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Old 02.21.2014, 01:21 PM   #17817
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Originally Posted by dead_battery
you're thinking of the original series

they did a reboot - 4 movies, 3 of which have been released so far.

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i didn't know this, thanks

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Originally Posted by dead_battery
the original tv show had 26 episodes and a movie called end of evangelion that retold the last 2 episodes, or perhaps came after it, it's hard to say what it was. unless you've seen that you haven't really seen evangelion. that movie is a masterpiece.

i saw the whole thing yeah. it was okay but didn't blow my mind or anything. i get it that if you were 15 when you saw it, it would blow your mind. but having gone through extensive therapy for depression by the time i saw it, it didn't give me anything i didn't know (i think) except to see the value of the guy externalizing and resolving his own struggles as art.

Quote:
Originally Posted by dead_battery
as for the post christianity thing-

so christianity dies in the mind of anyone who isn't brain damaged but it lives on in the unconscious. so you get this post christianity which totally dominates us now.

it's basically concerned with retrofitting the basic structure of christianity onto a secular and disenchanted world.

if you start to look for it you'll find evidence for it everywhere

of course. it's all over, everywhere--institutions, political systems, etc. it's what nietzsche called "the shadow of god" which keeps on living for centuries or millennia after god is dead.

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Originally Posted by dead_battery
the idea that if we can just find one "redeeming feature" in people then it's all worth it. the idea of an inner salvation through the self. the idea that negativity and making nihilism explicit are the symptoms of a damned soul, whereas positivity for its own sake and the denial of nihilism are redemptive. the idea that our entertainment industry constitutes a pure context free space of "enjoyment" which is like the sacrament, the holy ghost. the idea that a kind of belief in denying bad things is a substitute for morality. we don't want to face the truth so we use post modern relativism to make belief itself apparently meaningful. atheists are just as guilty of this, because they believe in belief.

i couldn't follow you here because it's a bunch of ideas that i think you're presenting as connected but they're very densely packed, so i can't see the connections (or the root of them) clearly. also i don't really understand the word "negativity" outside of a colloquial ("oh don't be so negative") context. also i don't know which variety of nihilism you're referring to so this is confusing me-- e.g., to me, christianity is a nihilism in that it devalues this world in opposition to an inexistent one. there's also the post-christian nihilism that says that withouth a god the world has no meaning and without a meaning life is not worth living. existentialism however rescues value from the face of absurdity and godlessness without a return of belief. i like the holy ghost metaphor but i don't see how it operates it in real life (but i'm odd, so, maybe it happens to others.).

Quote:
Originally Posted by dead_battery
the zombie and post apocalyptic genres exploded after the war in iraq was lost, which was a war to remake humanity into liberal democratic subjects (through murder). the suppressed rage at humanity for rejecting this imposition of a secular universalism that was supposed to bring it salvation, and the refusal to accept responsibility for what we did, which would entail questioning our very identity seems to manifest in zombie and post apocalyptic fiction.

there was no baghdad manhatten chase like the neo cons promised, no statue of milton friedman outside a baghdad mcdonalds which is what they ACTUALLY SAID WOULD HAPPEN. it wasn't a "zero casualities" war like they promised. it's not just that our invasion caused the death of over a million people, it's that it actually regressed the country to a state worse than what it was under a leader who was basically a secular dictator. we didn't economically benefit from the war, didn't even grab any loot. we basically just threw soldiers at it, and more of them choose to shoot themselves in the head than died in combat. we dismantled the government and destroyed the infrastructure and our dream of a free market utopia didn't magically spring from our imaginations into reality.

right. i love this.

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Originally Posted by dead_battery
zombies originated as a myth that french slave owners in haiti told their black slaves in order to stop them committing suicide due to their harsh conditions. the myth was that if you killed yourself your masters, who were of course made in gods image, would control your soul and you'd become a puppet slave and tend the fields for eternity. it was literally a myth designed to make the black slaves work themselves to death instead of killing themselves.

sounds good but i doubt the veracity of this tale. there's this fish toxin that actually produces zombie-like effects. and the black slaves in haiti overthrew their masters-- with the help of their own religion.

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Originally Posted by dead_battery
then in the 60's romero rejigged the whole zombie thing. he was brought up a catholic and explicitly linked that to his zombie films.

i didn't know this.

Quote:
Originally Posted by dead_battery
i think zombies function now as a way for the western culture to desperately try and rediscover its disgusting fantasy of its "authentic humanity". basically its vanity and rage at its own technoscience disenchanting it from its sick religion. zombie movies always sort humanity into the damned and the saved, and the post apocalyptic thing is an obvious metaphor for the collapse of the US empire. the fantasy is that it hasn't collapsed, just imploded, and by hacking and slashing away all the damned traitors who didn't believe in it, secular man can remake the christian covenant in his own image.

ha ha, this is great!

Quote:
Originally Posted by dead_battery
the zombie is obviously a christian fantasy. it's a corpse without a soul. it's the excess of animality - raw drive and craving. it's the fantasy that the soul of a person lives within us and our experience since we now know it isn't going to heaven.

i'd like to hear your thoughts on the vampire fantasies that ruled before zombies take over. and why they went (mostly) away.

Quote:
Originally Posted by dead_battery
most zombie films use this trope - it's a secular way of sublimating the horror of annihilation. we see this beautiful person and then the tragedy befalls them and they become a zombie. we have to kill them in order to force judgement on them, cos if we don't then we're all just appetite driven monsters seeking the fulfilment of our drives, shuffling around until we die.

then again you could read the zombie myth as a disenchantment with consumerism, a world in which the pure consumers (zombies) become a civilization-ending plague. it's also the myth of the back-to-basics survivalist.

the thing with these popular myths and the way they resonate with society is that they are hard to reduce to rational explanations and people will project different things upon them. in other words, they aren't simple devices for purging simple contradictions (even though they may serve to purge them)-- they are both conservative propagators of ideology and subversive doors to the imagination. there was a paper i read ages ago, i forget what it was, that showed how "rambo" was read in different cultures, and each one appropriated it for their own person rather than simply "take" the american meaning of it.
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