Films to chew on

by T.P. Wilkinson / June 20th, 2017

For years there have been two films from Hollywood that have drawn innumerable fans, especially among the “cultivated” (compatible) Left. These are Aliens with Sigourney Weaver and The Silence of the Lambs with Anthony Hopkins and Jody Foster. I have had to endure excerpts but have never been able to overcome the revulsion in order to actually sit through either film in its entirety. This was, of course, long before I recognised that I cannot watch “war films” anymore either, although I grew up on a steady fare of John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and all the other usual suspects who incarnated US war mythology from the 19th and 20th century.

Try as I might I could not explain why I found these two films– not to mention their sequels– unconditionally repulsive. Likewise I have been unable to fathom the insistence on the aesthetic value (virtue) or cultural significance of these grotesque stories.

In the process of re-reading material for another essay I took Ward Churchill’s volume A Little Matter of Genocide from the shelf again. The first essay discusses the history of the genocide in the Americas which killed an estimated 95% of the indigenous population beginning with the “discovery” of Hispanola by Christopher Columbus (never mind here the different names used for this person). Churchill asks why Columbus (Colón) was so important that various countries and ethnic groups would compete to identify him as their…

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