Our government’s belligerence and sabre-rattling over Ukraine brought to my mind a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century radical German philosopher. Nietzsche hated Christianity and what he called its ‘slave morality’, and instead advocated the philosophy of the ‘Ubermensch’ or ‘superman’, who would live a free and creative life unrestrained by conventional bourgeois morality. I think there’s a line in his best-known work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, which runs
‘They say that a good cause justifies any way. But I say unto you, a good war justifies any cause’. Nietzsche himself was rather less aggressive than his supporters. When his cousin, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, hailed Thus Spake Zarathustra as a work of supreme German nationalism, Nietzsche wrote back to her telling her that she was wrong. ‘It is a book for those who like to sit and think, no more’.
I doubt Bozo or any of the horrors have ever read Nietzsche, and I doubt they’d like him if they did. But they have the same attitude to war, even though I don’t think Nietzsche himself was entirely serious about it when he wrote.
But Bozo and his minions are, and I am afraid they will drag us into dreadful carnage, if not a nuclear war.
It’s Christmas, so I’m trying to intersperse the serious stuff I’m posting up here with lighter material, so that’s there some seasonal good cheer flying around. I found this on the Movie Clips Channel on YouTube. Kubrick’s epic SF film, 2001: A Space Odyssey was re-released at the cinema in 2014, thirteen years after the film’s nominal date. And it shows brief clips from the movie, mixed with suitable quotes from critics and directors. The clips are from some of the film’s iconic moments – the black monolith, the discovery of clubs and tools by primitive apemen, HAL, the lone astronaut jogging around the spinning living space inside the Odyssey, which gives it artificial gravity, to Khatchurian’s ‘Gayane’. The Odyssey itself, natch, the super-sleek space shuttle approaching the wheeling space station to the tune of Strauss’ ‘Blue Danube’, the symbolism of the Sun and moon appearing in line with the Monolith early in human prehistory, the strains of ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’, the Moon Lander descending to the underground moon base. And of course, the Star Gate.
Kubrick told Clarke he wanted to make the greatest SF movie of all time. And for many critics he did it. The film is epic, baffling and infuriating. When it was shown on BBC TV in Christmas 1983 or thereabout, my brother, father and myself all had an argument afterwards about what on Earth or space it all meant. It’s an intelligent, and paradoxically also a deeply religious one. Clarke, an atheist, who famously wrote the script, has made this point in interviews. It deals with intervention in human evolution by non-human intelligences, and has themes of death, rebirth and transcendence. Think of the last ten minutes or so of the movie, where Bowman ages before being transformed into the Star Child. And the pictures on his chamber walls are of the Madonna and Child. Again pointing up the theme of divine incarnation and birth with a salvific mission.
Back in the 1990s George Lucas re-released his Star Wars: Episode IV, which had been retouched with digital technology and computer graphics. Some of the critics got carried away, and announced that it was the greatest SF movie ever. Not so, replied the great man, who took out a whole page advert in the LA Times to say that 2001 was the greatest SF film of all time. A generous homage by one of the great masters of modern SF cinema.
There’s been a trend in some cinemas showing old movies. The other year one of cinemas around the country showed the original Blade Runner movie. Another showed the Czech SF epic Icarus. And one of the theatres in Cheltenham screened a series of old films, including the classic British comedy, The Ladykillers. This is film as it is made to be seen: at the cinema. My only regret is that I’ve managed to go to none of the re-releases, except Star Wars.
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