons and "Shakers" at the turn of the century, again the Fantastic in comics and pulp fictions in the 40 and 50 and the new religious mystic rebirth in the 60s with all utopianism and communalism.

2 - If the Great Art in Europe was identified with elements of the Fantastic, different from that in the U.S. the major artistic events in general indificaram with the realistic narrative with a strong influence on journalism as Ernst Hemingway, Mark Twain, Truman Capote etc.. Indeed, the whole process of rationalization of American culture just confining the Fantastic basically three different popular genres: science fiction, horror and fantasy. Thus, it creates a kind of "sub-zeitgeist" popular, as distinct from High Art, which will go through the whole underground culture of that country until last explosion mystical-religious '60s. Thereafter, the Fantastic will proliferate in video-games, role-playing games, interactive game web etc..

3 - Within this cultural process of rationalization, Fantasy has always been represented as an illusion, a dream, where a strategy of a character another trick to make him believe he lost his mind. From the '70s (as a reflection of the room "Great Awakening" mystical psychedelic 60s) the film begins to explore these elements of the fantastic in a serious and sophisticated:

"American films of the post-Star Wars begin to show interesting, sophisticated and ironic images. The 80s saw, for example, a furious Babylonian god trapped in a cold apartment in New York, without benefit of rationalizing a plot in the movie Ghostbusters (1984) Ivan Reitman, written by Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis; also saw the postmodern zombie mannequin in the movie Beetlejuice (1988) Tim Burton written by Burton and Caroline Thompson; saw the tragic story of the boy metal Scisorhands Edward (1990) by the same director and written by Michael McDowell. In all of them noticed a change in form and trans-formation and designed especially with the emphasis more on
technology than on the metaphysical dimension of the phenomenon "(Nelson, Victoria. The Secret Life of Puppets. Havard University Press, 2001 p.97).

4 - In addition to stage European Gnostic cult films (such as Zardoz starring Sean Connery and The Man Who Fell to Earth with David Bowie in the '70s) in the U.S. mix Gnostic (religious, mystical, alchemical and esoteric) comes to Hollywood mainstream in 90s in popular movies that will compose the model of Gnosticism pop whose films like Matrix represent the culmination of this trend.

5 - The fourth "Great Despartar" religion and mysticism converge with new computer technologies as demonstrated by Theodore Roszak. Gnostic Movies of the 90s will represent this utopian encounter between technology and transcendence gnosis in emblematic films like The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix. We could propose the hypothesis that the popularization of "sub-zeitgeist" gnostic-mystic-esoteric is rationalized by Hollywood. Unlike the past, the Fantastic is removed from the confines of traditional genres (science fiction, horror and fantasy) to emerge as a drama in movies like The Game (1997) or as a western Dead Man (1995). But the price to be paid is the emphasis on gnosis in technology, placing in the background metaphysical or philosophical aspects

6 - With the crisis of the dot com companies in 2000 and reflux of a whole messianic imagery of the Internet and new technologies, as well as the crisis of self-help technologies inspired by computational models (self-knowledge as a process of reprogramming Software cerebral), we have a new way open to the elements of the fantastic within the Gnostics movies for the masses. In this century we have the recurring question of the "technologies of the spirit" (self-help and self-knowledge) and a new approach to gnosis with no more emphasis on technology but as an inner journey of the protagonist confined in hallucinations, delusions and divisions esquizofrências induced a Demiurge. The list of films Gnostics is extensive, but we can highlight the following examples: the powerlessness of psychiatrists in Stay (2005), Shutter Island, (2009) Identity (2003), the perplexity of the therapist and pedophilia author's self-help books in Donnie Darko (2001), the manipulative therapy as digital erasure of memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), the failure of technology the company that sells "lucid dreaming" by not providing the irruption of the unconscious in his client in the film Vanilla Sky (2001). In all these films the intimate process of reform should not be confused with self-help and spirituality, opening room for a metaphysical emphasis to gnosis.

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The end of the matrix model of Pop Gnosticism

From the bombastic release of Windows 95, we had the speculative boom of the potential of the Internet and computing technologies. Parallel to this, the growth of motivational techniques and self-help explicitly modeled on computer programming. In 2000 we break companies "dot com" and the Nasdaq stock exchange and, thus, the deceleration of an entire ciberutopia. Movies Gnostics reflect this change with the crisis of the Matrix Gnosticism pop and change in pursuit of gnosis, increasingly focused on internal conflicts of the protagonist.

For the French historian Marc Ferro every film is a document because it would represent the imaginary of a given society or historical period, "the imaginary is both history and history, but the cinema, especially fiction films, opens a great way toward the fields psychosocial history ever achieved by the analysis of documents "does not matter if the film refers to an immediate or remote past, since it always goes beyond its content.

Strongly connected with the social imaginary of the end and beginning of new century, the film industry today, particularly the U.S., reflects not only the technological vision transcendentalist like, well, existential issues, ethical and spiritual resulting from such imagery.

Perceive a clear change in the gnostic themes in movies final passage of a century to the beginning of new century. The years 1999-2000 mark a change of representation of the unreality of the world in which the protagonist lives.

In the first period (1995-1999) we have a simulated world by powerful technologies omnipresent and omniscient, able to create a counterfeit of reality so perfect that is indistinguishable from the original, at least for the perception of the protagonists. We have in this first phase the classical Gnostic narrative of a world created by a Demiurge (the technology) to trap human beings. The narrative presents a Manichean character (in the sense attributed to the Gnostic narratives of Mani) and we see an explicit and dramatic confrontation of the divinity of man against a crazed by the spiritual power and technology.

In Mad City (1997) we see a whole supra-reality created by the media circus surrounded the kidnapping unwitting that imprisons the protagonist. The film highlights the technological power of the omniscient and omnipresent media versus innocence and purity of the protagonist, seduced by character goal of TV monitors placed within the actual scene of action (Sam saw himself in the museum where they kept the hostages) . Truman Show (1998) reinforces this view of media technology, capable of simulating a world to create a new Adam. Explicitly inspired by the exprience tecnognóstica Oracle (The Oracle Project was to put in huge hangars of glass, erected in an area cm Tucson, Arizona desert, four men and four women, 3,800 plant and animal species and simulations of the five major biomes of the planet Earth. There were monitored for two years for two thousand electronic sensors and assisted by paying 600 thousand), this film is a clear example of the representation of technological vision utopian and end-of-century transcendentalist.

Pleasantville (1998) the power, not just technology, but magic of Mr. TV technician transports players to a TV series of the '50s, a microcosm of perfect simulation of reality of Adams and Eves media. Indirectly, The Game (1997) will touch on that theme by presenting a company with such technological omnipotence and omniscience that is capable of interfering with TV broadcasts open (making the program interact with the protagonist) and produce a kind of game that also interacts with real life.


Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor (1999) explicitly represent the imaginary tecnognóstico the end of the century. Technoscience approach and mysticism to make computer technology as a means to spiritual transcendence possible. The metaphor of the units that are autonomous and self-learners to gain awareness in simulated worlds and the possibility of transcending consciousness of a simulated world for less than one are explicitly tecnognósticas. In both films we see creators of simulations Demiurgos become intoxicated by the power which, again, seek to extract from prisoners or the innocence of new energy "Adams."

The obvious symbolism of Gnostic Manichaeism is Dark City (1998). Demiurges again (this time an alien race) imprison humans in a city-lab to get them the essence of the human soul. The city is a gigantic scenery recreated from fragments of human memories of all times, as well as Seaheaven of Truman Show is a copy of a copy of the advertising imagery.

Although no explicit reference to the technological universe, Being John Malkovich (1999) is a true parable of the destinations that seek mediation of identities, or avatars, represented by the figures of the puppets and the interior of the head of John Malkovich. It is the media-technological context formed by the pursuit of fame (if you can only stay 15 minutes in Malkovich's head, a wry reference to Andy Warhol's famous phrase about fame) and identity by means of avatars in virtual environments like Second Life.

The Crisis of the "Matrix Model"

The "Matrix model" of Gnosticism pop seems to end in 1999 with the actual movie Matrix. In 2000 we have a slowdown of utopian euphoria in relation to computer technologies with the bankruptcies of companies "dot com" and the revelation that most of these companies never had profit and that the utopian model of an Internet socializing with potential within capitalism had his days are numbered. According to Erik Davis, we have a loss of techno-euphoria:

"The collapse of the bubble the 'dot com' visionaries put back into their comfortable homes, and that's return to the real 'was further cemented by September 11. Utopian euphoria and dizziness post-human are out; stability and family values are in. Instead of ambition for the dissolution of borders, we see, at least in American politics, the restoration of anxiety for the defense of borders: nation, intellectual property, the Christian religion. " (DAVIS, Erik, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. London: Serpents Tail, 2004, p. 400).

Simultaneously, from Memento (2000), although Fight Club 1999 is already a harbinger, we have an amendment on the nature of the illusory world in which the protagonist is a prisoner. Now, the origin is in the mind of the protagonist himself. The illusory world may be the result of a neurological disorder or psychological (loss of short-term memories as in amnesia or schizophrenia on Identity (2003), internal conflicts (the feeling of guilt as in Stay, 2005) extrasensory powers (the gift of ubiquity as space-time in Donnie Darko, 2001) or diving into an inner world of memories as in Vanilla Sky (2001) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).

The importance (or fear) symbolic of the new technologies and simulated worlds seems to deflate. This movement of "return to reality" seems to also reach the movies Gnostics. If, as Erik Davis noted, Gnosticism pop of "Matrix Model" had a paradoxical reinterpretation of Gnosticism (as in Gnosticism the world to be transcended is the material in the film world that imprisons the man is the mediations, the simulations and transcendence is the return to physical reality), after 2000 we have films Gnostics a return to a closer view of the concept of Gnosis: as individual salvation and inner transformation. All the Gnostic mythical narrative (Fall and Rise) is transposed into the protagonist in search of the hidden self that was trapped and that is still part of the Fullness.

Although all the films this is the Gnostic theme of faith in yourself (which is opposed to Catholicism where faith can only be in God), only after 2000 have a deepening of this aspect of gnosis. In the Matrix model "faith in yourself" is treated quickly, close to the philosophy of self-help (get rid of fears and personal limitations). Although the simulated worlds are technologically the arrest of the protagonist, technology plays an important role for this release: a simulation technology that produces consciousness and transcendence in The Thirteenth Floor or simulation games that help fights in The Matrix Neo overcome their fears and liberate consciousness.

In contrast, the crop of movies Gnostics post-2000 have these true "technology of the spirit" of reaching a critical way of being ridiculed. They are not only powerless to allow the inner reform, but they are in real or Archons Demiurgos that trap the protagonist. The powerlessness of psychiatrists and Identity in Stay, the puzzlement of the therapist and pedophilia author's self-help books in Donnie Darko, the manipulative therapeutic way of erasing memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the failure of technology company that sells "Lucid Dreams" by not providing the irruption of the unconscious in his client in the film Vanilla Sky. The criticism presented to these "technologies of the spirit" recalls Mani's warnings to avoid the temptations of consoling religion and hedonism as ways to combat the melancholy anesthetic. In Donnie Darko the followers of the pedophile writer of self-help are presented almost as religious fanatics and the technique to erase memories in Eternal Sunshine is actually a way of eliminating feelings of guilt for the client to live life so hedonistic.

As already presented Sfez (Thomas Sfez, Critical Communication, 2000), these "technologies of the spirit" have a secret alliance with the new computer technology to compare the human psyche to a software, hardware and a brain human interiority as a machine governed by the same principle as expressive of such networks: network, paradox, simulation and interaction. These "technologies of self" arrive at the crest of the wave euphoric over the Internet and computer technology and simulation. Apparently, the criticism of the technology of the spirit in movies Gnostics post-2000 line up to reflux technoscientific utopian dream.

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Mister Maker: The Gnostic Flavor for Kids

Hit of the children's channel Discovery Kids, Hit of the children's channel Discovery Kids, mister maker shows, behind the narrative innovations, a surprising flavor Gnostic: symbols that refer to a new children's metalinguistic sensitivity. Currently, the narratives for children are becoming increasingly content ironic, parodic and consciously reflective. The Gnostic mythologies seem to fall well within this universe.

Mister Maker comes out of nowhere in an infinite background white. He pauses, shrugging his shoulders and thinks ... eureka!!! Uma idéia! An idea! Then begins to produce several miniature objects: sofas, shelves, tables, window, curtain, to build a small stage design. The high notes with pride, his own creation, with its open arms enveloping her. Suddenly, a special effect like a star dust and shines involving Mister Maker, bringing it into your own work. The small stage design becomes the setting within which Mister Maker submit their inventions for kids and crafts.

This opening program Mister Maker of children's channel Discovery Kids, has a suggestive symbols at least an openness unheard of for a children's program of this kind. A kind of narrative of Genesis is told to know where it came from the universe run by Mister Maker.

There is a flavor that Gnostic symbolism. He is the Demiurge (the Gnostics hybrid form of consciousness emanating from higher planes, creator of the material cosmos as an imperfect copy of the fullness of the Pleroma), the architect of the scenery and objects and characters from the show. He suddenly appears in an infinite background (he was not created but "emanated", according to Gnostic mythology).

Just as the physical universe created by the demiurge is imperfect (chaotic, fragmented and finite) for being the result of a cosmic accident, the universe of Mister Maker is uneven, disorganized and prone to riots (such as the "doodle-drawers", because they are protesting floods). Of course, all this for the fun of children.

It is also symbolically suggestive framework "Minute Make" where Mister Maker runs against the clock to build one of his inventions. After a minute, Mister Maker back the time (or "tape") to explain the steps now to slow and understandable. The time and becoming are the major flaw of the cosmos created by the Demiurge:

"The scriptures say that the Gnostic Demiurge projected lap times as a poor imitation of timeless eternity. The order, the greatness and legitimacy of the cosmos are adulterated, and more than likely, under the semblance of order and progression casual unchanging cosmos is chaotic and haphazard "(HOELLER, Stephen. Gnosticism: the occult tradition, RJ: New Age, 2005, p. 201)

Although he created the universe, he is a slave of time and becoming. Ironic situation for children: the creator of all racing against time, often pilloried by a madman who goes cuckoo clock. At the end of each program, Mister maker says, "my time to making art is over, but yours is just beginning." Racing against time and time as becoming, finitude, limits. Mister maker wants to teach more than how to make art and toys: want to show children the inevitability of time and the finitude of its creation.

The Platonic World of Forms

Part of geometric shapes that create designs also draws attention. There is a Platonic symbolism: the precession of the perfect forms over the material world. Snore forms on top shelf Mister Maker, waking them. Then they jump from the top (the "World of Forms" platonic) fall into a dizzying speed (emphasis added special effects with the cries of the forms in effect doubled amplified and echoes). On the floor they dance and identify with. In the end, one way to identify again, light and form a figure with its shape, or having to count how many times the form is submitted twice, and then ascend, back to the top level of the shelves.

Jean Baudrillard would talk about the precession of simulacra: the perfect forms precede reality. They are just waiting for the creator / the demiurge awaken to hold the "big bang", the appearance of concrete forms in the physical cosmos.

Genesis, creation, emanation, demiurges, all this for kids? Of course we're not trying to prove that the existence of a Gnostic conspiracy to manipulate children and unsuspecting parents. But if Mister Maker handles symbolism (or archetypes) with a Gnostic flavor to an unpublished children's program of this kind (crafts, arts and toys) that might be the indicator of a change in sensitivity of the new generation: the predominance of a conscience "goal". After all, Mister Maker not only makes toys and art: he is the architect of the universe itself where to move (the end, puts the whole scene back to a box and everything returns to infinite depth).

From Epic to the Meta-narrative

The children's content in the media no longer have an epic narrative (focusing on action and heroism - knights, witches, pirates, steam trains, etc..) To acquire a metalinguistic narrative, reflective, ironic. This phenomenon has been appointed by the British historian Peter Burke. For him contemporary children's characters such as "Captain Underpants" adventure mixed traditional with irony and metalanguage:

"(...) The tricks with which to play, how to change the letters on the menu for lunch in the school canteen, to be as old as their own canteens of schools. In other respects, however, the stories are not even a little traditional. They may even be described as postmodern, thanks not only to the recurring references alternate universes, but also, especially, love the parody of the author and especially for the Self-reference. The hero, Captain Underpants is a parody of Superman, a guy more chubby than athletic, singing praises to cotton underwear while flying in their mission to bring the villains to justice "The captain is also presented to the reader how to create George and Harold, who spend much of their time, both at home and at school, writing and drawing comic strips about it. His comic books are reproduced in the series, so that
readers see themselves sucked into a world of comic within a comic book. So really postmodern, the division between fiction and reality will lose clarity as the stories unfold. " (BURKE, Peter. "Post Modern Children" in http://blog.controversia.com.br/2009/03/28/crianas-ps-modernas/ )

Pink Dink Doo "and" Charlie and Lola "are animations for children who are also examples of this shift in sensibility. Pink creates stories for her younger brother, scoring and creating all the time meta-narratives. In the second part of the episodes, there is a sort of quiz show with questions about the story invented by Pink. Self-reference and conscious parody permeate episodes.

Back to Mister Maker, it seems that the Gnostic narratives seem to fall very well in this environment, "goal" of children's culture postmodern. After all, think that our universe is not a stable and enduring reality, but an artificial construct that there has always been the work of a demiurge clumsy and imperfect, seems to sharpen the postmodern sensibility.

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Post-Modern Nostalgia: a Longing for the Tottaly Other

The idea that post came from a discussion in a class of Communication Studies at the Anhembi Morumbi University. The general theme was the Postmodern Studies. We discussed the nostalgia that dominates the postmodern aesthetic (remake, patchworks, etc...) We note the existence of a paradox: if nostalgia is to miss season that were experienced, how to explain the nostalgia of the postmodern aesthetic in which new generations have missed the times that have ever been experienced? What's behind this nostalgia: an aspiration or ideological manipulation by the "tottaly other"?

"Every ideology has its moment of truth" (Theodor Adorno)


A retro nature dominates the cultural horizon of contemporaneity. Patchworks and subsequent refresher create a cultural scene paradoxically nostalgic. First because it comes wrapped in a modern and contemporary packaging. Movies like Kill Bill shows a Tres chic Uma Thurman in the fight scenes in martial attire fashion, radical and seemingly very current. But to the delight of moviegoers, they are costumes worn by Bruce Lee in his movies Kung Fu B 70s. Actually, Kill Bill is a pastiche of references to the 60, 70 and 80 (western spaghetti "Italian '60s, Bruce Lee movies of the 70s, new wave sounds of the 80s etc.). Indeed, what makes the films of Tarantino cult is precisely the mastery of signs of these quotes from various eras and contexts, removed from their roots and placed in a logical set timeless.

Second paradoxical aspect: these pastiches that are the delight of moviegoers reveals a strange nostalgia: nostalgia for times that were not experienced. Youngsters ride the ambiance of their new homes with objects and decorations that recall the '60s and '70s, the '80s return with "ballads" specializing in this decade ("trash 80," Project Autobahn etc..), Street fairs where they are marketed Objects that time (books, games, toys) for young groups strangely nostalgic for an era that did not experience, themed bars recreate youth ambience and atmosphere of distant times and places in time and space ("bars chics" that revive the bars Popular 50s and 60s, bars frequented by tribes of young "rockers" in their black leather jackets, Tufts to Elvis in an environment with scenic studiously junkerboxes, checkered floors, and posters with success in films of the season).

How to understand this strange nostalgia that seems to characterize the young contemporary nostalgia of experience that have not been experienced and of places that were not visited? There are two different perspectives on this topic that we can name the first as a finalist and the other as causality.

In the first approach the nostalgia that infects contemporary cultural production is intended to serve "the interests of specific ideological stagnation of life that we should allow them to renew forever. Nostalgia, that both speak the newspapers and magazines, is nothing but a powerful psychological tool of Death Organized. "(Luis Carlos Maciel, Death Organized) is a kind of" psychological knot "to divert attention to the present problems. This approach is the traditional complaint of ideological manipulation of the media. Nostalgia as false consciousness.

The second approach causalist we exemplify the approach with Frederic Jameson's nostalgia, pastiche and cultural schizophrenia of postmodern subjectivity. Lacan on the foundations (the identity is structured through language) Jameson realizes the impossibility of the schizoid to ascend to the language and I build a persistent and enduring through time. Without being able to represent the real, it takes significant as the things themselves, to read an intense experience, ad hoc and fragmented. Time is perceived as eternal present and intense moments together a timeless, as well as cultural pastiches. In summary: nostalgia and pastiche as a symptom.

The "Totally Other"

If we Adorno's epistemological proposal that "all ideology has its moment of truth" we can understand that these approaches finalists and causality are inadequate because they can not grasp the particular moment of truth. Be that as false consciousness or as a symptom, post-modern nostalgia is in any way, discarded in toto as a myth or illusion or regression.

Without doubt, this nostalgia (symptom of a malaise of postmodern subjectivity) is exploited as a commodity, however, operates a nostalgic feeling real and concrete: the "longing for the totally other". Expression of Horkheimer, the "longing for the totally other" summarized the purpose of Critical Theory: tackling the idea of temporal progress and propose a rescue from the past:

"The wholly other can only mean pure transcendence, redemption: the materialism of Critical Theory is back for both the singular and redemption of the generations who went through history. We must connect the nostalgia of what happens in the world, the horror and injustice are not the final word, there is an Other "

There is this assertion Horkheimer a strong mystical or Gnostic: the time as a prison, a source of deception, illusion and deception. In fact, Gnosticism seeks to free itself of becoming and return to the status of the principle of everything: stability and true to the Pleroma, the eternal, the whole being. It's a romantic nostalgia.

From this point of view, this paradoxical nostalgia of postmodern culture expresses the mystical component of a radical subjectivity of the malaise now the malaise of an exile, a stranger in his own country, who yearns to seek something in the past that is lost, the real source.
Here Nostalgia is nothing more or false consciousness, nor a symptom, but, above all, call. The past is calling us to something that only experience like deja vu. Every game Genius found in antique fairs or images of old video game Pack Man who inexplicably inspires nostalgia in a young man who grew up playing Nintendo, we can find this nostalgia for the "Tottaly Other".

The sacred nostagia in Donnie Darko

A good example is the movie Donnie Darko (Richard Kelley, 2001). In addition to its retro aesthetic (the narrative is set in the late 80s), the film depicts the life of a troubled adolescent, Donnie Darko, with a mysterious mental condition that separates it from a cultural environment conformist: he begins to realize the unreality of suburban life of American middle class through state and sleepwalking after taking antidepressants. Donnie senses that something is wrong with the world through insights and altered states of consciousness and not from ideological or religious principles. Donnie also discovers that the timetable in which he lives can be reversed and that he has power to do so, that is, to transcend his plan through a temporal vortex and move freely in other planes by changing the predetermined destinations. After the death of his girlfriend and later his mother in a plane crash sucked into another dimension of time, Donnie goes back in time. This time Donnie is in his room and dies in the fall of the turbine. A great sacrifice that takes Donnie to wake up this world and change the flow of time - his girlfriend and her mother will escape death. "I went home," said Donnie expressively. He will find in the past the redemption of a world that Donnie inauthentic experiences so painful.

Incidentally, is recurrent in recent film protagonist's incessant quest for answers to the malaise of this in the past, through shifts in time (either through technological mediations or altered states of consciousness). From Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985), to Peggy Sue(Coppola, 1986) until we reach the recent The Butterfly Effect (Eric Bress, 2004 ) witnessed a nostalgic return to the past as a search for a lost innocence, the reconstitution of an experiment, the recovery of "looking the first time," the freshness of a first experience that was lost in the temporal trap of becoming.

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From Narcissistic Paranoia to Spiritual Paranoia in "Shutter Island"

For those who deal with research on the recurrence of gnostic themes in current film production, Shutter Island is reminiscent of a whole range of films (The Matrix, Dark City, Truman Show, Memento, Thirteenth Floor etc.). thematizing paranoia and schizophrenia as paths to the awakening of consciousness of the illusory reality artificially created by a conspiratorial plot.

Scorsese builds a heavy and tense atmosphere typical of film noir, with all the iconography and symbolism of the genre (fog, fogs, cigarette smoke, rain and storms, overcoats, windows and mirrors) on the story of two federal police (Teddy - Di Caprio and Chuck - Mark Ruffalo) who land on an island where it is installed a madhouse judiciary. They're there to unravel the mystery of the disappearance of a prisoner on an island whose escape is impossible. The important detail is that the narrative is located in 1952 at the height of paranoia of U.S. public opinion about the Cold War and anti-communism, a context that further enhances the film's paranoid vertigo.

As in any film noir where nothing is what it seems, Teddy's character embodies the archetypal detective: he has proposed to solve a puzzle without knowing what the final solution of this puzzle will lead to their identity lost or forgotten. This loss creates a state of paranoia: who to trust? How to distinguish truth from falsehood, illusion and reality? Why do events move without causality? How to know if what he feels is sanity or madness?

What at first seems like a linear narrative about the precision of the parts that lead to solving the mystery of the escape of an inmate of the asylum, is slowly being deconstructed, casting doubt on both the protagonist and for the viewer's identity as the protagonist existence of a prisoner who disappeared.

There are strong indications that Teddy is insane (dreams of his daughter, Dr. Cawley - Ben Kingsley - know your dreams), but if we want to go back to the real understanding of this film, we must bear in mind the aforementioned film "Dark City" , about a group of human beings who maintains a place of quarantine for deploying them false memories.

Teddy may have been drugged progressively, starting with "aspirin" it takes at the beginning, from which vivid dreams begin. Throughout the film, Teddy's mind is being bombarded with psychotropic drugs, as well as the institution is being bombarded by storm. Teddy's mind is heavily damaged, enough so that their mental defenses are reduced, leaving it to be manipulated by Dr. Cawley to believe he is a patient on the island and who had murdered his wife.

What differs from the classic noir is that while there everything revolves around the theme of "human, all too human" here in the movie "Shutter Island" is not the detective tries to solve the puzzle of personal relationships, but the enigma of the illusion of reality that captures the spirit. Then the memories of Teddy the corpses in the Dachau concentration camp (he is a veteran of World War II) are associated with evidence that the island would be an extension of the Nazi experiments on mind control.

Narcissistic Paranoia and Spiritual Paranoia

Besides the Gnostic theme of reality as an artificial construct, this is also the theme of paranoia. For Valentine (Gnostic teacher, student of St. Paul, born in Carthage around 100 AD) is the initiate begins to suspect that the objects around are illusory, how then, can discern between sanity and insanity of their perceptions that the world want to label it? How to separate the desire of fear? Através da paranóia. By paranoia.

Unlike the strict conception of narcissistic paranoia - the idea that the subject is that the world is focused on a prosecution against himself - the design Valentinian is borderline between sanity and madness, through a radical distrust towards the world to around what is given. Living in this sort of limbo, at risk of falling to one side or the other: to become hopelessly insane or prepare to hide in a lucid madness inhabiting a space between the clarity and emotional instability. If, by definition, Gnosticism denies the material reality as an illusion fabricated by unknown purposes, paranoia is the way in which the characters seek enlightenment.

Just like in "The Truman Show" (1998), which seeks to rationalize the paranoia of the protagonist (Christof, the demiurge, tries to rationalize the melancholy of Truman trying to build it within a Freudian plot: guilt for the death father, lutificação process, punishment itself through a hysterical manner) the same way in The Island of Fear psychiatrists seek to streamline the asylum the growing paranoia of Teddy ("all you do is considered part of the madness, its Fears are called paranoia, his survival instinct is labeled as a defense mechanism ..."). Attempts to reduce the sacred paranoia (paranoid distrust of spiritual reality as a whole constructu false or corrupted) the narcissistic paranoia, Freudian mere plot of a beleaguered ego.

The Narrative Irony

Beside the artificiality of reality and paranoia, is associated with a more gnostic theme: the irony. From beginning to end, the film creates a narrative radically ambiguous.

Since the first sequence we see systematic discontinuities between camera shots: axis breaks, discontinuities field / reverse shot etc. The plans that we have the sea or the sky in the background has a scenic character purposely reminding Hitchcoock films of the 50s as Vertigo (meta?). All this gives a character of artificiality to the narrative, leading the viewer to a typical ironic situation: what we see is the current reality or psychic projections of the protagonist? The images correspond to a realistic narrative or dream. What is the point of view of narrative?

Moreover, the story is ambiguous: the protagonist is actually a federal police looking for the solution of a puzzle that ultimately becomes a giant conspiracy or the prisoner's main mental hospital, able to create hallucinations to forget the murder of his family? He is a prisoner of psychotropic hallucinations of a government conspiracy or a prisoner of his own inner dramas? It does not matter, because the interpretations overlap and complement each other.

In the end, we have the main theme Gnostic: the durability of the particles of light and spirit before a material universe corrupted. herefore, the end is emblematic: the spirit of Teddy can not be corrupted, leading psychiatrists demiurges the "final solution": he is led to the lobotomy to confine the spirit finally end in prison - the body devoid of free will. "What could be worse: to live as a monster or to die as a good man?" Teddy delivery to the second option to keep the spiritual integrity.

Credits:

• Original title: Shutter Island
• Genre: Thriller
• Run Time: 02 hrs 28 min
• Release year: 2010
• Studio: Paramount Pictures / Sikel Productions / Phoenix Pictures / Hollywood Gang Productions / Appian Way
• Distributor: Paramount Pictures
• Director: Martin Scorsese
• Screenplay: Laeta Kalogridis, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane
• Production: Brad Fischer, Mike Medavoy, Arnold Messer and Martin Scorsese Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Williams

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Gothics and Darks roam in malls: the fate of the sacred in youth and Teens

The impetus for the sacred is neutralized by the rationalism. The power of symbols and pagan deities is aestheticized, for example, through the imaginary dark, gothic or an entire sub-zeitgeist "that fascinate successive generations of young people and adolescents. It reflects the desire by young "immediate religious experience."

Every ideology has its moment of truth (Theodor Adorno)

This week the students of the Screenplay Structure of the undergraduate course in Communication at the Anhembi Morumbi University produced its first arguments and Abstracts, orally presenting their productions for the class. A recurrent feature in the narratives presented arguments struck me: the 14 stories presented, almost half were covered by an imaginary Gothic and mystical, full of alchemical symbols, players with schizophrenia who do not distinguish reality from illusion, underground spaces and parallel worlds attacked etc. by vampires.

Stories whose protagonists usually teenagers, who lead a normal life until they discover they have strange powers and are secretly observed by dark entities. Why are young people aged around 20 years of age are fascinated by the dark imagery with colors while depressing and epic?

It marked the constant revival among young people of this universe that over the decades makes several labels. In the 70s we had the "rock horror" and "glam rock" of 70 years. Its icons were the androgyny of the character Ziggy Stardust by David Bowie (with the emblematic song "Rock and Roll Suicide" and the relationship of the couple with death - "You're too old to lose it, too young to choose it) and entire universe and underground urban trash synthesized in the movie "Rock Horror Picture Show" - 1975). In 80 years we have the "Dark" synthesized in icons like Robert Smith of The Cure, Peter Murphy of the band Bauhaus. Songs with lyrics inspired by the gothic universe of romantic literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Replicantes melancholy (in the movie "Blade Runner" - 1982), platonic love and the feeling of a generation have reached adolescence and youth at the party (hence the post-modern nostalgia for the 50s in fashion, architecture and film). In 90 years the "Dark" is recycled by a Gothic and Romantic literature is replaced by tales of terror. Young people whose aspiration is to become creatures of the night, with long black capes and special contact lenses that change eye color. This end of the first decade of this century we have the Twilight movie and musical imagination "Emo" distilling these depressive tendencies in young people and adolescents

Depressive tendencies

Already in the 70 German researchers Dieter Prokop and Lakaschus (see the collection of texts "Dieter Prokop" collection "Great Social Scientists" Atica Publisher) addressed as culture media dealt with these depressive tendencies, especially in young people. They analyzed how mass culture created a sort of "sportsmanship" in the relationship between youth and the media content on the one hand the young elements for stimulating artistic vitality, which combats the feeling of lack of substance in existence. On the other hand, the public does not want their peace or routine are destabilized by the true latent contents of this information that may put into question a whole entire order.

Anyway, the moment of truth in that ideology is the genuine desire for transcendence or break in this young, often wrapped around symbols and archetypes of the Sacred and Religious. With the emptiness of political mythology (Che Guevara, Communism, Marxism, etc..), We now have Sacred and Religious imagery as a new channel to transcendence by the anguish of the young (although we find the same component in religious and eschatological utopia policy Communism in the past).

As Nelson says Victoria, Western rationalist culture that momentum for the sacred (or more precisely, the belief in a multifaceted cosmos between the sensible and invisible, the vivid presence of God or the macrocosm in each one of us - the gnosis) is processed and confined the aesthetics of art and literature and made subjective by means of psychology and psychoanalysis.

"The displaced religious impulse surfaces elsewhere not as the demonic but rather as an overvaluing of the object beyond its intrinsic function in our lives. Craving its holy objects, its temples, its roadside shrines and absolutions, we have transcendental in distorted form invade art, the sexual experience, psycotherapy, even the quasi-worship of celebrities living and dead. (...) The aesthetic anaesthetizes. It annihilates function, taking the object out of the realm of necessity into the desinterested contemplation of the subjective viewer's consciousiness ... As opposed to religious modes of apprehension that attempt to penetrate reality in ritual action and symbolic codification, the aesthetic framework takes things out their context, stabilizes them on the surface. What better way might the power of ancient pagan deities be neutralized than by viewing them through the ideology of the aesthetic, as 'art'.""(Nelson, Victoria. The Secret Life of Puppets. Harvard University Press, 2001, pp. 19-20.

This description is the point of destination real impetus for the sacred in this couple, whose symptoms are depression, pain and suffering arising in a society that tries to destroy or at least shift the momentum to develop pragmatic and productive. This impulse translated by means of mass culture, through an entire sub-zeitgeist gothic, strange, bizarre and trash, becomes superficial aesthetic attitude.

That is what lies behind, for example, the paradoxical promotion of McDonald's on display in bus doors: to win the DVD of the movie Twilight in buying combos fast food meals. It is the climax of the sacred destination described by Victoria Nelson: the characters of the film darks lost "place of people happy." The true pursuit of "religious experience" immediate neutralized or aestheticized imagery in the movie "Twilight." The power of an entire pagan symbolism that could put into question the principle of reality struck down by esteticização media. This allows young people dressed in black sit comfortably in the bright indoor consumption of fast food. Darks and goths wandering in malls.

However, the moment of truth that ideology remains. The allure of the "strange" remains generation after generation of teenagers, as the time when renewed the person tries to find a way by which the identity can escape the rites of passage to adulthood, where rituals, such as the Science and Religion celebrate the settlement of the individual in front of a totalitarian order.

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Dialética Negativa: o Adorno Gnóstico

Ao ler dois tópicos da Dialética Negativa de Theodor Adorno ("Experiência Metafísica e Felicidade"e "Niilismo") encontramos uma crítica à religiosidade vulgar que aproxima a transcendência à busca de um "sentido para a vida".

"O Todo é a Verdade" (Hegel)
"O Todo é o Falso" (Adorno)

Na obra Dialética Negativa Adorno rompe com o passado "apocalíptico" das discussões sobre a indústria cultural para buscar a alternativa do "inteiramente outro", a busca pela transcendência de uma falsa totalidade que nos envolve. Para tanto, Adorno parte uma decisiva crítica contra a dialética positiva de Hegel (a transcendência por meio da síntese do Espírito em um Absoluto), ao propor as bases de uma "Dialética Negativa": o resgate da experiência do particular, do concreto e do individual por meio de uma dialética que não liquide o particular por meio de conceitos universais. Se em toda filosofia ocidental identificamos essa liquidação do particular em nome do Universal, Adorno propõe redimir a experiência individual, trazendo materialidade à metafísica por meio de uma dialétida negativa que negue a formação de conceitos para apreender a experiência. Para ele, os conceitos abstratos nada mais são do que reflexos de uma totalidade falsa por ser abstrata (as trocas mercantis, a religiosidade deteriorada, etc) que mata qualquer possibilidade de alteridade e verdade.
No mundo cotidiano essa liquidação do particular pelo universal é experimentada como sofrimento e mal-estar. Nesse cenário vão se propagar cada vez mais idéias que aspiram por um vulgar impulso por transcendência :

"O desespero pelo que existe propaga as idéias
transcedentais, que em outros tempos foram contidas. Qualquer um, unclusive as que se ocupam com negócios desse mundo, considerará um desvario a idéia de que esse mundo finito de tormento infinito seja abarcado por um plano universal divino" (ADORNO, La Dialectica Negativa. Madrid: Taurus, p. 375.)

Para Adorno a questão do "sentido da vida" é uma metafísica secularizada, isso é, já contaminada pela própria natureza do mundo que pretende questionar. A pergunta obterá uma "falsa resposta": este impulso religioso vulgar que pretende transcender a miséria reinante somente reproduz a própria totalidade que pretende superar ao entronar uma nova totalidade. É como se pulasse da frigideira para cair no fogo. Diante da totalidade inautêntica do mundo mercantil, a resposta procura por uma nova injeção de sentido a uma realidade vazia, ou seja, procura uma novo universal que continuará liquidando a autêntica experiência de singularidade individual.
Adorno refere-se a essa experiência como "imediatez subjetiva intacta" ou "subjetivismo do ato puro", experiência que nos daria o "interior dos objetos", a redenção do materialismo por meio da metafísica que, finalmente, revelaria a verdade do mundo. É uma espécie de teologia invertida onde a redenção é menos a fuga do espírito em direção do Absoluto do que o resgate do Absoluto no interior dos objetos do mundo.
Adorno exemplifica esse momento sagrado com a reconstituição proustiana da experiência. O que Proust descobre na Busca do Tempo Perdido são experiências singulares extraídas de pequenos lugares e prosaicos acontecimentos, mas que almejam espontaneamente a universalidade, não pela violência de conceitos que abstraem a concreção dos fatos mas da força do individual, do irreprodutível.

O Niilismo Gnóstico

Se vida tivesse um sentido não nos perguntaríamos pelo sentido dela, afirma ironicamente Adorno. Ao verdadeiro fascínio pela totalidade que a pergunta contém, Adorno contrapõe com o elogio do niilismo: a busca por sentido é paralizante para a liberdade e a felicidade. Aos ataques da consciência moral contra o niilismo, Adorno responde: o niilismo não significa "acreditar em nada" porque crer significa acreditar em algo e não em nada. Esse algo, portanto, é o inteiramente outro, algo para além da totalidade desse mundo, desde já ausente de sentido, tão niilista quanto a própria crítica que se dirige ao Niilismo:

"O niilismo dessa maneira implica no contrário da
identificação com o nada. Seu gnosticismo vê no mundo criado o radicalmente mal, e na negação deste pela possibilidade de outro, todavia ainda por ser. Enquanto o mundo for o que é, todas as imagens de reconciliação, paz e tranquilidade se assemelham a imagens da morte" (ADORNO, Dialéctica Negativa, Madrid: Taurus, p. 381).

Aqui Adorno identifica a natureza gnóstica latente na sua Dialética Negativa. Para ele, não se trata mais de recusar o existente por meio da crítica ideológica (subjacente na sua fase da crítica da indústria cultural). A negação por meio da crítica das ilusões ideológicas (fetichismo, coisificação etc.) esbarra na radicalidade do mal presente na realidade. Não há exterioridade para a crítica. Ser e Totalidade não têm sentido já que se constituem por uma série de abstrações que violentam a felicidade individual e a autenticidade da experiência singular. As dicotomias racionalistas da mera crítica ideológica (verdade/mentiral, real/ilusão etc) não conseguem dar conta de um niilismo desde sempre presente no mundo material. Por isso, para Adorno, a crítica deve ser Niilista e Metafísica ao aspirar pelo terceiro elemento, o tertium quid dos gnósticos: nem ilusão nem a realidade, mas o Inteiramente Outro.
Portanto, extrapolando esta aproximação que Adorno faz entre a experiência metafísica e niilismo, a verdadeira experiência do sagrado ou da gnose não advém da súbita descoberta de um "sentido" ou de um "desígnio"ou "propósito" para a mera existência cotidiana. Para além desse impulso metafísico vulgar, o Sagrado é a súbita descoberta do fascinante vazio e vertigem ao pressentir a ilusão que constitui a realidade.

Quem Foi Theodor Adorno: considerado o principal expoente da chamada Escola de Frankfurt, Instituto de Pesquiss Sociais que reuniu entre as décadas de 30 e 40 do século XX, entre outros nomes, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse e Walter Benjamin. Sistematizaram a Teoria Crítica da Sociedade, quadro conceitual que implicava não apenas na crítica das mídias como Indústria Cultural mas, também, a revisão crítica da filosofia iluminista ocidental.

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The Fate of Religion in the world after the attacks of September 11, 2001

The Book of Eli (Book of Eli, 2010) reflects in each scene the imagery after the attacks of 11/09/2001 where religion and the clash of civilizations are responsible for global conflicts. Therefore, it remains to be neutralized religion at its heart libertarian (Mysticism and Sacred) and become a model of asceticism and discipline martial for "new priests." Warning: this post contains spoilers!

If the films in the '80s-themed post-apocalyptic Mad Max reflect the steroids narcissism of conservatism of the Reagan era, films like the end of that decade continued to reflect the imagery after the attacks of September 11 and all the justifying ideology of international politics anti-terror U.S.. As we know, the alibi in anti-American terrorism is based on the existence of a "clash of civilizations" between East and West, between Islamic fundamentalism or other theocratic cultures and societies and the liberal democratic West. The issue went beyond the political, but through the cultural and religious: our God is more tolerant and liberal than the other. Countries wage wars and attacks in the name of a god, as we build democratic political institutions that reflect a religious system of a god tolerant, practicing compassion and love.

The film Book of Eli explicitly conservative ideology that sits in the era of supposedly liberal Obama administration (which means, in relation to the Bush era, nothing should change in international relations the U.S.).

The protagonist Eli (Denzel Washington) cross, alone, the U.S. apparently devastated by a nuclear catastrophe (the personagans talk about "Big Glare," "the sky opened up and the sun fell on the earth", etc.).. Anyway, the origin of everything would have been a war of global proportions with religious motivations. Therefore, after the war, all copies of the Bible (and other religious books) were rounded up and burned, leaving an issue that is transported by Eli, inside your backpack.

This single copy is eagerly sought by Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a mixture of gangster and mayor who sees the Bible as a set of words with magical power persuasive enough to enlist the city in its favor, getting even more power to influence and control .

Eli (a clear allusion to the prophet Elijah in the Old Testament described as the champion of monotheism and model for asceticism and seclusion in the pursuit of touch with God through prayer) is lonely, driven by blind faith (a voice you would have revealed you should take your single edition of the bible somewhere to the west), monosyllabic and endowed with courage and skills of a martial artist.

So far the movie combines three effects of religion: first, it produced an apocalyptic world war because (the film suggests) fundamentalism and intolerance, and second, the religious discourse is presented as a potential propaganda tool that produces persuasion and, consequently, a kind of "social cement" that motivates people to a common goal, and third, the religion as a drive that produces moral and ethical values like asceticism, self-discipline and motivation from a blind faith that leads to sublimation of desires and individual needs in the name of a higher purpose.

Here the allusion to the prophet Elijah is deliberate. The monastic movement of the century IV took Elijah as his model, a strong emphasis on continence, poverty, life in the wilderness, fasting, his prayer. Eli, the protagonist in the film, goes against a strain of silent protagonists, idealistic and ascetics, from Clint Eastwood at Mad Max.

"New Fathers"

The film's screenwriter, Gary Whitt, originates in the game universe as a journalist and writer of games like "Pray", "War" and so on. It is interesting to note the influence on the script of the Book of Eli not only the language of the universe of games, but even what we may call a new asceticism of a new class that deals with new technologies. The Canadian researcher Arthur Kroker talked about the emergence of "new priests", members of the new virtual class that have a self-image as a mystic and messianic harbingers of a promised land: the digital paradise. Mission that requires renunciation and asceticism: isolation, renunciation of worldly pleasures and physiological needs (sleep and sex), but different from fasting, a diet junk on coffee, cigarettes and slices of pizza in endless sessions in front of computer screens .

The pastiche that Eli is the protagonist (a mixture of characteristic "of the heroes of Western heroes in movies like Kung Fu with David Carradine of the 70 - and pacifist fighter) is a projection of that self-image of the" new fathers "of the digital age.

Return to Order

This neoconservative ideology on religion will be realized in his own narrative structure, and conventional hoolywoodiana: breakdown of order and return to order. The film starts showing sequences of lawlessness, chaos and disorder (gangs of cannibals, attempted rape, robbery, looting), all caused by religion who played in the post-apocalypse world. Eli should carry the book that produced the apocalypse (the Bible) to a safe place in the West. It should keep you away from people who just like Carnegie would repeat the awful addicted past.

At the end we have to restore order, although Carnegie can steal the Bible of Eli having been devoted to reading the Bible for years, managed to memorize it word for word. Arriving in San Francisco in ruins and you go to Alcatraz Island is received by members of an initiative that seeks to unite all the artistic legacy of humanity in a kind of museum. Eli begins to dictate the entire contents of the Bible is that manuscript to be subsequently printed a new edition.

The new version of the Bible is then placed on a shelf, comfortably alongside Thora, Quoran, Bhagavad Vita etc. It is the restoration of order. The ending is both ironic and symbolic: the museum where all cultural and artistic heritage of humanity is gathered is at Alcatraz Island, the legendary prison off (ironically many blogs say the movie should be called "Escape to Alcatraz").

This is the fate of conservative religion and the Sacred: as a book resting on a shelf in front of the disinterested gaze which borders the sacred or the mere aesthetic dilettantism. Herbert Marcuse once called this "repressive tolerance": under the guise of a liberal system that allows all ideologies and religions are published, released or exposed, everything comes down to simple binary oppositions, reducing them to "looks disinterested"or "point of views".

Of religion, only one thing will remain: the ethics of martial self-discipline, asceticism and renunciation: Eli makes a disciple, Solara (Mila Kunis), who, in military attire, backpack and a shotgun in rayban making it the envy of Rambo, off the island of Alcatraz in a spirit of vengeance, thinking about returning to the city of villain Carnaggie and do justice.

In other words, The Book of Eli, in line with the neoconservative ideology after September 11, focuses on religion in the aspect of the repression of the individual before the divine missions high. Religion is contained in the Great Books of Alcatraz (after all, caused great misfortunes in the past), neutralized the power of the Holy (turns another book stocked), leaving only its power to cancel any free will or desire on behalf of an individual moral martial ethics and necessary in a world of struggle against the "axis of evil."

Credits:

• Original title: The Book of Eli
• Source: United States, 2010.
• Director: Albert Hughes and Allen Hughes.
• Screenplay: Gary Whitt.
• Producer: Broderick Johnson, Andrew A. Kosove, Joel Silver, David Valdes and Denzel Washington.
• Photography: Don Burgess.
• Edition: Cindy Mollo.
• Music: Atticus Ross.
  Cast: Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis

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In Search of the Negativity of the Sacred

We should look at filmic experience the moments when the narrative does not return to order, where conflicts are not reconciled, where the film's final sequences are not part of a whole (return to order), but leave the viewer cognitive gap, ambiguity .

For this blog the concept of the sacred must be sought from the reference of a negative theology. Why?

We saw the beginning of this century a wave of documentaries and fictional films that speak on behalf of a sacred experience, spiritual journey of self-knowledge etc.. he or she goes against the universe of self-help and New Age spiritualism, or more philosophically prepared, speak of a unification between science and religion and the unification of all dualities present in scientific or religious discourses.

The problem is that both this conception of the sacred associated with spirituality and the discourse of criticism of the dualism of science and religion start from the same theological matrix: Positive Theology. Unlike metaphysics, theology, as we know, believes in the transcendent reality as existing. And this transmundo sacred or divine can only be a full, before the individual existence. While this has a discrete existence marked by death, that is eternal, and therefore true.

Other than that, metaphysics bring potential negative elements for the formation of a negative theology. Let this distinction between metaphysics and theology made by Eduardo Losso from a text of Adorno:

"The difference between metaphysics and religion is the fact that not apply to a personal God or a transcendent element exists. Is not a science, rather, try to think something "behind the world", or another hidden world, stressing the difference between essence and appearance. If religion has a divine essence and absolute metaphysics thinks the problem of the relationship between this earlier sense, this essence to the world of appearance. (...) The metaphysics does not posit a deity and not give it a shape as theologians .(...) Adorno is unapologetic defense of metaphysics, precisely in this aspect, stating that it qualifies as not content with what is, not to say that what is not there. If religious need the confidence to assert the existence of non-existent, the metaphysical and more realistic and idealistic, so even refusing illusions, would the non-existent without affirming it. "(LOSSO, Eduardo Guerreiro and B. Negative theology Adorno - The secularization of mysticism in modern art. PhD thesis Faculdade de Letras da UFRJ, 2007, p.112-3)

"Do you want the non-existent without affirming it" is perhaps the essence of Negative theology that opposes the positivity of both theology and the sacred. The positivity of both science and religion start from an order above (all divine or natural) already exists, while the science (by the method) carried it, or religion (through faith) Have the experience of the sacred. In this sense, Sacred shall mean a mystical experience or faith that takes hold of the individual, causing him to glimpse her connection with the whole or the Truth.

Instead, the "want the non-existent without say so," we have a reversal of both metaphysics and theology, the denial of all before the actual experience of the individual. The negative experience of the sacred becomes not the annulment of the individual to connect with a whole ( "we are all a" totalitarian slogan of New Age spirituality), but unlike it, can only be a painful experience of breaking away from a all false and inauthentic. While religion gives a supposed security that we are backed by one who comforts us all, negativity brings sacred about the idea the pain and discomfort of the individual to forcibly integrated wholes or systems (social, political, religious, metaphysical, etc.). .

Search the negativity of the experience of the sacred is to seek those moments where the individual raises the malaise in the world in terms of the concept (gnosis?). Vanish points, times when we sense the absence of all simultaneously authoritative and comforting. These are those moments of rupture and transformation originated in altered states of consciousness: suspension, paranoia and melancholy. While the positive moral conscience, religion or simply common sense qualifies the individual pain and limitations of potential errors, sins, weaknesses, this is precisely where, in the apparent nihilism, the denial of any totalizing sense that is the real wild ride . There where everything seems to indicate instability, failure is the true transcendence where the spirit yearns to raise their physical existence to a supra-reality does not yet exist.

The experience of the sacred in this sense is much more the individual desire for transcendence of transcendence existing elevation to an extent already pre-existing individual. Like negative theology asserts the existence of God by his denial ( "If God is absent is because there needs to be if it did not exist could not be absent), the negativity of the sacred denies transcendence already existing in the name of desire by a supra-existence that does not exist.

Speaking of the sacred that invades television and film production on immanence confused with transcendence. Productions such as "We Are All One", "Who We Are" sell a purported transcendence to talk about finding a purpose, meaning in life, connecting with a whole cosmic consciousness. This abstraction can only be that of the total well-known (market, society, corporation, etc.). To which the individual must necessarily be integrated, overcoming their "fears" and "limitations". Therein lies the critical aspect of the negativity of the sacred: the desire for transcendence can only mean a break with these wholes.

Therefore we must seek the filmic experience the moments when the narrative does not return deposits, where conflicts are not reconciled, where the film's final sequences are not part of a whole (return to order), but leave the viewer cognitive gap, ambiguity. Where the experience of returning to reality after the lights were lit in the exhibition hall is not a comforting harmony after seeing players who have left the desirable possible reasons for resignation in relation to individual life. Moments where the individual unease about the world is large and the concept is expressed through the alterations of consciousness (sleep, paranoia and melancholy) that is a possibility of an existence entirely

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Gnosticism Kabbalistic and Tecnognose: the shortcut to gnosis

The beginning of all our research and reflections on the recurrence of Gnosticism in Film and Audiovisual left the paradoxical confluence between mysticism and new technologies: Tecnognose. Unlike the movies where gnosticism gnosis is presented as the soul grows and refines from the body, Tecnognose matter is a golem that have deformed the order of the spirit to come alive. The consequences are totalitarianism and solipsism.

The secret alliance between mysticism and science flourish in the twentieth century with the revival of Kabbalistic myth of the Golem in the scientific and academic circles over the construction of modern technological utopia: a technological route traced by a benevolent elite that allows overcoming the ruins of a material world chaotic and imperfect and rescue the anthopos present in humanity, a return to pure Adamic trapped by mortality.

Kabbalah and the myth of the Golem

The Golem in Jewish mythology flourished during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but has its roots in the second and third centuries when Gnosticism created the myth of the perfect anthropos who fell in the imperfection. This myth of the decline is described in a basic narrative: emanation, and error trapping. In the Coptic Gospels anthropos is the first manifestation of the true God and above the Demiurge. Inside, contains the entire universe, particles of light through them, to redeem the material world and imperfect. However, it is ostensibly defeated by the forces of the Demiurge and kept imprisoned in circles materials. After this apparent decline, the anthropos hear the call of the God of Light, returning. But part of his soul is left behind, trapped. Particles of light serving prisoner that create the material cosmos as we know. Every time people hear the call of light, releasing trapped particles. When everyone has seized this call, the Anthropos (Primal Man) will be fully completed and the matter annihilated.

But how to return to the immaterial whether Anthropos inhabit this physical cosmos? Gnostics replied that the way to get that perfect Adam would be through asceticism or death. But there is another way, in an opposite direction: down to the world of matter. Medieval Kabbalists developed this method, namely, that of redemption through intense experiences with the matter, in their darkest realms. If before the ruins had perfection, it is the Kabbalist turn the matter to arrange the pieces that connect to all lost. Theogony attuned to the Cosmology.

This output produces the Golem ( "unformed"), the return to a state of matter misshapen and imperfect before God to form and perfection. The Talmud says that Adam, before receiving soul and language, was a Golem. God commands the matter through the code, building a world made out of letters. It is the basis of teourgia of Kabbalah. The only thing that separates us from God is sin. If divine creation is made from code, a being without sin can do the same. A person practicing this divine magic does not violate the sacred, but holds the potential of the spirit. The old discussions about the Golem in the twelfth and thirteenth revolve around this primary question: Can a wizard to create an equal or greater than the human? You can bring back Anthropos? For proponents of the medieval "ecstatic Kabbalah" the creation of the golem would be the culmination of a mystical experience, a symbol of union with God: the creation of life from the recitation of sacred letters.

The Shortcut to Gnosis

If the twentieth century physics and cosmology describe a scenario of chaos and improbability (it seems that God play dice with the universe through the formulation of chaos theory of N. Bohr and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Heisenberg), from this confirmation of the secret belief Gnostic primary flaw of the cosmos, the mystical Kabbalistic will be introduced in science to form a new biology made from a special relationship between biology and computer science.

Information Theory and model of computer binary code will offer a model for the design of DNA in the 1950s. Life comes to be seen as a kind of cues. DNA is a form of data processing, as well as the computer, enabling the instrument processing, therefore, be seen as a way of life emerging. Some now admit that we are near the time of the creation of new computer chips consist of DNA-RNA.

Robert Jawstron, NASA, was among the first to propose the advent of "disembodied intelligence". He envisions the day when we will become a "race of immortals" based on a computer mind.

"One day a scientist will be able to remove the contents of your mind and transfer it to the computer's memory. Because the mind is the essence of being, we can say that this scientist went into the computer and went to live there. At least we can say that from the moment that the human brain inhabits a computer it is released from the weakness of mortal flesh ... He is in control of their own destiny. The machine is your body, it is the mind of the machine ... This seems to me the most intelligent and mature life in the universe. Inhabit silicon plates and no longer limited by the duration of life inside the deadly cycle of a biological organism. This kind of being will live forever. "(Robert Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1984, pp. 166-67

Golem, the deformed area and entropy, modeled by binary codes sacred. If the DNA proves the coding divine matter through letters, the information will be the syntax that will remove the noise and the entropy of the organism that inhabits a universe flawed.

Creator of virtual reality, Jaron Lernier believe that this mystical motivation becomes the main attraction of cyberspace. For him, many hackers have the hope of one day live forever after a final upload to the inside of a computer. Lerner characterizes this fantasy as the beginning of a "culture of zombies dominated by ex-humans who" are ready to leave everything behind imagining living in a hard drive, only interacting with other minds and other elements of an environment that exists only in a software "Therefore, the essence of being, the mind (or particle of light that connects us to our original home, the Pleroma), can be scanned for information.

This is the shortcut to the Gnosis: technology as the quickest route to realizing the project of redeeming humanity exiled and imprisoned in circles materials.

This ancient Gnostic quest to transcend the flesh is the emotional subtext behind the euphoric reaction to each new computer on the market and every website or blog with frivolity that is thrown. Lernier even suggested a new psychological category of users: the "nerdiness" intellectually search scan any distinction of quality, feeling and affection. Emotionally, seeks shelter that protects the human intimacy and the demands of the body.
Happily, the guy takes off the body to live a fantasy of unlimited power.

Erick Felinto will appoint this guy as the ciberutopias "tire guy", a form of subjectivity that you want to release the limits of the body, one almost self divine and spiritual nature (pneuma). This guy would tire of the following characteristics: a total communication (such as intangible angels wandering in cyberspace without barriers to communicate), through "hipermediação equivalent to the immediacy of digital media" and the total mobility:

"Immersed in a world without borders, without limits, the ciberanjo enjoys the most absolute freedom of movement. Subjectivity as air, can move or extend at will, can even aim for ubiquity. In fact, it is not just mobility, but the ability to model the "space" around them. "(FELINTO Erick," The Tecnoreligião and the subject tire imagery of cyberspace ", In: Journal Alceu v.6 - n.12 - p. 115 to 125 - Jan. / Jun. 2006, p. 120)

How Felinto notes, the apparent variety of identity on the Internet and the multiplicity of selves in networks hides a weakening or fragmentation of subjectivity. As he concludes: "At a very dark, the subject of the networks I would like an absolute, you want to be in opposition even to expressions of otherness. This person often is limited to ratify the same in the sense that, as concluded a study of the ethnography of the Internet cited by Rüdiger "surfers, mostly not open to the other"

The individual in the network becomes a node that would just reiterate what it is external. As said Christopher Lasch, the appearance of a narcissistic ego great (pneumatic, spiritual) covers an emptying of one's own subjectivity, besieged, adapts and reproduces the mimetic environment to survive. It is the subject fractal, as a fragment that plays within himself, endlessly, the pattern of the whole (See the book Lasch's The Least I).

If the boundaries between Self and Other or disappear, first by the immediacy of the networks (the actual time it feeling that the map is the territory), second, the permeability of the ego and the third by a subjectivity that you want to get rid of limits of the body is in crisis the perception of otherness.

Gnosticism Alchemical versus Kabbalistic Gnosticism

While the Kabbalistic Gnosticism through technology and language, see the matter as a prison, confinement and limiting the potential of the spirit, gnosticism alchemical for the spirit behind the matter, life emerging from death, the order arising from chaos the soul that grows from the body. In short, Gnosticism search alchemical transmutation and not transcoding cabalistic. While the trend Kabbalistic matter is a golem formless and lifeless that have imbued with the spirit to come alive (binary code technology and information), the trend encourages alchemical metamorphosis and the redemption of the spirit through the material existence. The first is digital and abstract, the second is analog and sensual.

If the Kabbalistic Gnosticism seeks to shortcut through the technology of language and the fastest way to the spirit leave the field, the bias for the alchemical Great Denial, the tertium quid, a third alternative between illusion and reality. If the truth about God is beyond human knowledge, the denial of knowledge is the sacred path. The man receives the objects of knowledge and the words as they were vehicles of knowledge in the hope that they can reveal the truth of things.

In a world of illusions his knowledge can only be an illusion also. Neither illusion (created by an imperfect cosmos) and not the reality (Knowledge, Science and Language), but the sacred, the experience that leads the individual beyond those

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