The Legendarium according to Smaug

A meteoric dumpster fire

I’ve watched the first two episodes of Rings of Power. Even though I promised I wouldn’t.

It’s bad. And I mean really, holistically bad.

Let’s get the trivial concerns out of the way first. Casting Black actors and actresses to play hobbits, dwarves, men and elves isn’t at all a problem for me. If anything, Tolkien’s dwarves are supposed to be swarthy-skinned and dark of complexion, which for some reason they weren’t in the Jackson movies; and the hobbits were envisioned as being just as diverse of physical appearance as humans. The question is whether the actors and actresses can act well. (Sir Lenny Henry and Sophia Nomvete can and do act well here. Ismael Cruz Córdova? Not so much.) Also if it isn’t done cynically, which is a bit more questionable. Race politics have nothing to do with why I think Rings of Power is a full-on betrayal of Tolkien’s work.

What does, then? One word: Galadriel.

In Tolkien’s Silmarillion, Galadriel was originally a stubborn, headstrong and adventurous girl—this much is true. She did have something of a growth arc. The reason she came to Middle Earth at the end of the First Age was because she was intrigued by the place. She was tempted, in part, by Fëanor’s promises of glory, and longed to see the shores of an unknown land and even to rule them as queen. But she refused to join Fëanor’s quest for revenge against Melkor for the death of his father (Galadriel’s grandfather) Finwë, and she (along with her father Finarfin and her eldest brother Finrod) refused to engage in the political quarrels of the Noldor which ended in the slaughter of the Kinslaying and the Burning of the Ships.

That is as much as to say: she was stubborn and adventurous, but neither brooding nor vengeful—she was of like mind with her father and brother, not having sworn Fëanor’s oath of revenge. Further, it is highly hinted by Jack himself that the reason she stayed in Middle Earth was because she loved it. She loved the people, she loved the living creatures, and she especially loved the forests. The reason she stayed in Middle Earth was because she found hope there.

Melian said: ‘There is some woe that lies upon you and your kin. That I can see in you, but all else is hidden from me; for by no vision or thought can I perceive anything that passed or passes in the West: a shadow lies over all the land of Aman, and reaches far out over the sea. Why will you not tell me more?’

‘For that woe is past,’ said Galadriel; ‘and I would take what joy is here left, untroubled by memory. And maybe there is woe enough yet to come, though still hope may seem bright.’

In Rings of Power, there is no love at all in the character upon whom they wrongly bestow the name of ‘Galadriel’. There is no joy. There is not even a trace of hope. Her reasons for staying in Middle Earth have nothing to do with any kind of attachment to Middle Earth, land or creatures or people—and everything to do with hunting down her brother’s killer, Sauron. The makers of Rings of Power have made this ‘Galadriel’ into precisely a bitter, brooding, violent woman who is dead-set on revenge: in short, they have made her into Fëanor Mark II.

These are not the same character. Not even at different ages.

This is partly ideological. There is a current in the corporate culture machine’s interpretation of feminism, that thinks that in order to pander to women viewers they should make all female characters ‘strong’ by putting weapons in their hands—by making them ‘action heroines and corporate girl-bosses’. But this isn’t good writing, and arguably it isn’t even good feminism. Let me be blunt: Éowyn wasn’t a badass just because she picked up a sword, delivered a one-liner and stabbed a wraith in the ‘face’. If it had been just that, she wouldn’t have gotten any of the cheers she did. Éowyn was a badass because of the context of that action: she cared about Merry and her father enough to protect them.

This ‘Galadriel’? She doesn’t care for anything or anyone except her dead brother—and not even Finrod himself, but his ‘task’. This ‘Galadriel’ would never have been found worthy of the option of returning to Valinor in the first place—the pardon that the Valar bestowed only upon Finarfin and his children, among all of the Noldor. The only reason Galadriel was allowed to return to the Elf-home was because she wasn’t as vengeance-obsessed as Fëanor, and hadn’t taken Fëanor’s oath! Rewriting ‘Galadriel’ as another Fëanor doesn’t strengthen her—it diminishes her in ways that are frankly blasphemous.

And what’s worse, Rings of Power tries to make her Fëanorish vindictiveness a sign of her sagacity. Like Cassandra she warns of Sauron’s known-to-the-audience return when everyone around her, High King Gil-Galad and ‘Elrond’ particularly, disbelieve her and tell her she’s overreacting (the mansplaining chauvinist bastards). Never mind that in the book, Galadriel was the one urging Gil-Galad to show caution, not the other way around—and she was right to do so!

I’ve got other grievances with Rings of Power that operate on a similar level. The portrayal of ‘Elrond’ as Gil-Galad’s political staffer and speechwriter is particularly offensive. As is the notion that Celebrimbor would be worried about the size of the elves’ ‘workforce’ in building his Super-Duper Mega-Forge—sending ‘Elrond’ off to literally hammer out (and I do mean with a literal hammer) a labour contract with Durin’s dwarves. Tolkien would be appalled at this! His elves and dwarves had their flaws, but they were not industrialists and capitalists. Their crafts, were crafts. Capitalism was personified in Lord of the Rings by Saruman, and assembly-line Fordist industrialism metonymised by Isengard. They were certainly not valorised the way they are here.

But this should not come as a surprise. Both my gripes against ‘Galadriel’ and the characterisation of the elves and dwarves generally stem from a much broader complaint. That is: Rings of Power is nothing more and nothing less than the Legendarium according to Smaug. It’s Tolkien’s universe as interpreted by Jeff Bezos—born on third base, mega-polluter, war hawk defence contractor, exploiter of the poor—someone who doesn’t even value Tolkien or his œuvre and has nothing to do with Tolkien’s own ecological-minded Christian Tory-anarchist mythopoesis. Of course any interpretation he sponsors in order to garner a greater market share for his streaming service, is going to run dead against the logic of Tolkien’s universe.

Tolkien often expressed his own view through the words of Faramir. And this was Faramir’s view: ‘I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.’ Rings of Power, so far, takes the opposite view: trying to dazzle with special effects, battle sequences, blood and fire—while holding the substance of their source material, the characters and the setting, in utter contempt.

Give this one a hard pass.

For Faina

I looked truth in the eye today,
in both of her lake-green eyes:
pools in whose depths
too much wordless fear and
anguish had been anchored.

And then I heard her speak.
She had a child’s voice,
soft and high and sterling-clear.
Such a voice should not belong
to eyes which have seen so much,

to tear-stained eyes which have taken
in from the tender age of five
the explosions of the shells,
the shredded bodies in rubble,
the flowers laid at infants’ graves.

But, even more than that,
when one hears such a voice
from a face with such eyes,
it is hard to turn away from.
And so, many choose not to hear.

Truth speaks, and she writes.
Her mind is full of starships,
and her heart is full of cats;
for that I’d praise her courage—
but my throat catches on such a word.

Not for any lack in her of courage!
No! I balk at the obscenity:
no thirteen-year-old girl
should ever have her ‘courage’
tested under shell fire for eight years.

And yet still that voice comes:
soft and high and sterling-clear,
defying those who would consign her
to darkness and to silence.
Truth has always spoken thus.

- Matthew Cooper, 25 August 2022

A spectre is haunting Christendom…

In his article ‘Philosophical verity and intelligentsia truth’, written for Landmarks in 1905, Nikolai Berdyaev made the following observations about Marxism and its interpretation by the Russian intelligentsia.

It must be said that the objective and scientific side of Marxism contained a healthy kernel… but on the whole we misunderstood economic materialism and Marxism. We construed them ‘subjectively’ and adapted them to the intelligentsia’s traditional psychology. Economic materialism lost its objective character: production and creation were reduced to secondary importance, while the subjective, class side of Social Democracy came to the fore. The Russian Marxists were possessed by an extreme love for equality, combined with extreme faith in the nearness of the socialist consummation and in the possibility of achieving this consummation in Russia even sooner, perhaps, than in the West. The element of objective truth was completely submerged in the subjective element.

Berdyaev would maintain this line throughout his career. His book on The Russian Revolution, compiled in 1931, more fully explored this theme. Berdyaev’s understanding of Karl Marx was twofold: on the one hand, he deeply respected Marx as an objective social critic and the explicator of a particular method of analysis. On the other hand, however, he found certain of Marx’s assumptions objectionable on metaphysical grounds. What he objected to most in Marx was his lack of a qualitative dimension in the consideration of production – he could find no room in Marx for the æsthetic, the purely creative impulse. In Berdyaev’s reading of Marx, all production was quantitative, was ‘ant-hill’ production. (Personally, I find this objection a trifle unfair. Marx had a genuine and heartfelt love for the poetry and pathos of William Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets that both transcended and illuminated his class analysis.) His other objection to Marx’s thought was that it carried with it a deterministic teleology grounded in an unfulfilled or frustrated messianic religious impulse: and here I tend to think Berdyaev is on firmer ground.

But note what both of these criticisms share! Berdyaev aimed his critiques of Marx at his implied metaphysics, not at his methodology! Indeed, Berdyaev’s praise above of the ‘objective and scientific side’ of Marxism refers precisely to his ‘materialist’ methods of historical analysis. What he found dangerous in Marxism was the tendency – a tendency Marx himself warned against – of imbuing the proletarian class with a kind of religious-idealist ‘mystique’. In the Russian-Soviet formulation of Marxism, this mystique became the criterion against which all cultural and ideological output was judged. And it was precisely this mystique that Berdyaev characterised as a Christian hæresy in The Russian Revolution. It was precisely this mystique that Berdyaev convincingly convicted of having its own mythology, its own sacred rites, its own priests, its own holy texts, its own apocalyptic messianism.

Berdyaev’s understanding – however amorphous and unsystematic – of a Christian socialism, attempted to merge what he considered to be the objective methodology of Karl Marx with the subjective impulse for the creative that animated a decided non-socialist like Solovyov, the relational impulse for the vertical ascent that animated a reactionary socialist like Leont’ev, and the metaphysical impulse to explore the individual in all his moral and subconscious depth that animated an ex-radical Orthodox Christian novelist like Dostoevsky. It is not altogether clear that he succeeded in doing so, and indeed by the end of his career he cast doubts on his own wisdom in that pursuit. But it was in pursuit of just such a synthesis that Saint Maria of Paris and Saint Il’ya Fondaminskii won martyrdom for the Orthodox faith at the hands of the Nazis.

This would seem to suggest that the liberation theologians in the tradition of Gutierrez and Boff were, in a certain sense, right. Inductively, the Marxist methodology appears valid, and is a valid way of representing a fuller sense of historical truth. For obvious reasons, Christians cannot accept the metaphysics that grew out of Marxism, which lend themselves to a hard determinism and to a tolerance of ‘natural’ evil and sacrifice of personhood. Berdyaev, who began his career as a dedicated Marxist, ultimately found this intolerable. But still, the spectre of Marx continues to haunt us, and with good reason, as we see a billionaire class which is hoarding ever greater shares of the world’s resources, intruding into all of our lives with greater frequency and impunity, entertaining fever dreams of hacking human beings (see also here).

As the global œconomy transitions from capitalism into something even more hideous and unrecognisable – what Yanis Varoufakis calls ‘techno-feudalism’ – the billionaire class is currently attempting to harness the world’s wealth toward cheating death with cryogenics and consciousness transference and guaranteeing their own survival (but no one else’s) in perpetuity. If humankind wants to survive on any sort of recognisable level, we must find some way to stop this ‘project’ before it strips human beings of their humanity. All theologies, insofar as they can inform anthropologies, must become theologies of liberation.

Your Name 《君の名は。》

I want to help build landscapes that leave heart-warming memories… I didn’t even know anybody in that town. Why does the scenery of a town that no longer exists wring my heart so?

Back when I did my review of Flavours of Youth I promised I’d get around to seeing this film: Your Name, directed by Shinkai Makoto 新海诚. In short, I’m incredibly glad I did. This film is a masterpiece, one which well deserves its reputation as a classic of Japanese animation.

Your Name is best described as a fantasy/sci-fi romance, which speaks directly to a Japanese but also a more broadly East Asian experience of being disconnected in time, of the tensions and antinomies that arise from being part of a landscape where ageless antiquity and glittering hyper-modernity exist side-by-side. But the two main characters, despite their frequent and sometimes heartbreaking alienation which sometimes takes the form of literal jumps in time, still seek a genuine connexion with each other. And the heart of the film rests in how they mature and grow.

Your Name is a story that defies easy categorisation. It’s a story about a (literal) disaster, when a comet strikes a remote, traditional Japanese town. It’s also a bildungsroman and a breathtakingly bittersweet teen romance. It freely borrows from SFnal tropes about time-travel (including multiple timelines and alternate futures), as well as fantasy tropes about body-swapping (think the Warehouse 13 episode ‘Merge with Caution’). It is steeped in traditional Chinese lore, Daoism and Shintô religious rites, but it also has the feel of a young-adult fantasy book by TA Barron. It would be easy for any feature film, but particularly a Japanese animated one, with this many moving parts to feel overstuffed, overwrought and pretentious. But Your Name avoids this in part because of the tender vulnerability and humanity of the two protagonists.

Your Name uses a lot of traditional tropes from East Asian literature that might get lost on American audiences. The ‘red thread of fate’ is probably a familiar enough one, and it gets used liberally here between the two protagonists. The ‘butterfly dream’ of Zhuangzi is also alluded to. The tradition of fermenting rice wine with human saliva (kuchikamizake 口嚼酒) plays an important rôle in the story. And despite all the fractures and disconnects in time that occur between the two protagonists, there is a subtle but persistent theme of continuity, of history repeating itself, of déjà vu.

A comet, whose orbit comes within sight of Earth once every 1200 years, passes overhead. As it enters Earth’s gravity well, its nucleus fractures, producing a spectacular meteor shower. One of these fragments is large enough to fall on the village of Itomori. It destroys the town and kills 500 of its inhabitants. Two young teenagers look up at the night sky and watch the comet streak across. One of them, Tachibana Taki 立花泷 is a high-schooler and part-time waiter in a fancy restaurant in Shinjuku ward in Tôkyô. The other, Miyamizu Mitsuha 宫水三叶, is a high schooler in Itomori, and one of the two granddaughters of the keeper of the local Shintô shrine there.

Mitsuha is frustrated with her limited surroundings, being (embarrassingly) involved in the rites of the shrine, getting unwanted attention from being the village mayor’s daughter, and feeling like she’s trapped in a fishbowl. She screams from underneath the torii that she hates her life, she hates her town, and she wishes she could be reincarnated as a handsome boy in Tôkyô. Not long after this, Mitsuha and Taki begin to have strange dreams.

Formerly, I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamt that I was a butterfly, a butterfly flying about, feeling that it was enjoying itself. I did not know that it was Zhou. Suddenly I awoke, and was myself again, the veritable Zhou. I did not know whether it had formerly been Zhou dreaming that he was a butterfly, or it was now a butterfly dreaming that it was Zhou. But between Zhou and a butterfly there must be a difference.

昔者莊周夢為胡蝶，栩栩然胡蝶也，自喻適志與！不知周也。俄然覺，則蘧蘧然周也。不知周之夢為胡蝶與，胡蝶之夢為周與？周與胡蝶，則必有分矣。此之謂物化。

As though in answer to Mitsuha’s wish, Mitsuha and Taki begin swapping bodies, randomly, whenever they fall asleep. This part of the story might have been handled gratuitously or exploitatively, and sometimes it rides the line. (What’s the first thing Pete does when Robert Louis Stevenson’s bookends trap him in Myka’s body? Yup, Taki does the same thing. Typical teenage boy.) But Taki and Mitsuha are quickly intrigued by each other in deeper ways. Mitsuha finally gets to visit Tôkyô, go out to eat in stylish urban cafés, and hold down a job in a fancy restaurant. And Taki is enchanted by the charming architecture and wondrous vistas of Itomori – including the huge round lake which is very clearly and ominously a crater.

The two teenagers quickly begin setting ground rules for each other, what they are and aren’t allowed to do in each other’s bodies, leaving each other messages including by writing on each other’s hands and wrists with marker. Going through each other’s smartphones, they learn details about each other’s lives that they can appreciate. Taki begins asserting himself among Mitsuha’s classmates to get them to stop teasing her. And Mitsuha sets Taki up with an older girl at his workplace, Okudera, whom he has a crush on, and tells him in a message that he should be able to see the comet that night.

Taki’s date with Okudera goes poorly and no comet appears. He tries calling Mitsuha with the number she left him, and she doesn’t answer. The body-switching stops, but Taki can’t forget about the dreams he had from when he was Mitsuha. He then embarks, together with Okudera and his classmate Tsukasa, on a half-baked quest to find Mitsuha and her village. The only thing he has to go on, though, since he can’t remember her name or the name of the village, are the landscape drawings and sketches he did of the views from her house and the temple. An old man recognises his sketch as that of Itomori before the disaster, and Taki ultimately learns from him that Mitsuha was killed along with the rest of the village when the comet struck Itomori three years before.

Taki decides to leave Okudera and Tsukasa to try and find the holy place where Mitsuha’s grandmother took her to pay respects to the old Shintô god that had come 1200 years ago. It happens to be in the middle of a crater – and Mitsuha’s grandmother had told her that crossing over into the grounds of the shrine was like taking a step into the underworld. Taki finds the rice wine that Mitsuha made inside the shrine, and drinks it. This reconnects Mitsuha and Taki, and allows the two of them to rewrite the history of Itomori and save the townspeople from the impact of the comet fragment. But, as history changes, the dream ends, and the two of them lose each other again, even forgetting each other’s names…

I’m not going to spoil the ending here, but suffice it to say this: Shinkai Makoto has a brilliant and touching ‘ear’ for the voices of young adults. He makes real the connexion between these two people, so utterly different from one another and separated by time, space, class, sex, tradition and modernity. Although the director very cautiously refrains from overtly editorialising at any point in the film – with one partial exception – one gets the distinct impression that the same longing the characters feel for each other is connected intimately to a sense of loss of the traditions that Mitsuha embodies in her life even as she rebels against them.

One sees this same sort of traditionalism, actually, even in the gender-bending body-swap plot. Even though it’s a explicitly a comic point to see ‘Taki’ (inhabited by Mitsuha’s consciousness) act like a traditional-minded Japanese girl, and ‘Mitsuha’ (actually Taki) behave live a typical urban high-school boy – right down to their body language and pronouns (‘Taki’ almost gives the game away by calling himself by the feminine ‘watashi 私’ before landing on the more masculine ‘ore 俺’) – they each come to have a tender respect for each other’s physical embodiedness and an active interest in each other’s social lives. There is an almost Ruist sensibility here, in that Taki and Mitsuha come to understand and love each other by experiencing relationships with friends, family and surroundings through each other’s eyes.

The single most strained relationship in the film, actually, is that between Mitsuha and her father, who is a (presumably ruling-party) politician in the town, and who rather callously left his daughters behind with his shrine-keeping mother-in-law after their mother died. Throughout the film Mitsuha’s father refuses to listen to her or take her seriously. This is where I think the partial exception to Shinkai’s refusal to editorialise comes in. Mitsuha’s father represents a deliberate rupture with tradition even though he uses it to attain his personal goals.

As to be expected from a CoMix Wave production, the animation quality is amazing, even if – by Shinkai Makoto’s own admission – not quite reaching the Studio Ghibli gold standard. Both the urban and the rural backdrops are lovingly, painstakingly rendered – as though each frame is meant to be a landscape painting. The technical and stylistic use of proportion and perspective, also, enhance the thematic preoccupations with separation and reunion, rupture and continuity, alienation and connexion. I highly, highly recommend this film.

EDIT: Also, the title of the film called to mind this Tad Morose song, the lyrics to which seem almost appropriate at times:

Skif: a Eurasian tribute to eighties Hollywood

Kunitsa (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) and Lyutobor (Aleksei Faddeev) in Skif

Rustam Mosafir – the director of 2015’s Begletsy – returned in 2018 with the big-budget action movie Skif (literally, The Scythian, but released in English under the title of The Last Warrior). This is a film that places itself readily in the sweet-spot ambit of reviewers like RedLetterMedia. It readily approaches the Tarantino threshold for æstheticisation of violence to the point where it becomes campy – but it skirts the line with enough adroit self-awareness that it never quite crosses it. Ostensibly set in the vicinity of Krasnodar during the Kievan Rus’ period (and shot on location in Crimea), though in such a way that it skirts the blurry line between historical fiction and sword-and-sorcery low fantasy, it is a grim, brutal, cynical depiction of the age that nonetheless carries itself with a suitably compelling degree of swagger.

As my brief description may suggest, Mosafir’s most recent film is in many ways an entirely deliberate throwback to Hollywood thrillers and action movies of the eighties and nineties: the Mad Max trilogy, the Lethal Weapon films, Conan the Barbarian, Rob Roy and the Death Wish movies, to name a few. (Mosafir directly credits as his inspirations in this film Mel Gibson, George Miller, Robert Howard and Charles Bronson.) As such there are strong thematic preoccupations with honour, power and its dangers, trust and betrayal, fate and destiny. The characters inhabit a universe of blood oaths and kingly intrigues, of human sacrifice and inhuman rage, where tribal clashes between East and West end messily and with gruesome results. There are also some bitterly cynical intimations, particularly toward the end of the film, about the very nature of political power.

The last band of Scythians – a warlike nomadic people who have all but faded entirely from history – make their living as hired killers for lords and khans who can pay their price in gold. They call themselves the ‘Wolves of Ares’, and they are led by a red-bearded man named Yar (Vitalii Kravchenko) and by a spiritual elder named Anagast (Viktor Solov’ev). The Wolves of Ares kidnap the wife, Tatyana (Vasilisa Izmailova) and newborn son of a loyal Rus’ warrior named Lyutobor (Aleksei Faddeev), with a ransom demand knifed to the door-jamb of his house. The demand is that Lyutobor poison his liege, the knyaz Oleg of T’mutarakan (Yurii Tsurilo). Lyutobor dutifully reports this to his lord, and Oleg subsequently frames Lyutobor for poisoning him – the idea being that he would use the opportunity to get his wife and son back, and also find out who in the T’mutarakan court tried to suborn Lyutobor to assassinate Oleg. Lyutobor’s only hope to find his family rests in a Scythian captive that his people took when they raided his home: a young fighter named Kunitsa (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) who hopes to challenge Yar for control of the Wolves when he grows strong enough.

The film’s primary relationship – the one that sets forth the thematic problems of trust, honour, betrayal and vengeance – is the tense relationship between Lyutobor and Kunitsa. At first, neither of them likes or trusts the other in the slightest. As far as Lyutobor is concerned, Kunitsa is just an animal. On the other hand, Kunitsa thinks Lyutobor’s Christianity makes him weak and that his scruples make him naïve. However, despite in the beginning Lyutobor forcing Kunitsa to swear an oath to Ares on his blood-stained sword, Kunitsa proves over and over again that he is willing to honour his word – and so he gains Lyutobor’s grudging respect. On the other hand, Kunitsa comes to admire Lyutobor for his tenacity as well as for his prowess in battle. It wouldn’t be quite right to call this a ‘buddy’ film, despite the subtle hat-tips to Lethal Weapon in this relationship. Lyutobor and Kunitsa gain respect for each other through a number of encounters and survival scenarios, and the natural flow of these events effectively builds audience sympathy and investment in that friendship. But at the same time, the two of them stand on either side of a religious and cultural divide that, even toward the end of the film, is never quite bridged. The film seems to intimate that the only force that can bridge it is bloodshed, even political mass murder.

In fact, what the film has to say about honour and trust is that both of these things are fragile, and built on a landscape of power-struggle and intrigue that can roll over and crush them at any time. With the notable exceptions of Kunitsa and Anagast – both of them Scythians! – and Lyutobor’s loyal wife Tatyana, all of the major characters go back on their word or violate a relationship of trust in some way, and they do it for gain, in power or in wealth. At the beginning of the film, a Qypchaq warrior named Qumai (played by Rustam Mosafir himself) challenges Lyutobor to a wrestling-match, but when Lyutobor beats him fair and square, the humiliated and enraged Qumai draws a knife and tries to stab Lyutobor in the back. This sets the tone for a number of encounters and relationships in the film. Although kinship, friendship and religious obligation are expressed by most of the characters in Skif, the only ones ever shown to 100% hold up their end of a bargain are Scythian. And in the end they suffer a dreadful, tragic price for this honesty.

Scythian lore exercises a powerful grip on the Russian imagination. The obvious point of reference is the Aleksandr Blok poem Skify, which ties the character of the Russian nation to the ancient Asiatic steppe nomads. But it goes back further than that. As religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev highlights, the great Slavophil cultural critic Aleksei Khomyakov in Semiramis spoke of the civilisational principle of iranstvo: the principle of fire and sunlight and the sacredness of the spoken word, which is opposed to the animistic principle of kushitstvo with its emphasis on power, monuments and necessity. In Khomyakov’s ethnographic imagination, the Scythians embodied the ‘Iranian’ principles of sacred truth, hatred of the lie, and the idea that true freedom consists in keeping one’s word – and then passed on these traits to the Russians. This same imagination seems to fuel Mosafir’s low-fantasy vision of whom the Scythians were and what they believed, though if Oleg is any indication, he expresses a strong doubt that the Russians inherited it except indirectly.

The logic of Skif appears, at first, to be ‘Cushitic’. The gods that go unseen are false. Power is invested – even by supposedly ‘Christian’ characters like Oleg – in magic totems of wood and stone, which must be sated by blood. Necessity overrules any conception of the sacredness of one’s word. Sons betray fathers; fathers kill sons. Lords and servants cheat each other. Men betray other men to their deaths for purses full of gold. Alliances are broken; tribes are massacred. The world we get to view through the eyes of Lyutobor is bleak and brutal. But it seems like Mosafir is in ultimate agreement with Berdyaev and Khomyakov, given that the few fleeting glimpses we get of any sort of spiritual freedom – including a particularly poignant and bittersweet one at the very end of the film – come through the perspective of the Scythians themselves.

This political angle on the amoral nature of acquiring and keeping political power, and the options available for a person of integrity under it, prompts a contrast with another genre film, but not a Hollywood one. Despite several echoing similarities in theme and in plot beats between Skif and Zhang Yimou’s Hero – with Jet Li’s Wuming sharing certain qualities and temperament with both Lyutobor and Kunitsa and with Yurii Tsurilo’s Oleg displaying a similar outlook to Chen Daoming’s Qin Shihuang – the final tragic choice of Wuming to uphold the state order without regard for his own life at the end of Hero, stands in stark contrast to Lyutobor’s penultimate choice to defy the state order without regard for his own life.

The Scythians left their archaeological traces across a good quarter of the Eurasian continent, from the Balkans across Crimea and the Caucasus to Kazakhstan. They also left their genetic traces among human progeny in a broad swathe of the same. In the modern day, the Ossetian people of the Caucasus, who are descended from the Sauromatai tribe of Late Antiquity and the Alan people of the Middle Ages, still speak a language which is descended from Scythian. I do have to wonder a bit if Mosafir consulted at all with these Ossetian neighbours while they were filming this in (relatively) nearby Crimea.

The production values and cinematography in Skif are every bit as polished and lavish as one would come to expect from a modern action flim, though again Mosafir appears to be quite fond of stylistic throwbacks to the silver era of eighties and nineties genre films, action movies and crime thrillers. The palette is washed out with the exceptions of the blood effects, which are always a vivid red. Certain scenes – like the one in which Lyutobor imbibes a psychoactive drink after being captured by a forest tribe and goes berserk – rely on fish-eye lens first-person camerawork and filters to capture the violent psychedelia of the practice: actually, no Western film, but instead the Kazakh films Otyrardyń kúıreýi (with which Skif shares similar thematic material) and Igla come the closest in my experience to these effects. In fact, Mosafir’s portrayal of Lyutobor’s berserkergang – including both the indiscriminate bestial rage during the episode and the extreme physical and emotional weakness of the warrior in dénouement – appears to be remarkably accurate from what historical knowledge of the practice we have.

The action scenes are nicely choreographed, and Mosafir takes delight in favouring us with numerous mobile first person takes to provide a sense of disorientation in combat. The elaborate and outlandish costumes – leather and metal spikes and face-masques galore – and ubiquitous face-paint further entrench the inevitable comparisons with Mad Max, as Mosafir no doubt intended. I will say, however, that some of the CGI blood effects, particularly in Lyutobor’s last confrontation with Qumai and even during the berserkergang, were unintentionally hilarious and came close to having the opposite of the intended effect: this is why I say earlier that Mosafir is playing on the ragged edge of the Tarantino threshold. The musical score is eclectic: a mixture of traditional symphonic accompaniment, ethnic drumming and instrumentation including some khöömi throat-singing, and a bit of modern darkwave dance music (during the end credits). The soundtrack is excellent in that it is suitably subdued, and supports the action rather than distracts from it.

This film is entirely watchable and entertaining as a popcorn action thriller. It’s well-paced, is visually lush, has solid dramatic tension and a decent emotional core. At the same time, I note with some dismay, many of these new movies from modern Russian directors – both in the ‘mainstream’ like this one and in the art-house circuit like Fedorchenko’s ethnofuturist dramas – are soused in a double faith, a dvoeverie, that self-alienates them from the native strength of the Orthodox Christian belief. I’m not entirely sure what is driving this. In Mosafir’s case, I wonder – both from Begletsy and from this film – if he feels that Orthodoxy in Russia has something opportunistic about it, something too close to the amoral logic of princely power.

Baikonur: space-age romanticism and færie realism

Gagarin (Asochakov) and Julie Mahé (de Villepin) in Baikonur

I recently watched the 2011 German-Kazakhstani romantic comedy Baikonur directed by Veit Helmer and starring Alexander Asochakov, Marie de Villepin and Sitora Farmonova. Outlandish and charming, its love story sometimes seems to take a back seat to broader themes, not least of which are the (post-)Soviet enthusiasm for space, the more prosaic impacts of the space programme on local life, and more generally on the tension in Kazakh life between tradition and modernity. Caught thematically between Jules Verne and the Brothers Grimm, ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ themes blend together in odd ways, as does the strange relationship between Kazakh semi-nomadic life and literal rocket science. Baikonur seems to delight in, and explore to a much better effect than I did, the odd confluence between folklore and space exploration. (I still think the folkloric choice of name for the Chinese rover, its landing on Tolkien’s birthday, and the actual attempt at lunar agriculture, are all more than a little suggestive that way!) It also makes a point of turning inside-out our expectations of sæcular space and time. Space is enchanted; even the old Soviet machinery of the ISS seems to operate by the logic of mediæval romances. And yet the characters who are most attuned to ‘færie’ are also the ones most drawn back to earth, to the realities of the situation of ‘the people here’.

The cinematography is excellent; it must be said that Helmer seems to have a taste for a human-level view of big things and big events. Helmer is judicious and effective, with a subtle wink and nod to the audience, in his use of archival footage of old Baikonur launches: he knows exactly the kind of space-age nostalgia and Star Trekky feelings of exploration he is evoking. In fact, the opening sequence sees Nazira sketching rocket launches in the sand, while archival footage of old Baikonur launches transitions in from the background.

We get treated to a lot of ground-level shots of the eponymous Cosmodrome and the Kazakh steppe – the grand stage for the very relatable and very poignant human drama among the protagonists. Speaking of which, the acting is also quite good. Asochakov absolutely nails his performance as Iskander ‘Gagarin’ Orynbekuly – a crafty but good-hearted Kazakh whiz-kid who aids his village by maintaining the radio equipment which helps them scavenge and trade in scrap metal from jettisoned modules of rocket launches at the nearby Cosmodrome. (The Kazakhs justify this with the principle that ‘whatever drops from the sky is a gift from God’.) Disarmingly earnest and sweet, Iskander’s dreams of becoming a cosmonaut himself are played arrow-straight, without the slightest hint of irony. His fellow nomad Nazira, played by Farmonova, clearly has a liking for Gagarin but shows it mostly by teasing him or by giving him folkloric advice (all of which seems to come true at one point or another in the film). But Gagarin has eyes only for the French tourist-cosmonaut Julie Mahé – played by Marie de Villepin – whom he watches prior to her launch on the television, and then later discovers comatose on the steppe after her capsule lands back on Earth.

Warning: as usual, there are SPOILERS in the discussion of the plot below.

In the broad strokes: we get introduced to the two sides of this love triangle early on. On the one side, we get scenes of Julie Mahé as she is preparing for her launch – long and loving shots of rockets being hauled on Soviet-era trucks to the launch site; a Russian Orthodox priest blessing the rocket and astronauts with aspergillum and holy water; the countdown and liftoff; Julie entranced by the outline of the earth as seen from space; the docking at the International Space Station. Mahé’s ecstasy is mirrored precisely in Gagarin’s love of everything rocketry- and space-related – he even keeps in touch with a Kazakh technician in the Cosmodrome who apparently comes from the same aul. Gagarin and Julie share the same rapturous gazes skyward, the same dreams of spaceflight. But Gagarin, when he turns on his old television set and sees Julie’s face there as she’s on her way up, finds his space-age romanticism transmuting itself into puppy love.

All the while, Gagarin’s perpetually-dishevelled childhood friend Nazira – like him, an orphan, due to the dangerous (and, we later learn, poisonous) nature of their aul’s scavenging work – likes to spend her time either yelling at him or insulting him. But it’s more than clear she harbours deeper feelings for him, and doesn’t see him merely as a geeky younger brother. (Nazira’s definitely a Type A tsun that way.) We see her offering him sage advice and camel dung for engineering purposes; and we get the clear sense that she’s something of a ‘diamond in the rough’, but Gagarin’s a bit too intent on his scavenging work (and daydreaming about space and Julie) to notice her. By the way – the wide-angle shots of the aul are terrific: traditional yurts decked out in bits and pieces of scrap metal from the Cosmodrome.

Julie’s ISS tour comes to a close and she is sent home – but a calculating error causes her module to overheat on reentry and crash into the Kazakh steppe ‘under the radar’. Gagarin finds her crashed pod and Julie herself inside, comatose – he carries her back to his yurt, makes her comfortable, but finds he can’t wake her up. Nazira suggests that he wake her up with a kiss, like in Sleeping Beauty, and then teases him about being a bad kisser when he can’t. (She then promptly demonstrates how to kiss properly – on him.) Gagarin eventually succeeds in waking Julie up – but she has amnesia and can’t remember anything about herself.

Due to several miscommunications on the part of Gagarin (who tries to get her the bathtub she asks for), Julie becomes convinced that she’s Gagarin’s köketai – his fiancée. Nazira is not too happy about this, and she throws some great shade on Julie and Gagarin as she remarks: ‘Must be nice to just forget everything.’ She later tells Gagarin: ‘If you touch her, you will lose her.’ The two bickering village elders also try to get Gagarin’s köketai off him with cash, each trying to outbid the other. When Gagarin’s grandfather informs the Cosmodrome that Julie has been found, Gagarin takes her out of the aul and into a cave, where Julie starts eagerly making love to him. As they climax, Julie suddenly – and awkwardly – regains her memory, and promptly storms out of the cave, furious with Gagarin for having deceived her. The hapless but entirely earnest Gagarin meekly offers to return her to the Cosmodrome… but later lands himself a job at the Cosmodrome by leveraging his discovery of Julie to the embarrassed and mortified director of spaceflight, who doesn’t want it leaked to the press that Baikonur lost one of its cosmonauts.

At the Cosmodrome, Gagarin makes every effort to get back in touch with Julie, but his efforts are frustrated. He even enters the cosmonaut programme and is promptly hazed by the Cosmodrome technicians by being put in the high-G centrifuge. (He acquits himself well at eight G’s – the gobsmacked technicians remark that he’s ‘just like the real Gagarin’.) He eventually manages to meet up with Julie, who is working on a solar panel in her spacesuit – for a moment, we are fooled into thinking that he went up to space to meet her, but, in a nice cinematographic touch, we learn they’re in the training tank when bubbles start rising around their helmets. Julie, who is eager to get up to the space station again, repeatedly puts him off – to the point where Gagarin uses camel dung from his village to sabotage the space launch so he can talk to Julie one last time.

When he finally does, Julie admits she’s impressed by Gagarin and that his köketai really did love him, but tells him point-blank that she’s not the person he thinks she is, and that her heart is already given to the stars – which appears to be a definitive moment at which Gagarin realises that he does, in fact, care about ‘the people down here’ more than he does about spaceflight.

This transition, if it had been handled cursorily or without a certain degree of foreshadowing, would have come off as a bit cheap. But Gagarin clearly does care about his aul, even when he’s bickering with Nazira or trying to skive off collecting space scrap. At the Cosmodrome, Nazira visits on horseback to tell him to either come back or teach her how to use the ham radio, so the old folks at home won’t starve – which Gagarin reluctantly does. (Nazira doesn’t succeed in using the radio, and to cool her frustration takes a bath in Julie’s bathtub instead.) Gagarin is clearly affected when he learns the village elders have injured each other in a fight over scrap, and he is shaken when he learns that the scrap metal they’d been harvesting is carcinogenic. When Gagarin’s friend the Kazakh technician tells him not to worry about the aul – he’s got a great cosmonaut career ahead of him – that’s when he decides to walk away from the Cosmodrome. Significantly, he dons a takiya and a traditional Kazakh jacket as he does so – and immediately goes out and buys two lambs for breeding. (This is where we get to see the cameo by Nursultan Nazarbaev’s granddaughter, as the incredibly-cute but hard bargain-driving shepherd girl.) He comes home to his aul and is greeted at once by a glowing, freshly-bathed Nazira in a clean koilek, who comes and sits with him as they watch Julie’s rocket lift off from the Cosmodrome.

End spoilers.

This film is, for the most part, a sweet and slightly sad tale of first loves – but it’s also in itself something of a mournful love song for a bygone age of space-bound optimism, enthusiasm, big dreams for a humanity united by common technological endeavor; and, at the end of the day, a reaffirmation of the realism of ancestral wisdom. Baikonur with all of its now-incredibly dated technology is shown pretty straight – big-box electronics with knobs and dials and incandescent indicator lights under bits of coloured plastic; exposed tubes and wires and hardware-store engineering – and that is sometimes (as in the part where Gagarin sabotages one of the valves with camel dung) played for laughs. But Helmer wants us to look at Baikonur through Gagarin’s and Julie’s eyes: to look heavenward and see and understand the enchantment of spaceflight as it took people during the space race. Helmer wants us to touch our hearts with the grand, Vernean Romanticism which inspired not just the Space Race, but also Star Trek and the American and Soviet science-fictional traditions.

By way of contrast, the Grimmish, Chestertonian-Tolkienian færie-tale logic embodied by Nazira’s proverbial wisdom actually manages to bring Gagarin (and us) back down to earth (or, dare I say, there and back again?), to get us to look level at ‘the people back here’. Nazira is the true believer in the ‘doctrine of conditional joy’; the one who keeps reminding us of the hidden costs of reaching for the stars. She’s the one who first suggests that: the metal is poisonous; that orphans should stick together; that the sleeping princess can be awoken with a kiss; that touching her will mean losing her; that to fly up into space is to trespass on the realm of the ancestors. Nazira’s heartfelt kiss might have had something of a delayed effect, but that was what woke Gagarin up from his space-bound dreams, and turned him back toward the aul, the nomadic life, the traditional œconomy. It’s the færie logic and the traditional wisdom that helps Gagarin to grow and mature as a character.

Still, Helmer is a skilled enough director that he doesn’t make his point in a ham-fisted way, or try to answer the dilemmas for us. The final frame manages to showcase the real draw on both sides of that – the fields where the lambs will graze being brilliantly lit up by a blastoff. Yet the question remains very much open whether the two of those can indeed coexist in the long run. I’m somewhat over-intellectualising it here, though. Baikonur is what it is – a sweet, quirky and very post-Soviet romantic comedy, and one which I would highly recommend to the age-appropriate audience.

Our venerable father Breandán ‘an Loingseoir’ of Clonfert

Saint Breandán of Clonfert

The sixteenth of May is the feast day of Saint Breandán of Clonfert, also known as Breandán ‘the Navigator’. One of the great itinerant Celtic Church fathers and a founder of many monasteries, he is noteworthy for his daring feats of seafaring and missionary exploration that earned him a deserved place in mediæval literature and legend.

Breandán [also Brendan, Bréanainn or Brandanus] was born in Tralee, in County Kerry in the firths of the far Irish southwest, in the year 484. His parents, Findlugán and Carae, appear to have been of humble background, but on the night he was born it was said that bright angels hovered over his house. He was nurtured early in his life and tutored in the faith not by a man, but by one of the Church’s holy mothers, Saint Íte of Killeedy; at the age of twenty-seven he was ordained a priest by his friend and mentor Saint Erc of Slane. At some point he may also have studied under Saint Fionnán of Clonard. It was shortly after his ordination, though, that he began making missionary and church-founding voyages by coracle, or hide-covered wicker boat – which he undertook for the next two decades of his life.

His first faring took him into the Aran Islands off the western coast of Ireland between Galway and Clare, where he founded a monastery. He then travelled to Hinba, or Eileach an Naoimh, off the coast of Scotland, where he visited the anchoress Eithne ni Mac Naue and her son Saint Colum Cille. Local tradition has it that he helped Eithne to found a full monastery there.

Subsequent voyages of Breandán an Loingseoir took him to Wales and the coast of Brittany, where he founded more churches and pastorally strengthened those which were already there. He founded monasteries near the coasts of his own homeland. Two with which his name is closely associated are Ardfert near his home in County Kerry, and Ballynavenooragh near Dingle. Later voyages he made took him to the Hebrides and the Orkneys, and he is even said to have visited the coast of Iceland, where he is locally known as Brandanus.

The monastery which Breandán is most closely associated with, though, is Clonfert in Galway, which the saint founded in the year 557. At its peak, the monastery founded by Saint Breandán housed three thousand monks, all striving tirelessly for the glory of God. However, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries it was sacked repeatedly by Danish invaders and its glory was significantly diminished; unfortunately, only the cathedral – dedicated to Saint Breandán – remains standing today. The holy saint of God lived to the age of eighty-three, and reposed in the Lord, at peace among his brothers, on the sixteenth of May, 577.

Illustration from Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis

Saint Breandán’s voyages were the subject of a significant piece of mediæval Latin literature, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, or Voyages of Saint Brendan the Abbot. Partly a work of travel literature like The Spiritual Meadow, and partly a work of fantasy, the Navigatio was quite popular in Western Europe and was translated into a number of vernacular languages. In the broad strokes, the story goes thus:

While Saint Breandán was still abbot at Ardfert, his monastery was visited by a monk named Barinthus, who in his worldly life had been a nobleman of the Northern Uí Néill. While he stays with Abbot Breandán, the monk begins to speak about his voyages to a great isle in the sea toward the west, the Land of Promise of the Saints. This isle was, in his telling, a paradise – a land which was always lit with daylight, filled with flowers and ripe fruits, where every stone on the ground was a precious gem. Half the isle was open to him, however, the greater and more glorious half was barred to him and all his companions, for they were not deemed worthy to set foot across the river that ran through the isle. Only his abbot Mernoc was allowed to cross, and he would often stay away from them months at a time. Only with great reluctance did Barinthus return to Ireland to bear word of this isle to the monks of Ardfert.

Abbot Breandán then selected fourteen of his monks to prepare for a voyage west. He fasted together with them for forty days, and afterwards Saint Breandán commended the abbey to his prior. He built a coracle, piled provisions for a forty-day journey inside, and pushed off with his fourteen monks from Ardfert into the Atlantic. Just before they left Ardfert, three more monks of his house begged to join him; with some reluctance Breandán allowed them, though he warned two of them that their motives were not pure, and that this voyage would likely be to their deaths.

At sea, the monks in the coracle encountered many strange, wondrous and perilous sights and situations. In one island, a spire of rock reaching the clouds, they found a marvellous treasury of silver in a cave beneath the water-line; but they only borrowed what they needed on which to break bread and eat, and took nothing. On another island, they beheld flocks of sheep which grew to be as heavy and strong as oxen, but which were tamer than lambs. On yet another island, they discovered a pure spring issuing forth the waters of sleep, surrounded by flowers and flocks of many-hued birds—which were actually fallen angels attempting to repent of having followed Lucifer. Another island they landed on turned out to be the back of some mighty sea creature, which moved along with the ship. They encountered a whale which they feared would devour the ship. They also encountered fantastic creatures such as gryphons, and landed on an island which seemed to be made entirely of crystal. At another time they came across an ancient man chained to a rock in the sea, who was buffeted by the waves – it turned out to be Judas Iscariot, who was condemned to remain there until the Last Judgement. Navigatio relates also, however, that the monks spent long stretches of time involuntarily fasting aboard their coracle, rationing food particularly when they were becalmed or when they spent many days at sea between islands.

One of the three monks, who had joined the coracle uninvited, being tempted by a devil of greed, stole a silver bridle-bit from one of the islands they visited. He repented of his sin, and Saint Breandán exorcised him of his devil and administered to him the Gifts. He died repentant. Another of the three monks, however, was carried off by devils and cast into hell through the mouth of an erupting volcano. The third of these monks was sent among a monastic community on the Isle of the Strong Men, there to live the rest of his days in constant repentance.

At last Saint Breandán and his monks made their way to the Island of the Promise which was described by Father Barinthus, and they found everything as he had described it. Everywhere was lit with daylight, even during the night when the sun set. Every tree was full of fruit, every other plant was in full flower, and the ground was covered with precious stones. They were met by a young monk who bade them take as much as they liked of the fruit and gems back to their boat and back to Ardfert Abbey, so that those who met them might see and wonder at God’s works. After spending three days as the guests of the Isle of the Promise, Saint Breandán gave thanks to the Holy Trinity and set back in his coracle to Ireland, where he did all as the young monk told him.

It was thought for some time during the Renaissance and the Age of Exploration that Saint Breandán had reached the shores of America. This tale was later, in a more ‘enlightened’ age, taken to be mere pious fiction. But one Anglo-Indian professor, author and explorer, Tim Severin, was taken with the tale of Saint Breandán. He set out to prove that a voyage to the Americas from Ireland may have been possible, in a coracle like the one described in the Navigatio. He and his team built a coracle with a wooden frame, used ox hides tanned with oak bark to cover it, and smeared the hides with rendered fat to waterproof them. Tim Severin set out in this coracle and used it to make his way from Ireland to the Hebrides, the Færœ Islands, Iceland (where he and his team spent the winter), and even all the way across to Newfoundland. He encountered icebergs, volcanoes and whales, encounters with the likes of which could have produced the descriptions seen in the Navigatio. Severin didn’t set out to prove conclusively that Breandán had landed in Newfoundland, only to show that such a voyage was possible with the technology and knowledge available to him at the time – similarly to how Thor Heyerdahl proved that it was possible for the Polynesians to have had contact with præ-Contact South America in his Kon-Tiki expedition.

It’s possible that Tim Severin’s recreation of Saint Breandán’s voyage was one of the real-life influences on the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode ‘Explorers’, in which Captain Benjamin Sisko and his son Jake board a sub-light space vessel with solar sails and attempt to ride particle currents to the next star system. Tellingly, the original script featured the expedition being led by CPO Miles O’Brien – the Irish station engineer portrayed by Colm Meaney. Holy father Breandán, voyager and founder of many monasteries, pray unto Christ our God for us sinners!

The Divine Likeness has been perfected in thee, O holy Father Breandán,
For taking up the Cross thou hast followed Christ,
And by thy deeds thou hast taught us to disdain the flesh for it passes away,
But to cultivate the soul for it is immortal:
Wherefore, O holy father, thy spirit rejoices with the Angels.

Clonfert Cathedral, Ireland

The Wandering Earth

Yesterday I took my wife out on an actual date (!), something which has become for us, sadly, a bit of a luxury and a rarity since having children and moving back to the United States – and we went to see the new mainland Chinese blockbuster The Wandering Earth 《流浪地球》. I’ll try and give some of my impressions of the film. Just be aware that this review is coming from the same contrarian who gave The Last Jedi a rather half-hearted thumbs-up, ironically, because Rian Johnson proved himself to be more of a traditionalist than the Star Wars fanboys in regard to his treatment of the canonical mythos – Mahler’s ‘preservation of fire’ versus ‘worship of ashes’, and all that.

The Wandering Earth takes as its premise a cataclysmic disaster in which the Sun is going nova. It will consume the Earth within 100 years and destroy the Solar System within 300. Mankind embarks upon a grand project to use massive cold fusion reactors to move the Earth 4.2 light years into orbit around Proxima Centauri, using a massive international space station to pilot the Earth toward its new destination over the course of 2500 years. Things take a very literal wrong turn as the Earth passes the orbit of Jupiter, however, and it is up to a Chinese astronaut, Liu Peiqiang 劉培強, and his fellow Russian cosmonaut Makarov on the space station, along with that astronaut’s family still on Earth, to correct Earth’s course before it collides with Jupiter. In the telling of this story, the film makes several attempts to explore questions regarding humanity’s instinct for survival, the ethics of extreme measures in the face of world-ending peril, determinism versus free will, and the meaning and nature of family and home in a ‘post-apocalyptic’ (actually ‘peri-apocalyptic’) universe.

The Wandering Earth weds an ambitious, grand space-operatic high concept with the noisy, landscape-shattering, frenetic pacing and disbelief suspension-straining of a Roland Emmerich-style disaster flick. In terms of special effects (big vehicles, chase scenes, explosions and so on), director and screenwriter (also sci-fi author whose story this was) Liu Cixin 劉慈欣 and producer Frant Gwo 郭帆 really don’t do anything by halves. The atmospheric shots of the exhaust trails of the Earth Engines, of Jupiter, of the moving Earth itself are a cinematographic achievement in themselves: they manage to give the film an appealing æsthetic weight it wouldn’t otherwise have.

The fact that action star Wu Jing 吳京 (of Wolf Warrior 《戰狼》 fame) gets top billing should tell you something about the film’s core target demographic. And yet at the same time, for all the big, noisy pyrotechnics, the core message of the film is not a violent one. Human beings don’t fight each other over the preservation of their planet. Even Wu Jing’s character Liu Peiqiang (though he does get to cause an explosion and drop a typical badass action-movie one-liner) depends far more on suasion and pathos to save the day than on force – and as the emotional climax of the movie draws near, one of the major characters (the charmingly-cynical teenager Han Duoduo 韓朵朵) makes an appeal to hope and to an ideal of peaceful global coöperation that would have the late great Gene Roddenberry himself shedding big fat tears of joy. The problem that they have to solve involves (again, somewhat in defiance of scientific realism) re-rigging one of the fusion-powered ‘Earth Engines’ that are propelling the Earth out of its orbit, to act as an ignition torch to spark a hydrogen combustion reaction that will propel the Earth out of Jupiter’s gravity well. In the scene you see hundreds of people of six or seven different nationalities all literally pushing in the same direction to achieve this goal.

One thing that I fear is lost on American audiences about The Wandering Earth is that it can be loosely considered a New Year’s movie, which means something very specific in Chinese culture. Family troubles and reconciliation are a very common trope in New Year’s films, and The Wandering Earth is no exception to that; the emotional core of the movie is the bittersweet relationship between Liu Peiqiang and his estranged son Liu Qi 劉啓 (all the more impressive when one considers all of Wu Jing’s parts were shot separately from the rest of the film, essentially in post-production). In addition, there is an underlying (somewhat understated) œcological theme about the nature of home and its relationship to specific places. The Wandering Earth project required piling the surviving human population into massive underground cities located around the ‘Earth Engines’ that also provide heat and energy: as it moves further from the Sun, the surface temperatures plunge to negative 100° centigrade. All of the characters in the movie were forced out of their homes; all of them lost loved ones in the ‘lottery’ that was held to determine who got entrance to the underground cities. (These events are more alluded to than directly exposited.) Without spoiling too much: one of the characters, his situation hopeless, chooses to die in a collapsing apartment building – presumably his home before he went underground. As the global situation gets more desperate, the United Earth Government urges people to go home and spend their remaining moments with their loved ones.

A few of the characters don’t quite feel like they ‘earn’ their arcs. Wisecracking hapa haole sidekick Tim doesn’t really even have one, apart from being the comic relief guy who saves Liu Qi’s life from time to time. Han Duoduo’s backstory, though it’s compelling enough that you’re rooting for her at the end and you do care about what happens to her, still feels a bit compressed (coming mostly in flashbacks in the second half of the film). The characters who get the best ‘moments’, in my own view, are Liu Qi’s grandfather Han Ziang 韓子昂 who manages a nice mix of comedy and pathos, at one point getting in trouble for bribing a prison guard; and the Russian cosmonaut Makarov, who exudes a genuine friendly warmth for Liu Peiqiang, and whose (presumably Christian) religious sentiments manage to make themselves known and felt without feeling forced or lampshaded.

Much of the film does feel like it’s riffing off of long-established science-fictional and action film tropes, which is actually fine with me. It’s not like American films have been breaking ground in that direction for the past few decades at least. Instead, it’s the hopeful communitarian, pro-family social vision that manages to peek through the explosions and cliffhangers and futuristic Mack truck chase scenes, that in our cynical and near-nihilistic age seems to come off like such a breath of fresh air. In the end, Liu Cixin and Frant Gwo have put out a big-budget action movie, not to be taken too seriously, but one with a heart; one which holds up fairly well by contemporary action movie standards and extremely well by æsthetic ones.

Mouse-ear cress on the moon

Chinese scientists have now successfully sprouted plants on the moon. In earth soil, mind you. And in a sealed oxygenated environment. And sadly, it appears the sprouts did not survive the lunar night cold. But even so: this is a remarkable achievement, and growing plants, possibly even food, is a far healthier achievement than putting the Moon to military uses (in my own humble opinion). Lunar agriculture is no longer science fiction, but has ascended to the realm of the possible.

Even more exciting for me is that, among the plants and animals the Chinese sent up on Chang’e (along with cotton - which sprouted, canola, potatoes, yeast and fruit flies) is Arabidopsis thaliana, also known as mouse-ear cress, a plant with which I became quite familiar and friendly in my college days as a lab technician on an evolutionary biology project spanning two continents and nine different research sites.

But this is me nerding out. Personally, I think this stuff is (pardon the expression) far out, and definitely want to see what China does next with its space programme.

Guess I’m just a good man. Well, I’m alright.

I used to rag on libertarians a lot on this blog. Ragged on ‘em for perverting Christianity, and faking quotes by Saint John Chrysostom. (By the way: Johnny – not a goldbug.) Ragged on ‘em for likewise misreading Confucius. Ragged on their tea party. Ragged on their running Kansas and Wisconsin into the ground. Ragged on their mooning over moonbeams (oh boy did I ever). Ragged on ‘em for being dangerous utopians. Ragged on ‘em for hollowing out academia and inventing social constructivism. And, of course, I ragged on the bespectacled bow-tied breed for generally being the tweaked ones they are.

Though, it’s kind of hard to do nowadays in a post-liberal era. After all, they have no mass constituency to speak of, and their brand is broadly discredited on the American right. Doesn’t seem too seemly, kicking a fedora-tipper with his very fine hat when he’s down and all. Also, being somewhere on the realist spectrum my own self, I actually do tend to agree with libertarian priorities on foreign policy.

But, while I can sympathise with their independent stand on some issues, the recent endorsements given to the new anti-oxygen Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro by Forbes and the Economist in a sudden irrational wave of Chicago Boys nostalgia recently put me in a somewhat less charitable mood. There are a couple of features of libertarianism that require pointing out and, uh, stabbing. You know, politely. Libertarian theory was, after all, instrumental in conceiving, midwifing and nourishing the current political hellscape that modern-day libertarians now claim, like Dr Frankenstein to his monster, to disown and reject. Now, as a representative sample of the historical policies I talk about, I am going to be focussing on the thought of four major post-war libertarian theorists: Friedman, Hayek, von Mises and Rand. (Don’t like it? Don’t think that’s quite fair to your esoteric pet sub-theory of libertarianism or right-anarchism? 去你媽的。 I’m wise to that motte-and-bailey trick. Besides, your boy David Bernstein claims ‘em all.)


Coups and régime change

Libertarians these days generally aren’t fans of military interventions, colour revolutions and US-supported coups abroad. This is one of the points on which I find libertarian bloggers (like Justin Raimondo), think-tanks (like the Cato Institute) and statesmen (like Ron and Rand Paul) the most admirable. Unfortunately, this is also one of the points on which I find libertarians to be the least credible. There is a long and sordid history of the libertarian principle of ‘free trade’ being pushed on unwilling partners down the barrels of guns. Often as not, people with the Whiggish, classical-liberal views that modern-day libertarians lay claim to had a certain idealist, crusading make-the-world-anew mentality that is nowadays the signature of liberal interventionists and neoconservatives. This was a tough habit to shake as recently as the 1960’s, the 1970’s and even the 1990’s.

Most infamously, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek both supported the CIA-funded military coup in Chile that murdered Salvador Allende, as well as the resulting government. Friedman was personally instrumental in stocking the Chilean military with contractors and advisers that not only led the reforms, but actually carried out the coup. These attachés personally trained and educated by Friedman were inculcated in precisely this kind of crusading belief that American institutions and œconomists had a continental duty to spread the gospel of the free market, by force if necessary. Friedrich Hayek, too, would not only engage in two personal tête-à-têtes with Pinochet, but indeed defended his political accomplishments to Western governments and not merely his œconomic ones. In 1979, Ayn Rand supported Israel’s wars of aggression and conquest against its Arabic neighbours, citing Israel as the ‘advanced, technological, civilized country’ and Arabs as ‘almost totally primitive savages’. Note that she too displays this crusading-idealist mentality: ‘Israel [is] bringing industry, intelligence, and modern technology into their stagnation.’ It’s actually a mite stunning in retrospect how, in the early decades of libertarianism’s intellectual ascent, Murray Rothbard stood almost alone in his principled commitment to non-intervention in foreign affairs!

Unfortunately, the crazy 1970’s do not mark the end of the libertarian enthusiasm for régime change. Both at the time and in retrospect, the libertarian right has supported the civil violence orchestrated by Boris Eltsin and supported by the American military and the CIA. The man hailed by the libertarians at the Cato Institute as Russia’s hero during the 1990’s repeatedly secured his hold over the country, with American help, by force and by fraud. The columnists at Reason magazine indeed might do well to note this historical tidbit as they bellyache about Russia’s subsequent allergic reactions to their ideas. Even today, more modest ‘classical-liberal’ outlets still run interference for America’s interventionist foreign policy: for example, when the Economist magazine attributed Yemeni famine and immiseration not to Saudi bombing and American blockades, but instead to a qat habit.

Now, it is perfectly true that the state machinery by which the American government effected these military coups, interventions and régime changes has, with practice, gotten more and more effective and insidious as time has gone on, and the Washington foreign policy consensus has got no problem making all manner of dastardly use of it. The libertarians who nowadays decry all of this architecture and its aggressive use as creeping government totalitarianism are not wrong to do so, but with almost the sole exception of Rothbard, they were asleep at the wheel while it was still manageable and while they still had a non-marginal degree of influence on government processes. And they missed the boat precisely because the American government was implementing policy prescriptions that they wanted. For now, I’m willing to play nice with the libertarians who walk their talk on foreign matters. In the meanwhile, though, pardon me if I take the present-day libertarian penchant for non-interventionist foreign policy with a grain of salt.


Big money in politics

Libertarians pretty well shot themselves in the foot here. A common line among libertarians is that they endorse ‘capitalism’ but not ‘crony capitalism’. Course, that’s never properly been true because, going back to the days of the first joint-stock company charters and the first stock exchanges, all capitalism has been primarily driven by access to governments and their power. But nowhere is it observably more false than in the oh-so-precious libertarian attitude toward campaign finance.

Libertarians conveniently turn the other way whenever considerations on the corruptions of political power take the form of money. Friedman himself considered the matter a simple one of free speech, with money being equivalent to speech; Hayek’s viewpoint was a bit more pessimistic but he came to the same conclusion: whatever the distortions that private money could introduce into politics, they couldn’t possibly be as detrimental as the applications of political power itself. Ayn Rand, utter sociopath that she was, doubled down on this latter point of Hayek’s and said that the concept of the public interest itself was to blame for corruption, and that any attempts to limit it were doomed to failure as long as altruism existed. Some of the more radical anarcho-capitalists like von Mises are utterly incapable of seeing an intrinsic problem with private ‘gifts’ between private citizens, even if those citizens happen to be in capacities of public trust.

For all pragmatic purposes, then, libertarians line up solidly behind big money on this question. There’s something twistedly admirable about Gary Johnson supporting the Citizens United decision even though it directly hurts his electoral chances and aids the major established parties. For the most part, that’s a strategy that’s worked for pushing libertarian policies within those established parties because – as mentioned above – the data show fairly consistently that the donor class as a whole is the class most favourable to libertarian ideas.

Even so, the donor class are not ideologues, and they aren’t particularly beholden to ideas so much as they are to… well, power interests. So what happens when the political winds shift and the donor class starts pulling in favour of, say, immigration restrictions? Or mass surveillance? Or police militarisation (after all, whose interests are they protecting)? Libertarian ideology taken in its pure form starts working against practical libertarian policy objectives, precisely because that ideology is unable to reckon, on this question, with money equating to power instead of speech.

On a related note: given how insistent ‘classical liberals’ tend to be in their saner moments on the law of unintended consequences, it’s rather fascinating that they ignore that law wholesale when it comes to the policy ramifications of decoupling government funding from programmatic objectives. Of course, most libertarians – Friedman and Hayek in particular – would say that, in an ideal world, the only programmatic objectives of government would be territorial defence and a justice system to enforce contracts. But the problem with basing policy on ideals is that it never works wholly according to the dictates of the ideal.

Now, Friedman and Hayek both claimed themselves apprehensive about the 1981 Reagan tax cuts and the way they were implemented. In the end, those apprehensions didn’t stop Friedman from supporting the tax cuts as they happened, as he himself noted in retrospect in 1999. (Remember that Friedman himself was a key adviser to the Reagan campaign.) But their first instincts were correct. The tax cuts were not tailored to specific programmatic objectives; thus they wound up ballooning government spending and creating shiny new opportunities for private cash to grease public fingers. Polanyi said it best: all capitalism is crony, or goes that way left to its own long enough.


The opioid crisis: Prohibition inverted

What I’m gonna say here isn’t news. I mean, Lin Zexu could have told you this back 175 years ago. But one of the things that our current opioid epidemic has proven to those of us have eyes, is that simply making a market in legal drugs doesn’t reduce the social harms associated with those drugs, and indeed might even create them. It really is a crisis, by the way: we have 115 people overdosing on legal opioids and over 1,000 ER visits caused by opioid abuse every day. A full quarter of patients with legal prescriptions for fentanyl and other synthetic opiate painkillers misuse them, despite the assurances of pharmaceutical companies back in the ‘90’s that such misuses would not occur. There is evidence that legal opioids are a gateway to heroin abuse. Opioid abuse is costing our œconomy something to the tune of $80 billion every year, and creating a spike in violent and property crime.

Libertarians (following all four of their gurus Friedman, Rand, von Mises and Hayek) have fought tooth-and-nail to end the ‘war on drugs’, which they basically see as a spectre of Prohibition. Libertarians love to point to the failed American experiment in banning alcohol, and for good reason. Prohibition really did waste shiploads of cash money enforcing the ban on alcohol; it really did make black markets in alcohol more profitable; it really did turn more ordinary people into criminals; and it really did turn already-criminal profiteers in alcohol more dangerous. As they see it, the ‘war on drugs’ generates similar public waste, retrenches violent crime associated with illegal drugs, and crowds out legal companies who would render a ‘safer’ product if the drugs were legal.

Here’s how it is, though. The libertarians basically got one part of their dearest wish fulfilled back in the Clinton years with these prescription painkillers. Those tidy, shiny, legal, for-profit, tax-paying companies (Johnson & Johnson, Purdue Pharma, Endo) that libertarians all assure us would reduce the social harms associated with consumption of illegal drugs? They lobbied the FDA for the legal right to long-term painkiller prescriptions to patients. And the FDA complied: opium-derived drugs, completely legal. And then – without any prompting from the government – these same pharma companies started encouraging doctors to over-prescribe them. No crime, organised or contrary-wise, had ever been involved in the sale of these synthetic painkillers before their appearance on the Rx counter. No black market existed. But these for-profit companies – which libertarians still basically see as the silver bullet to the drug problem – conjured up a widespread addiction crisis of their very own, complete with all the œconomic and social harms libertarians rightly attribute to the original Prohibition.

Once an addiction problem already exists, getting rid of it is another matter – and there I tend to be more sympathetic to certain libertarian arguments about the ‘War on Drugs’ not working as it should. But clearly legalising all drugs, the way libertarians believe should be done on principle, is not the answer if you’re looking to minimise the harms associated with drug use. And the people most like to say so are the people who suffer from it.


The nudgey dictatorialism of ‘sound œconomic principles’

All the foregoing is just so much pussyfooting around the real heart of the matter. And that’s that libertarianism claims to be a philosophy of liberty, but when it comes to defending its policy preferences, it incessantly retreats to the fiction of ‘sound œconomic principles’ and ‘œconomic laws’. Problem with ‘principles’ and ‘laws’ sound like they’re coming from a hard science (when œconomics is no such thing), is they tend to reduce the human being down to a series of quantifiable desires and consequentialist calculations between them. Twice two is four. Every time.

The libertarian is enough of a true believer in the powers of ratiocination, in the ramifications of the calculation, in the brazen law of commerce, that it won’t occur to them that people could come to some other answer than four. That’s the entire point of Austrian ‘praxeology’, which claims oracular predictive power for itself on the basis of individual-level rational calculation. The ‘œconomic consensus’ around which congealed the rather more amorphous ideological axioms of neoliberalism, however, is not quite so trusting. The newer breed of Chicago Boys share the libertarian faith in the rationality of markets and the brazen law of commerce, but generally don’t trust the rationality of market actors, who have to be… nudged, prodded, incentivised to put down ‘twice two is four’. You don’t have to make laws or threats to get folk to comply; you just have to lay down a path of least resistance.

Now, if these champions of œconomism – even the savvier, more cynical behaviouralist kind – actually read Dostoevsky or other literary students of human nature ‘stead of œcon textbooks, they’d see the problem with that. These ‘œconomic laws’ don’t and can’t account for either the individual or the mass instances of human perversity that’ll hold ‘twice two is five’. And it was just such an instance of mass human perversity that got us into our current political dilemma. As I’ve said, libertarians and neoliberals are not particularly identical in their political outlook, but they both hold to the ironclad logic of ‘twice two is four’ and can’t see how anyone could think otherwise. Problem is, folks who wind up on the wrong side of that equation often enough will end up writing ‘twice two is five’ with their votes – and with their middle fingers. Libertarians simply don’t have the conceptual tools or the will to answer these instances when people go against their own rational interests, which is near front among the reasons why they’re in such a pickle these days.


The principle of self-own-ership

Again, this is me just pointing out the self-inflicted wounds that libertarian idealism has garnered over the past five decades – whether it’s their utopian vision pitting itself against their immediate policy goals, or their cynical willingness to toy around with not-too-friendly private forces basically coming back to bite them in the end. Am I enjoying this? Little bit. Not too much, though, given the seriousness of some of the problems I just highlighted.

As I said above, all of the foregoing may look like an extended exercise in kicking the advocates of a largely-beaten and -discredited political philosophy when they’re down. And to a certain degree, it’s just that. But, as a great fictional libertarian-minded Bat Durston once said: ‘Mercy is the mark of a great man. Guess I’m just a good man. … Well, I’m alright.’