Muscles, Fire, Guns, the New Frontier and Inner City Savages! - the Right Wing Mythology of Eighties' Action Films

By Jimi Thaule

"We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!"

Colonel Walter E. Kurtz - Apocalypse Now

The eighties was the last decade of the Cold War, a decade dominated by the presidency of Ronald Reagan and his second term vice president George Bush – elected as Reagan's successor in 1988. Another significant feature of the decade was the American action film, which had its golden age in the eighties and nearly died out once the Cold War ended. As the nineties and the Clinton years progressed action films were reduced to action comedies, and only recently have we seen a resurgence of the type of action films we saw in the eighties – in particular with Stallones' tribute film the Expendables and its anticipated sequel.

There have been rumors that Expendables 2 would be rated PG13 to ensure Chuck Norris' involvement. Chuck Norris of course is known for his right wing conservative christian politics as well as his involvement in several classic action films – notably the Missing in Action series. While wholesale slaughter seems to be fine with conservatives, blasphemy is not.

Before turning to politics Reagan was an actor, and while he mostly starred in b-comedies it seems fitting that the decade dominated by his policies would also see a great number of films espousing conservative ideals and myths. Some of them far to the right of even the most conservative Republican.

Let's take a look at the action films of the eighties, to which Expendables plays loving tribute. While the action film is as old as the Tinsel Town itself eighties action was unique in its portrayal of steroid enhanced muscle men fighting small wars single handedly, and espousing conservative values. We're talking Sylvester Stallone, Charles Bronson, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris of course -as well as Jean Claude VanDamme, Dolph Lundgren and many others. In order to understand the action film of the eighties we have to start about a decade earlier, with Clint Eastwood and his lauded interpretation of the role "Dirty" Harry Callahan in 1971 - a movie that spawned a handful of sequels and changed the face of action films forever.

Modernism to Postmodernism to Postmortemism

By P. Emerson Williams


We cultural types do love to declare death wherever we cast our jaded blood-shot eyes. When our imaginations are exhausted, hard-ons for the latest arising only with greater efforts require new extremes of fetishism. A point comes when completed work crowds out attention. Art, empire, economy, politics look to us to be sated with days and ready to give in to sweet oblivion.

Lady Gaga killed sex, says the once much discussed Camille Paglia, who quotes her subject who declaims “Music is a lie”, “Art is a lie”, “Gaga is a lie”. The death of the novel is an idea so oft repeated that one can envision members of the literary establishment daring each other to intone the phrase three times in front of a mirror in expectation of the candyman to appear. And closer to home for us here, the right honourable psychonaut James L. Kent writing for Acceler8or the new transhumanist vehicle established by R. U. Sirius says we've come to rest after years of the deceler8ing of music as a living mode of expression. Nice opening shot.

Every style of traditional, ethnic, and world music has been incorporated into the modern pop uber-genre. There are no more Afro beats, throat singers, Middle Eastern microtonal scales, Buddhist Ohms, Irish sea shanties, American folk songs, Navajo ancestral chants, and so on, that haven’t already been chewed up, digested, and shat out by modern pop composers.

Forcing sound snippets into a twelve-tone, four on the floor format is for sure a denigration of these traditions, but it's a very colonial Western POV that would consider that this raiding of sampled sounds a cancelling out of entire traditions of music and culture. I recall a thread in an occult social site that began from a post that stated basically that Eastern philosophies were being killed by Western adoption through Western seekers not understanding the finer points or getting entire belief systems wrong. Well, I have news – taking a photo of a person does not trap their soul in the camera and Americans weaving Tibetan buddhism into candy-coated self help material doesn't make all the monks in exile disappear from the universe.

Maybe he's right. Perhaps the hum that is plaguing many towns across the globe with no detectable source is just the musicological equivalent of the smell of dead plague victims piling up.

Arthur Krystal is a voice in the Death of the Novel chorus for some time. In an interview in Harper's magazine he expands his theme:

Leaving film aside, since it’s a relatively recent art, the arts as we know them have run their course. You can argue this until your face is blue, but it won’t change the historical fact. Time and technology wait for no artist, and unfortunately history has seen fit to alter our sense of time by the invention of new technologies.

Tina Brown Asks Philip Roth About the Future of the Novel from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.
Philip Roth has devoted his life to creating novels, but he’s pessimistic about their future.
“The book can’t compete with the screen,” Roth tells Tina Brown in this video, and even the Kindle won’t change that.
“It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen," Roth says. "It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen.”

The Sheening: TigerBlood, Adonis DNA, Winning, and You

Image by Chip Zdarsky

By James Curcio It seems unimaginable that I should come to such a low point in my life that it would seem necessary for me to explain the ranting of Charlie Sheen to the public. Look, you all helped me reach this "rock bottom," which of course is not a real thing, there is no "real" rock bottom. It's a myth invented by AA. So I'm not actually at rock bottom, I'm actually on my way to "winning," which you would understand if you had any goddamn clue what this terminology actually refers to. Since you, you the American Public, are all so insistent on utilizing the advanced lexicon that developed as a result of his now (in)famous interviews, let's get a few things straight as this PR nightmare "win" jumps the megashark and bites a plane right out of fucking midair!OMGZ:

If you are going to pretend you are a Warlock or that you have Tigerblood,  you have to have some clue what these things are. They are based on an arcane system of magic that Charlie is a very high degree Adept in. (He actually kind of outed them based on a bit of a dispute. I am also a Sacred Brother, but they've been charging me dues for years and so far they haven't gotten me laid once since I joined so fuck them. Here are some of our secrets.)

"Tiger blood" is not something that all of us have. It is not an energy drink or a hot dog. It is reserved only for a select few- those who have demonstrated through "radical" acts their ability to "roll" in a way that would render most other people, including famed party animals like Mick Jagger, "droopy-eyed, armless children."

So don't just go around saying you have tiger blood. You need to prove that shit. Again: it can only be proven through the regular performance of radical acts which will leave the other people involved forever changed. Some might even say "scarred," but scarring is a common part of the Initiatory Process. I expect that in the coming years there will be a huge uptick in overdoses as some of you non-Tigerblood wannabees heart's explode all over your pimped out Honda's. That's alright. Our planet-mother-tree could use a little pruning.


Another little tidbit. "Adonis DNA" seems to be an afterthought, not all that different from "tigerblood," but it also helps explain how, in Sheen's self-referential ideology, he is able to live the life that he lives. Clearly it cannot be done without the DNA of Adonis. Again: Ye Shall Know Me By My Results. This is another core element of American Mythology that has been capitalized on by the drug formerly known as "Charlie Sheen." If you're not knee-deep in pussy, then sit down and shut up. You don't have Adonis DNA. If you do, you don't need to tell anyone, unless if you need a PR stunt to get you out of a jam. In which case, wave your arms and say the craziest shit you can come up with. The media will make so much noise you could run out the back door with 12 goddesses under each arm and no one would notice. 
"Warlock"? That's easy. Watch this shit from The Men That Stare At Goats. 


Did you get it? No? Then you're not a fucking Warlock. (And you're probably not a Black Wizard, either.)
Which gets me to "winning." It is somewhat unclear what "winning" means, since it might mean swinging from a the ceiling naked with a knife between your teeth, or having your children taken from you, or having the LA PD drop by for a friendly visit that is "not a raid." That's cool. It's all winning if you are "winning." This is murky semantic territory. I think "winning" is the attitude of winning. This follows from a very deep rooted myth in America, that image and intent is everything. If you are smiling as you shake a business-partner's hand, you are his friend, even if you are fucking his future with that deal. If you are rotting from the inside, but riding in a Lamborghini, you are "winning." 
(As for Bi-Winning, that is the Secret Key to the Internal Warlock Power. I am keeping that for a later point when everyone else thinks it's finally totally uncool to still be talking about this shit, and I will crack it open, like a box of Chinese food that's totally past its "open by" date. I will explore its swampy nether-regions and reveal arcana and even occult and psychological truths there too because I am just that fucking Bi-Winning)
But as for regular old "Winning," that is a state of mind. It is the state of mind where one believes with absolute certainty, no matter WHAT fucking empirical facts are staring you in the face, that one is, one embodies, the winner, hero archetype which is the absolute ideal in America Mythology. It doesn't matter if one actually wins or loses, what matters is that one approaches all wins and losses with the "winning" attitude. 
In conclusion, I do have tiger blood and Adonis DNA. I do not yet have "winning." But I am working on it. And that is the American way. 
Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.