Eruditorum Press

We’re all for praxis, just not for going outside

Review: The Substance

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As Demi Moore awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, she found herself transformed on her bathroom floor into Margaret Qualley.

The Substance touches on a frequently quoted bit of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing about how men look at women while women watch themselves being looked at. In the first act of The Substance, we accompany (Demi Moore in perhaps her most meta role) through her decaying world. Elisabeth’s world is one where her body is commodified, where she is forced to look at herself as a spectacle everywhere she goes. Like all spectacles, she wears down; she’s treated as disposable, ephemeral, like a piece of chicken rotting in her apartment.

When Elisabeth’s double Sue (Margaret Qualley) emerges, we first see her from her own perspective: we see her through her eyes, as the object she was created to be. Sue and Elisabeth’s connection is symbiotic-turned-parasitic-turned-symbiotic-again. Elisabeth’s curse is to see herself as the world sees her: something to be used, enjoyed, and disposed of. It’s body horror, but equally, it’s economic horror, depicting a Hollywood where women are a prized commodity — a world that enlightened, post-#MeToo Hollywood pretends not to be anymore.

Imagine Cinderella meets The Metamorphosis crossed with Sunset Boulevard via Videodrome mixed with Twin Peaks: The Return, and you’d have something almost but not entirely unlike The Substance. It’s bizarre, disgusting, and one of the only intelligent statements about Hollywood this side of the turn of the century. Watching this movie slowly turn into a grosser Carrie is delicious. I giggled at some of the nastiest bits — always a sign that a movie is really effectively horrific. What a beautiful year for horror.…

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And Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 3)

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Continuing a consideration of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark

Links to all previous essays in this series may be found below.

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  1. Succession

As we have seen, the character of Dr. Haynes invokes the evangelical reformers of the English Reformation.  This Reformation was a revolution from above; a top-down change of official ideology in the service of expanding the power and property of the national state and the crown.  It took the form of an ‘enclosing’ of church property, wealth, land, and ideological hegemony by new owners, by the crown, the crown’s state bureaucracy, those sectors of the aristocracy allied with the crown’s project, and those sectors of the rising middle class allied with both.

It is easy to look at Dr Haynes and declare that he had no business ascending to the role of archdeacon because he did so via murder.  But is this correct?  His expectation was that he would be given the post upon the death of Dr Pulteney, and he was right.  All he did was hasten the event.  He achieved his post but the post was always and already his.  How can a world which prizes enterprise and ruthlessness, competition and victory, declare out of the other side of its mouth that it is wrong for him to take the post by force?  By the values of such a civilisation, surely his crimes make him more deserving?  Yes, the church publicly espouses contrary values, publicly despises ambition and cruelty, but then so does Dr Haynes publicly advocate the same worldview.  Is he to be declared unfit for office because he lives by both the ideological claims and the material reality of his institution, his society?

Haynes and his story invoke the spectre of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

It is by no means clear that Macbeth is actually an illegitimate king because he came by his crown by murder.  He is destined to be king.  We know this because the weird sisters see his kingship and its consequences in the future, already written.  And if he achieves the crown of Scotland by deadly competition, so too does Duncan before him, so too does Malcolm after him.  As Richard II says in his own play “they well deserve who know the surest, safest way to get”.

Much as Macbeth is haunted by three witches or weird sisters, so is Haynes haunted by three figures: the carved cat, the carved monk/Death, and the carved Devil.  He does not encounter the Devil explicitly but the Devil character on the stalls is described as having fearsomely long and sharp talons, and Haynes’ facial injuries at his demise are ambiguous: they could be the work of the cat or the clawed Devil – or, in some obscure way, both.  And surely his own crimes would be seen, from within the confines of his own belief system, as diabolical.  Again like Macbeth he is also haunted by women in the sense that Jane Lee’s threat of exposure and blackmail dogs him, his sister’s absence leaves him at the mercy of the supernatural forces in the house, and the entities lurking in the house are repeatedly mistaken for maids moving around.…

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Review: Conclave

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Carlo Maria Viganò will never recover from being portrayed as a guy who vapes in the Vatican.

In the wake of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young/New Pope, there’s been ample room for more political dramas about the Holy See. Conclave takes the route of the paranoid thriller, treating St. Peter’s Basilica as the Washington of All the President’s Men or the London of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (and indeed, TTSS co-writer Peter Straughan scripted this). Conclave is low on original insights into the Catholic Church, but when the results are this much fun, that’s an easy shortcoming to forgive.

Conclave makes for a fun two hours of intrigue and deliciously Catholic doubt, rife with allusions to the Vatican Leaks, John Paul II and Benedict XVI’s neglect of clerical abuse victims, and the fascism of Piuses XI and XII. My friend Shea Vassar has described it as Mean Girls in the Vatican, and if that appeals to you, this is probably your movie. Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, Lucian Msamati, and Isabella Rossellini make the already solid script absolutely sing. Fiennes’ character Lawrence articulates the role doubt has in faith, both explaining an important part of belief and comforting himself for his uncertainty about the Papacy. Like most good paranoid thrillers, Conclave is a story about political power where the greatest institution is rudderless, struggling under the weight of an empty throne, a sede vacante. In a post-Benedict XVI world, it’s not exactly a new insight, but it’s visually poignant and well-visualized by director Edward Berger.

The ending left me slightly cold — “what if we just got a nice Pope?” is a weak response to the ongoing plutocracy and colonialism of the Catholic Church. But seeing a movie about the Vatican take on the damage caused by Humanae Vitae and traditionalist Catholicism was healing for me, and it seemed to be fun for everyone else. If Conclave is what we get instead of The Young Pope Season 3, stories about the Vatican are in good shape.…

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Bourgeois Salvations

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On Protestantism, Calvinism, Anglicanism, and their relation to capitalism.  See also this previous essay.

The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion.

– Marx, Capital vol.1, Chapter 1, Section 4

But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin’s creed was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man’s activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers; and this was especially true at a period of economic revolution, when all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by new ones, when India and America were opened to the world, and when even the most sacred economic articles of faith – the value of gold and silver – began to totter and to break down. Calvin’s church constitution of God was republicanized, could the kingdoms of this world remains subject to monarchs, bishops, and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism founded a republic in Holland, and active republican parties in England, and, above all, Scotland.

In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine ready cut and dried.

– Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

 

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In Behemoth – the first great work of sociological and political analysis of Nazi Germany, published in 1944 – Franz Neumann, a political scientist affiliated with the Frankfurt School, commences a consideration of the roots of German fascism with an account of the ideologies of the revolutionary Protestant movements of Early Modernity.

He writes:

In the periods of religious wars and civil insurrections, the rising middle classes had great need of peace and tranquillity; merchants and industrialists yearned for equality with the clergy and the nobility. As a result, a central secular authority was established and its sovereign power was justified as that of an institution to which men owed not only outward obedience but sincere inner devotion. Charismatic justification of existing authority thus found a place at the beginning of bourgeois society…

 

2.

The great ideological fault line between Catholicism and Protestantism was always the issue of salvation.  How is one saved?

Martin Luther answered the question of salvation by pioneering a set of five conditions or methods by which one may be saved, sometimes known as ‘the five solas’: sola scriptura (by scripture alone), solus Christus (by Christ alone), sola fide (by faith alone), sola gratia (by grace alone), and soli Deo gloria (by glorification of God alone). …

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Joy to the World Review

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First off, I want to note that technically Penn’s and my Patreon is well short of where it should be for me to be doing this. I ain’t no grinch, and so I’m posting publicly anyway, but seriously, it’s a pretty sizeable shortfall in our monthly budgeting. I’m currently finishing up the epic Neil Gaiman section of Last War in Albion over on the Patreon, which you’ll see here in a few months, and I’ve also finally started work on my inevitable Blake book, so it’s an exciting time.  And besides. Next episode isn’t at Christmas and I can grinch it up as much as I want.

Right. On to the fun stuff, or at least this curious little thing we’re calling the Gatwa era, and may someday find out if we’ll be calling it that for more than another eight episodes. Let’s start with the obvious: this is loads of fun, in a big dumb Christmassy way. Yes, obviously this is not my favorite mode of Moffat because I’m a basic bitch who prefers dark and epic Doctor Who to comedy. But it’s still Moffat, with all his weird little idiosyncrasies, which at this point feel like pulling your favorite jacket off the rack and slipping it on. I in no way hope he takes over again after Davies (though I suspect I’d be hard-pressed to actually be unhappy if it happened), but this is always going to be the most straightforwardly “my Doctor Who” there is. The bit at the start where the Doctor realizes he’s seen something because he’s suiting up—nobody else writes that particular Doctor, and I just plain vibe.

This one even avoids Moffat’s standard tics more than Boom did. There’s a bootstrap paradox and a long way around, and there’s not a single other writer who would have done that Christmas farce cold open, but this isn’t a “play the hits” episode in the same way. In some ways it’s much closer to “play the misses”—I remember seeing the AV Club’s review drop a few days ago and being utterly bemused at its longing for the classic Moffat specials of yesteryear like The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe and The Return of Doctor Mysterio, which this was apparently not as good as, and feeling like I should quickly Google how The Berenstain Bears are spelled to make sure I was still in the correct reality. 

Mostly, though, this feels like its own thing. Boom came early enough in the Gatwa era that everything was up in the air, such that it felt like Gatwa doing a Moffat episode as part of the work of establishing himself and figuring out what this show is. This, on the other hand, feels like Moffat doing a Gatwa episode, which is to say that it feels like Gatwa-era Doctor Who is a defined enough thing to riff upon. The death of the hotel manager is a good example—Gatwa’s Doctor simply handles that emotional beat differently than Smith or Capaldi would have, and Moffat writes it accordingly. …

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meet the elders

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What they talkin’ ‘bout?
They ain’t talkin’ ‘bout nothin’. – Kendrick Lamar

So, here I am at my mother-in-law’s house. It’s Christmas time, and my wife’s family is big on the holiday, so naturally, when Judy Collins is doing a Christmas show near her mom, we go. It was a lovely time; honestly, time spent with my mother-in-law usually is. It took me a while to really understand how that family works, but now that I do, it’s an extreme pleasure to get to watch my wife be loved. On our way out the door to go home, she and I stopped and talked about that for a moment—about the way that people constantly miss the things we both see so clearly about her. About the way she is assumed to be working in bad faith, or trying to be provocative before she’s even opened her mouth. But I’m ahead of myself, because it was that morning, after taking a shower, and getting a little early packing done that I walked out into the living room, when my wife handed me her phone.

“You’re not going to like this,” she told me. Reader, I didn’t.

El had gotten a letter from the Northeast Thing’s Special Investigation Committee informing her that she was banned from their event, citing a rule that had simply not been there when it might have been used to consider the targeted harassment levelled at my wife and my community by that event’s president, David Carron. I would love to say I was surprised by this, but I don’t think anyone who’s been paying attention possibly could be.

I have, to this point, kept my tongue. Not that this has stopped multiple people from silently unfriending or blocking me over El’s actions—which is wild for a group of people that spent years not raising an eyebrow at someone whose husband paraded around the event with a confederate flag mug. But I don’t want to flame out of the community, even though I feel its leadership is making cruel and frankly dangerous errors, because I love it, and I’ve loved this event. I have hinted at this in some places, and stated it in others, but my primary work right now—and if you know me, you will know how important my work is to me now that my health is in a place where I can finally do that work—is studying to become a priest of Sága, a goddess of language and divination for whom I keep a small vé at the event. Each year, I’ve run a ritual for her, and have a couple more years worth of ideas for how I’d change and grow that ritual now that I’ve had a couple runs to teach people what to expect from it. The space itself had gravity. We set it up as a social space; a goddess of language needs stories, and stories come from people, not just books. Unsurprisingly, this drew in a mostly young to middle aged queer crowd, several of whom I know have also had seismic spiritual experiences in that vé, in the space I set up and invited my goddess into.…

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Morning Album Reviews: Thatcher Week

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Over on the Patreon, I have been running a weekly Morning Album Reviews column for almost a year now. It is not focused on new music, or even on a particular genre or style–just whatever 7 records El curates for me that week. I won’t know what they are before she plays them for me, as the column’s name implies, in the mornings to wake me up. It started it’s life as a lark over on Bluesky, and blossomed out into what it is now–it’s a real study in accidentally taking something much more seriously than you’d intended.

Here’s a normal review, to give you a sense of the project:

10/25 Halsey’s 2024 The Great Impersonator

With their often messy sound, distinctive voice, and pristine pop instincts, Halsey has been a favorite of mine since Hopeless Fountain Kingdom in 2017. But more than that, they are just relentlessly interesting: No two of their records have been doing the same thing within the wide genre of pop, and this one takes that instinct to new heights—a sensible move for the artist after 2021’s If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, their record about pregnancy and motherhood as body horror, produced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It saw them drifting farther away than ever from the standard pop record formula to critic’s delight, and fan’s dismay.

In the years between starting If I Can’t Have Love and now, Halsey had their son, broke up with his father, got dropped by their record label, and got diagnosed with a couple of chronic illnesses that had been hiding in the cracks of their busy life. It’s been a time, to say the least, and it’s no wonder they’re thinking about the self as an artistic construct.

They are an artist who has always been defined by change, and driven by it. When describing this album for Apple Music, they talk about that: “Some people get into a creative medium and have a very specific style: ‘This is what works for me, this is who I am and what I’m comfortable with.’ And for me, I just don’t know that it’s fun unless I’m reinventing. I think a lot of people see that and get the sense that I don’t have a very secure sense of self.” The Great Impersonator is a direct exploration of that idea.

In the lead-up to release, over on Instagram, Halsey did a countdown for 18 days: one for each song, with photographs of themself re-creating other artist’s photos, linking each song to it’s inspiration. Some are more straightforward: You can hear the bluesy PJ Harvey vocal dripping off of “Dog Years,” but might need to squint to find the Dolly in “Hometown.”

“Step right up,” the record announcement goes, “Witness the uncanny ability of a woman who can become anyone, anything your heart desires,” but that’s all part of the illusion. This record is more a love letter to the things that built Halsey as a pop artist than it is a spectacle of lack of the self, with their usual veiled confessional lyrical turns and polish.

…

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11:27 in Sokvabekkr

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Stop playing with me ‘fore I turn you to a song. – Kendrick Lamar

Ever since Monday there’s been this Draugr following me around. Weirdest thing. 

OK, look, let’s say up front, this is a petty footnote. “Exiting the Draugr Castle” is a major work on my part—a big swing essay tackling important topics. This is some bullshit—an update to enliven the holiday weekends of the sort of people who check Eruditorum Press on a holiday weekend. 

The essay went over about how I expected. Good number of people who are still cool with me, more who aren’t. Landing slightly more punitive than I’d hoped—caught some Facebook blocks from people I’d honestly expected more empathy from. But like I said, you don’t write an essay like that unless you’re ready to lose friends over it. The good news is that nobody’s played “collective guilt” and taken it out on Penn or something. 

Except, like I said, this one fuckin’ Draugr. And the funny thing is, he’s the one I hemmed and hawed on including, cause I was less sure I thought he deserved it than some. Needn’t have worried, turns out. Cause the Quisling went on an absolute unfriending spree, dropping not only Penn but a swath of other friends of mine, and also managing to blow up his local community in the process. Must have been something I said.

Thing is, some of those blocks I caught seem to have been in response to him accusing me of “all but doxing” him. And as that’s lie worthy of Tyr himself, I think it’s time for one last ray of disinfecting sunlight. 

So, here’s the thing he’s pissed at me for—a Bluesky post I made where I included these two screenshots.

Now, as you can see I went through and blacked out everyone’s names there except, of course, David Carron’s. I labeled the two people who had been characters in Draugr Castle, and left their Facebook icons, which I suppose means that if you really wanted to go scavenging around Facebook you could probably find them, but come on. That’s not fucking doxxing. For one thing, I’d already identified the Quisling as Associate President of the Troth. In what is probably not a surprise to you, the Troth’s website will readily inform you who its current Associate President is. Anyone who was terribly interested who the Quisling was could have figured it out from the original essay, which has been read by 2500 people at this point, and had a far easier time than they would reverse engineering his Facebook icon from a screenshot.

And I knew that when I posted the essay. I, in fact, put a lot of thought into exactly how identifiable people were. I wrote it so that anyone in the community could trivially solve the roman a clef for most of the main figures, but so that readers from outside the community would not. The only two exceptions were David Carron, because fuck him, and the Quisling, because it was impossible.…

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Freelance Subversion: Time Bandits

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With Life of Brian out of the way, Terry Gilliam had partially unshackled himself from Monty Python. He was unable to bring his masterpiece Brazil to the big screen, but he was free to focus on his own movies. He’ll come back to Python in 1983 for The Meaning of Life, which is the movie most influenced by the Pythons’ solo careers, but from now on, he’ll be an artist in his own right rather than just the Monty Python cartoonist. Gilliam is Python’s Peter Gabriel, the member who goes off and does weird, antagonistic art for an audience who knows his new stuff better than his Python work (granted, he splits Peter Gabriel duties with the equally wayward John Cleese). When he does return to Python, it’s like an old novelist reuniting with his college buddies. He doesn’t have a Spamalot moment, infusing one of his old hits with some new clever, fun bits. From this point on, Terry Gilliam is a forward-looking director.

At least in theory. Gilliam can’t stop himself from co-writing a movie with Michael Palin. And it’s hard to blame him. Aside from being a notoriously lovely chap, Palin is Python’s second best writer. Time Bandits benefits enormously from Palin’s influence. It’s consistent in character, theme, plot, and tone, an enormous leap in quality from Jabberwocky. While Time Bandits explores a lot of the same ideas as Jabberwocky, it feels more like a movie you can show your kids for fun than one you’d show them as punishment. For the first time, Gilliam directs a classic on his own terms, rather than splitting duties with Terry Jones (like in Holy Grail), or feeling like he’s putting a demo reel on the big screen (Jabberwocky).

Time Bandits has an all-timer of a premise (a step up from Jabberwocky, which only narrowly has a premise). Kevin, a young boy in the English suburbs, is whisked away from his miserable life by six dwarfs who are fleeing their boss — who is God  — after stealing a map that allows them to travel time and space. Unlike the Doctor who stole a Tardis and ran away, the dwarfs aren’t interested in seeing the wonders of the universe. They don’t even know the history of the universe they helped create — Napoleon and Agamemnon are unfamiliar names to them. The dwarfs only want to rob the whole universe blind. The cosmos is their Treasure Island — damn the safety of the young boy in their care.

Like its predecessor, Time Bandits scoffs at the idea of heroes. Kevin, ostensibly a fairy tale hero, is more interested in his books and violence than human suffering (as poor Shelley Duvall and Michael Palin find out). The dwarfs are mostly sociopathic upstart criminals. Ian Holm’s Napoleon is too busy giggling at violent puppet shows to accept Castiliogne’s surrender. Robin Hood (who of course is John Cleese) is a phony leading a gang of gratuitously violent Merry Men.…

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Capitalism and the Protestant Reformation

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To say that the protestant Reformation is an expression of the rise of capitalism is not to say that you have capitalist Protestantism on one side, feudal Catholicism on the other.  Protestantism did not (usually) express the ideology of capitalism in a direct way.  It did not enjoy exclusive support from the rising bourgeoisie.  Catholicism did not exclusively express the old ideology of feudalism, or take its support exclusively from old feudal ruling classes and their hangers on.

There’s some truth to that picture, but only at the extremes (where, as Bakunin said, we see things more clearly).  Calvin’s Doctrine of the Elect is almost suspiciously perfect in how it provides a justificatory ideology for capitalism.  (We shall be coming back to this in later parts of the M.R. James series, for which this post is a kind of parenthetical theoretical bookmark.)

Overall, however, that wasn’t how it worked.  Catholicism, in many ways, embraced rising commodification, despite being as based in the power of landed property as any feudal aristocracy.  Rothbard and Hayek claimed to see prefigurations of their own libertarian free market ideology in the writings of the Salamancan scholastics (this is still an idea that libertarians are obsessed with).  Protestantism caught fire partly because it expressed popular disillusion with the very marketisation of religion – the selling of indulgences, the buying of private masses and prayers, the profitability of episcopal sees, etc – that was increasingly seen in the Catholic Church.

Rather, what we see is a very slow and gradual breakdown of feudal economic stability, and the slow accumulation of wealth and power in new and rising sectors, as a result of rising forms of trade and production, which leads to the growth of increasingly wealthy and powerful middle classes, to political controversy and struggle between classes, and thus to centuries of instability and of ideological squabbling over how to make sense of the mixed-up world.  A huge part of the instability is caused by the mixture of capitalist and feudal methods.  Increasingly marketised, feudal society found its production methods lagging behind its consumption and investment needs.  Exacerbated by the insatiable appetites of ruling classes for both conquest and luxury, this was the root cause of multiple interlocking crises which rocked the world of the late middle ages, only accelerating the instability which further accelerated the economic reconstruction.  At the ideological level, both Catholicism and Protestantism are trying to understand the instability and reconstruction.  They come to be the two great camps in the realignments and renegotiations of religious ideology because of two material expressions of the rising bourgeois system: the revolutions in communication and in government.

A glib answer to the question ‘Why does Protestantism happen?’ would be ‘the printing press’.  But this begs the question: why does the printing press happen?  It is both cause and result of the development of technical processes, the slow build-up of new technologies within feudalism, and thus of the growth of literate publics who want to read.  This rise of literacy and political involvement is an expression of class struggle, itself partly stemming from – and reciprocally causing – the growth of new classes as a result of that slow accumulation of change. …

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