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New Bond movie
- same old culture of hate, masked to look good.
With the release this
weekend of the new Bond movie I thought it's time to revisit this article from
our CUT Newsletter of the Autumn of 2007. For it the main areas of research were
two books Romano Guardini's End
of The End of the Modern World and David Holbrook, The Masks of Hate. Holbrook's work is of particular interest as it involved
a study of the Bond movie Goldfinger. Holbrook shows us in this study just how
evil the Bond films are and although I have not seen the new 007 film,
indications are it is more of the same. Cynical treatment of human life the usage
and objectification of women, even by other women even if they now try and tell
you that women give as good as they get in Bond films, it's still full of
hatred for humanity, and particularly women.
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| copyright Bond movies MGM et al. |
Visions of Modernity
How modernist broadcasts
created a Culture of Hate
Modernity is all around us it is the modern world. Some elements
of modernity have beneficial effects on our lives for example electricity,
motorcars, aeroplanes, modern medicine, and mass-communication. But used to excess and without care the modernist,
some believe could destroy the natural
order and indeed undermine western culture itself. The modernist in this
article refers to someone particularly in the media who has been totally and
psychologically affected by modernity in all its excesses and champions it. He
hates any group or individual who contradicts him and tries to deflect this
hatred on them particularly through the
push media the television and
radio. However, the basic concept of modernity and the modernist, is being
challenged or undermined from within by nuclear weapons, terrorism, euthanasia,
the holocaust and today’s extermination camps - the abortion mills. The
materialistic crudity that becomes ever more prevalent in society objectifies
humanity, that if it can’t use you, you are discarded. This objectifying of the
human person adds up to a world that’s being changed and controlled a culture
that has turned its back on its foundations, and even despises it. Western man
is replacing the culture based on love, Christianity, with the culture of hate.
The once stable paradigms of
Western culture, the family, morality and religion, are all up in the air and
being juggled by the media and the secular liberal intelligentsia, who control
the media. The Holy Father is aware of this and of the countless messages that
arrive through the mass media and of their dangers. When addressing a gathering
of 500,000 young people at Loreto, Italy, on September 2 last, he said, “Go
against the current: Don’t listen to the persuasive and self-seeking voices that
today promote lifestyles marked by arrogance and violence, by appearances and
possessions to the detriment of being.” The Pope instead held out an
alternative path marked purity, sharing, study and work for the common good. He
said, “Be vigilant! Be critical! Don’t be dragged along by the wave produced by
this powerful movement of persuasion.”1
The above advice from the Holy
Father is similar to that used by CUT from the beginning of our campaign. We
always question the broadcaster’s motives and ask why they have produced
programmes that push the boundaries of ethics and truth, have they personal
issues at stake? For it has often come to light that those in the media who
push ‘alternative’ life-styles or champion a ‘pro-choice’ stance, have a vested
interest in the acceptance of these corrosive modernist doctrines. These are
often the same people who will produce TV programmes that attack the Church and
try to undermine her teachings. Either by producing anti-Church dramas or
documentaries that attempt to attribute the world’s problems on Catholic moral
teaching, problems that are really brought about by a misuse of modernity. In
doing this they create a culture of hate, especially against those who have a
traditional moral standpoint based on discipline and the teachings of Christ.
They would rather objectify humanity especially human sexuality and use this
object as a commodity.
One
of the Holy Father’s early mentors, Romano Guardini, who was professor of
philosophy and theology at the University of Munich, wrote a remarkable work of
social analysis The End of the Modern
World in 1956. This work examines
the era of “Mass Man” of mass communication, mass marketing and mass
materialism that threaten to crush the individual human spirit, objectify him
and drive him into anonymity. Of these forces that steadily erode man’s sense
of his own uniqueness and replaces it with man as object he writes, ‘Man
confronts this attitude in the range of authority exercised over him; he may
merely meet it in countless statistics and tables or he may experience its
culmination in an unspeakable rape of the individual, of the group, even of the
whole nation.’2
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| From the new Bond film - the Mask of Hate masquerading as good family entertainment? |
‘Only the strong love, it is the weak who Hate’3
One of the icons of the modern western culture, James
Bond, with all the glamour of the materialistic world laced with sex, violence,
and a shallow callous sense of humour, are typical traits that have become all
too common in the media today. Academic and poet David Holbrook in his book The Masks of Hate used Ian Flemings
Goldfinger to explain the hatred manifested and projected into society by such
works. Holbrook’s analysis of the book and its simplistic messages leads him to
state that ‘...its symbolism is manifestly that of primitive schizoid hate’3
He goes on to voice his concern to the point that humanness is at stake by such
works of projected hatred, he says ‘...an uncomfortable sense that something
even more primitive lurks beneath its coarseness, stupidity, and cruelty.’4
Bond’s contempt for women and for human life is all part of the glamour and
excitement of the books and subsequent films. Their premiers are often attended
by the highest dignitaries in the land these films are regularly shown on
primetime television today, they are considered family entertainment. Yet these
films have been surpassed in their simplistic crudity by even more explicit sex
and violence of today’s films and television dramas. Our national public
service broadcaster has shown itself to be one of the leaders in its decent
into this simplistic crudity and hate with programmes such as Rome and Fanny
Hill. The television is not a force for love and kindness and betrays its
weakness for hate and evil. It makes one wonder what will be the next ‘classic’
that the BBC will adapt for television, the memoirs of the Marquise de Sade
perhaps? I wouldn’t put it past them given their track record. However, that
Ian Brady the ‘Moors’ child murderer had read de Sade is a warning to all.
Evil be thou my Good
There appears to be a schizoid tendency prevalent in
modern secular society and it is easy to see the footprint of the television
leading culture down the path to hatred. There has seen a complete reversal in
what is acceptable, particularly relating to abortion and family values.
Activities once illegal are now even encouraged with the gagging of the
individual’s conscience, by browbeating as him bigoted or even possessing a phobia. There has been a complete change
in the love-hate relationship, ‘It becomes a case, not only of “evil be thou my
good” but also “Good be thou my evil.”6
The broadcaster’s vision of modernity, both
materialistic and ethical, results not only in street violence and record
numbers of people in prison, but also the AIDS crisis and other manifestations
of hatred. The television presents us with a sea of fantasies that threatens to
draw us in. Some believe the television exudes mediocrity but by its effects on
society it betrays its brilliance. The fiendish brilliance of materialism and
the doctrines of the politically correct that threaten to engulf us all.
References:
1. Sartini, Serena, Inside the Vatican. October 2007 p.21
2. Guardini, Romano, The End of the Modern world, 1956. ISI books,
Wilmington. 1998, p.61.
3. Holbrook, David, The Masks of Hate, Pergamon Press 1972, p.30,
quoting Guntrip.
4-5. Ibid p.75
6. Ibid p.53
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