Incessant Cycles - commentary on music & language

Dit vind je misschien ook leuk

keanu reeves

Cheap Sunglassezz

Rich Sands

Pelumi salako

ROCK YOUR DANCE FLOOR

Ntlascoh

Low Frequency Operator

maharaj_ma

The UnHoly Diver

The latín loveflow

Wiz Othman

World's cutest hunns

Links to recent writings in which I provide a running commentary on music, theatre and language.

04/01/2024

SASKIA KERSENBOOM -
the intercultural dancer, teacher, writer & theoretician who enriched by life with knowledge...
New Post to New Used Eyes - Non-Fiction by Zachar Laskewicz

This particularly amazing woman - intercultural dancer, thinker, teacher and theoretician - was the supervisor to my doctoral dissertation.

You can see her performing here two dances from the devadasi tradition now commonly referred to as Bharata Natyam which I once learned from her.

Her theoretical insights into the work of Bourdieu, Levis Strauss and Huizinga were particularly influential to me when I was writing my dissertation on Balinese music as episteme.

This is an excerpt from a documentary televised on Dutch television in 1984.

I adore watching it and I want to make a GIF series with me echoing these movements that I once learned and that still influence me everytime I move; my arms move immediately to that position and I think of the symmetrical forms, the language of gestures, the rhythmic dance language, the stamping of the feet and the ankle temple bells which continue to reverberate from when I studied with her through everything I do today.

This coupled with the widening of my understanding of movement, dance, ritual and culture through performance allowed me to develop thanks to her teachings, makes me even more grateful to everyone who has ever taught me anything which elevated me.

I truly love it when my interactions with the world result in a dialectic that enlightens and raises me. I associate the gaining of knowledge with intense joy.

Saskia Kersenboom - a portrait A digital excerpt from a Documentary on Dr. Saskia Kersenboom by the Dutch National Television (NOS, 1984). After a short Introduction on her Academic and Da...

04/01/2022

ZLANECDOTES & ZLAPHORISMS..anecdotes, aphorisms and word-play by Zachar Laskewicz

TAGS:

YOU: Pray do tell, Zachar, what on earth is a "zlanecdote"?!
ME: It's a Zachar anecdote of course! ...and you can quote me on that!
____________________

[on the geographical limitations of happiness]

"Who needs to search for a place to be happy when you can be miserable just about anywhere !"
- Friday 13 April 2012
Ghent (Belgium)

22/11/2021

HIDEOUS LITTLE LEOPOLD– the genuinely unpleasant shadow homophobia has cast on my life...

…because the most vile and twisted of all the little dead children refused to stay locked in the closet …

From Vile Little Dead Children: Deeply Personal Metaphors
https://www.facebook.com/IncessantCycles/posts/117407597075478

“By burning him alive perhaps
We were a little rough;
Yet boys like little Leopold
They’re just not boy enough!”
- Zachar Laskewicz, 9-2020

This analysis concerns a poem I wrote in October 2020 called “Little Leopold’s Last Lark”. You can read the original poem here:
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=116041330545434&id=105160588300175

It comes from a series of four poems that concern particular bugbears from my distant past which continue to plague my life; I’ve represented them metaphorically as hideous dead children, which is amusing insofar as they are clearly not dead… and striking if only because I initially didn’t have any idea that they were symbolic representations of anything; except for my desire to see hideous little children soundly murdered...
..At least I wasn’t aware of them meaning anything until after I wrote them…

LITTLE LEOPOLD’S LAST LARK is a dark sardonic sneer at the most sublimated and horrifying of all the little dead children.

How does one deal with interminable children? By repressing them, of course! ...And on failing that, murdering them…

…And keeping up good form as far as pesky little children are concerned, I just tried to pretend that Little Leopold was someone else’s shame…

In fact, I just tried to ignore he was there at all! I locked the door on that mincing, girly excuse for a boy and then I threw away the key…

…But like all vile little children who are locked away against their will, they just keep on whining!

…And this one refused to die!!

I punished him by ignoring him and starving him. He is, quite obviously, “The Vile Secret” that I don’t want to talk about...

…Some secrets, however, are not meant for keeping…

…But I didn’t want to talk about it when I wrote this cruel little moral lesson on 22 October 2020…

…I didn’t want to talk about it when I started analyzing this painful creative gesture…

And I still don’t!

But here we go anyway…

If I compare these dreadful little metaphoric children who are so not dead, then the vilest of them all is little Leopold… and in light of the recent on street haranguing by a total stranger… is also the least dead of that awful bunch…

Just imagining he is not there does not will him away. This is probably the REAL reason I ended up leaving Australia. Sexism and racism are really, really terrible. But I’m white and a male. And although bullying is awful, it happened largely when I was at school. This one was far more recent; in fact, it's still happening.

Still until a day before I started writing this account which was just after I finished the original poem, I wasn’t really at all willing to accept he existed at all…

But in a sudden fury revealing this fourth shameful little dead child, I yet again revealed myself to myself: homophobia felt dreadful, and it is all the worse because it was my own personal problem.

The way I dealt with it was an expression of the ultimate act of sublimation of the terrible dark feeling homophobia left inside me. I never admitted this to myself by avoiding the question.

So in this funereal soliloquy, the recently passed Leopold is mourned. As the memories of the boy are recalled, so are the last moments of his life. It turns out that little Leopold who was basically an unbearable effeminate little urchin who liked to dress like a girl, got dragged out to the funeral home, bullied until he was peering into the crematorium oven, and then burned alive by whichever member of his family is presiding over the funeral.

After admitting to pushing him into the crematorium oven and slamming the door closed, he can only reflect on the fact that Little Leo who ‘just wasn’t boy enough’ got exactly what he deserved and that no one would blame them for forever silencing the little boy.

Wow, that is cruel and sardonic – even for me!

That shows how heavily the whole experience rests on my soul…

Here’s an example of homophobia in action and the very personal impact it had. After attending a composition lesson with the new (American) Dean of the Conservatorium at the Academy of Performing Arts in Perth in the nineties, I saw a fellow student and the dean looking at one of my scores and sniggering. They were laughing at an illustration that formed part of the instructions at the front of the elaborate score I'd made for the new music-theatre piece SONGS OF INCANTATION for 9 performers and tape (1992). It shows the movements that were required by one of the performers who was to throw a handful of rice onto the stage.

What they were reacting to is the fact that it showed a figure of a partially dressed man. But it was just to show how the performer needed to move. I didn’t draw it OR request specifically that it be of a man.

Anyway, the Dean and one of his students had taken it upon themselves for no other reason than having a good old laugh at my expense, demonstrated their ignorance and the acceptability of openly expressing these opinions to others... as was the tradition at the time...

Unfortunately, it didn’t stop with the sniggering. Directly in front of me while I was standing in the room they made a joke about my enthusiasm for the male body. I can remember every word as if they are still saying it.

That hit me deep because it was not only a stupid and inappropriate judgement about me but it was an unintended consequence that had nothing to do with my work.

This confirmed my realization that things I created were considered to be about as valuable as a mocking snigger and that people like that, i.e. people in power at art institutions, viewed me through a lens which filtered out everything except for their imagined slight to their masculinity.

Thankfully they ditched the dean soon after hiring him.

But at the time that was absolutely no consolation. I was mortified.
It felt pretty awful and I’ve never forgotten it. I never will.

My way of dealing with this type of treatment? Lock it up and pretend it is not there. Call it something else! Just do your best to not direct anyone else’s attention to the misformed, mutant child in the tiny lightless room.

It’s a dreadful dark feeling: slimy, slithering shame.

Oh, little Zachar! Maybe if you run far enough and fast enough you'll escape those judging eyes glaring at you?

Maybe if you change your name and rethink your identity through a new language you'll convince yourself that you are free of the shackles of your past?

Yeah, well it didn't turn out so well for that little boy either...

…And so the vile little imprisoned child, yearning for recognition and for someone to finally hear his cries, moans ever louder and festers in his own excrement.

He gets more unruly and desperate.

Oh God why won’t he die!?

And I continue to avoid the issue and act as if he’s not there, no matter how insistent or desperate his complaints.

And suddenly I write a concise little piece of amusing grotesqueness about a little boy violently put to death by his parents because he wasn’t “boy enough”; who could really blame them for cremating their child for his “annoying mincing lisp”?

OH MY GOD!

Now I keep rereading it compulsively and sculpting it into shape. Distancing itself from me or providing it with a context. Like the other Vile Little Dead Children, it’s my way of dealing with these emotions. It places it in an imagined, symbolic, poetic universe of ridiculous Victorian morality that is deliberately distant. In context it is seems far less frivolous.

…And this is perhaps the worst thing of all: despite writing this I don’t actually feel ANY better about it!

Writing about sexism and racism helped !!

Damnation!!!

…Then recently it all came flooding back to me when some idiot passed me on the street and whispered under his breath the dread words: dirty q***r. You can read about the immediate impact of this experience on me here. It happened on 11 June 2021:
https://www.facebook.com/zachar.laskewicz/posts/271539344662043

I was immediately filled with the awful confirmation of those nasty feelings that hang over me from the RECOLLECTED MISERIES of childhood: that there is not only something deeply wrong with me, but that other people can see it too and that it disgusts them.

What the f**k?!

If it isn't already painfully obvious: when people stare at you, they don't do it because they think you're amazing.

They do it because they despise you...

Who needs a pandemic to keep one inside when you've got a lifetime of homophobia to keep you from braving the streets?

I clearly don't...

VILE LITTLE DEAD CHILDREN: deeply personal metaphors
Child 4 – LEOPOLD [homophobia]
_________________________
THE FUNNY THING is that these little dead children are clearly none of these things. Firstly they’re not dead. And they’re certainly no longer little; or for that matter children! Clearly viler than ever, they’re menacing me still today with the grossly unpleasant shadows of the ugliness they have grown into.

10/11/2021

7. THE ELABORATE LIES
This is the seventh part of my treatise on language, music and art called “THE GLORIOUS ILLUSION & THE LITTLE GREEN BOX:
on cumulative narratives, unreliable narrators and disintegrating frames”
https://www.facebook.com/IncessantCycles/posts/117377680411803

- The film accompanying this post was made specifically to enunciate the themes I discuss in this writing. It concerns the elaborate way people lie to themselves about their past and, worse still, how they change what they remember about the past to suit the present. I explored these themes in a set of piano works called “The Incessant Cycles”… and I’m still exploring them!

The title I initially thought up for this language lesson/piano composition was “Blumitshlipas Dumatshiplit” which translates to “Flowery Time”. The film I made for this writing is called “The Elaborate Lies”, which is actually an alternative translation of the title… in the imaginary language I wrote for this set of piano compositions…

Disfodish is the name of the language I invented to explore these very particular themes “protolinguistically”. And if you’re wondering, ‘protolinguistics’ is actually a term I made up to describe the process of inventing languages specifically to understand better how language works. I mean, it may exist, but I'd never heard it before...

This film was made using excerpts from the piano composition LANGUID CYCLE interspliced with a set of intertitles I composed specifically for this film. You can see the original film here which shows me playing the whole piano composition, offset against flowers which gradually die on screen and then are transformed into stylized art as the peeling wallpaper gradually shifts by:
https://www.facebook.com/GloriousIllusions/videos/549975679564218/

This piano composition, like each of the other Incessant Cycles that I composed in this series (circa 2007), was structured around the language lesson that I wrote for it. Sometimes the language lesson came first; sometimes they were created in unison.

The language lesson thus envisaged as part of the same artistic gesture, helped determine the structure and form of the filmization of this music, and more specifically and obviously, the short film I completed more recently to accompany this writing.

THIS IS WHAT I REMEMBER ABOUT US :

The piano player immediately visible after the opening title, is distanced behind frames within frames. Behind the frame of silent film intertitles that iris in an out, he is masked in the frame of a photo hung on a wall from which the wallpaper is gradually peeling....

The performance is further distanced by the stylized movements he performs. Although at times they appear to mimic those of the tradition, they are repeated in exactly the same fashion each time. Although it may appear at first that it is emotion that is motivating the piano player in function of the music, their repetition reveals something else. The performer sways and pivots around a central axis in the same way on each melody arc. They were intended as examples of the “elaborate lies” which become the main conceit of the narrative told during the language lesson.

“YOU ONCE LOVED ME” / “NO! I ALWAYS DESPISED YOU!”

The basic tenet of the language lesson narrative has been pared back to two sentences, the first of which involves the imagined elaborate lies which the narrator convinces himself of, and the second the painful truth which he does everything to avoid having to face:
[1] “Once you truly loved me”;
[2] “No! I always despised you!!”

The initial title I had planned for this language lesson translated to ‘flowery tense’. It tells a particular and devastating narrative about the dreadful things a man does, but it concerns more generally the lies men are willing to perpetuate about themselves to explain away the violence they inflict. Even more generally, it’s about the specific ways that language itself allows and encourages its speakers to deceive, providing them with the specific tools to do this…

But it’s also about the human tendency to elaborate on the past and sculpt it into an imagined ideal future: the illusion of history which actually only reflects on the recent past. Sometimes we create glorious illusions… but unfortunately we as often as not create terrible, murderous ones…

Since so recently it has been such dreadful lies that have murdered hundreds of thousands of peoples, these themes seem as pertinent today as when I composed the piano composition and imagined the language after returning from China circa 2006.

IN ORDER TO PROVE MY LOVE, I KIDNAPPED YOU AND IMPRISONED YOU…

This particular narrative was always intended to be as creepy as it sounds. In this short film, the development happens a lot more quickly and efficiently. In the filmization of the language lesson, the story would be played out as the utter insidiousness of the dialogue is translated word for word. The narrator of this story plants the seeds for a truly gruesome development….

Although the two sentences in this short film may appear, well, short, the language lesson I actually wrote is only three sentences longer! But as I had envisaged in all these “protolinguistic” films, the actual narrative is not communicated by the words, but the vehicles used to provide the words with a framework to be conceived: the grammar.

The story is as much told by the language as the words.

…THEN I R***D YOU SO I COULD POSSESS YOU COMPLETELY…

It is not as the result of chance the word for ‘time’, [grammatical] ‘tense’ and ‘lies’ are synonyms for one another… The ‘flowery tense’ (or ‘the elaborate lies') of the title is actually referring to a particular type of past tense. It is contrasted to the ‘simple’ or ‘specified’ past tense. The simple tense is retelling the exact things as they happened: the bare truth. The ‘flowery’ tense allows for an elaborate retelling of these events. Here the florality of the title is a complex metaphor. Beauty is skin deep; it’s a construction of the gazer; and it’s temporal. In this film, flowers are beautiful because we know that beauty is fleeting. My flowers not only wilt and die, but they are burned beyond recognition.

The opening section introduces words like “blumit” (flower) and “bnimet” (to possess or own) in a series of four basic sentences: I like giving things, I have a flower, I want to give it to you, please take my flower.

The five declarative sentences are then negated by the female voice: “No, you don’t have any bloody money and I don’t want it anyway”. This simple act of rejection forms the basis for the second part of the lesson when the narrator relates the ‘elaborated’ story of how he dealt with this rejection, using the flowery tense as the major tool for his deception.

…AND THEN WHEN YOU REFUSED TO COMPLY, I MURDERED YOU…

In the ‘flowery past’, the sentences appear at first to be versions of the opening four sentences placed into the past. But the idea was that double meanings would reveal an entirely insidious interpretation. “I used to give you flowers” is revealed to also mean “there was a time when I truly loved you”. The intention was that this double meaning would reveal the devastating events of the narrative. “I wanted to give them to you” could also mean “I gave you everything so that you’d love me too.” This becomes the reasoning the narrator uses to explain away the nefarious way he ended up dealing with his rejection.

After this, the ‘flowery’ sentences are reintroduced and contrasted to their meaning with the same basic verbs but this time in the ‘specified past’ and the brutal truth is revealed as it actually happened: “As a matter of fact I kidnapped you and r***d you; and that I therefore possessed you completely.” The flower is seized, put in a vase; then it wilts and dies. “After that, you fell silent forever.” The implication is that faced with the truth of his lies, the narrator murdered the woman who refused to accept either his non-existent wealth or his imagined love.

…BUT I WILL ALWAYS BRING YOU FLOWERS…

What follows in the last part of the language lesson involves an introduction of the ‘flowery’ future tense and it involves the awful truth of historical revisionism. The closing sentence of the language lesson is “I will never forget our love. I will always love you. I will always bring you flowers.” I imagined the closing image of the film would have the narrator in his old age visiting the grave of his ‘beloved’, constantly laying flowers at her grave; retelling an embellished version of what will happen in the future. It is intended to be genuinely creepy. All this with just four sentences translated into different grammatical tenses.

…Uncomfortable truths are communicated with a simple set of verbs…

Economical. Perfectly linguistic. Utterly deadly.

In the Languid Cycle piano composition you can hear it all expressed in the structure of the music which is divided into four parts, which involves a slowing down and elaboration of the linguistic concepts of the first sentences. The cycling twists of the piano player are all part of this cultured and prepared elaboration. And the tragic sounding closing phrases in part three were designed to enunciate this painful truth.

Although no one had ever heard about these complex metalinguistic and diabolical metaphors, before I mentioned it in this writing, I did allow these exact themes to be expressed in a poem (in English!) about gruesome gardening called “All the wilting petals”. You can read the complete poem here:
https://www.facebook.com/DreadfulLittleNightmares/posts/210999357733861

An aged gardener tells stories of his life and relates them to his one true love. Scarred by a gradually arising dementia, he confuses his story of the past with his job as a tender of his garden and his picking of flowers out of it. It turns out that the garden he tends is hiding a terrible secret. All the women he has buried underneath it and who feed the growth of his flowers. But he remembers with special affection his first victim who he took, imprisoned and murdered when ‘her petals wilted’.

I’ll end with the last few verses from this poem:

“Through the years the fleeting flowers
Felt a love they knew was true…
Yet, wilting left them lacking powers
(So they were cut and buried just like you).

Though many petals did shed blood,
Killing you it was the worst;
You’re my eternal bursting bud;
After all, 't-was you I plucked and planted first. . .”

16/09/2021

HAIL TO THE BUGS FOR THEY ARE LEGION:
…on the traitors who betray us to the invading menace…

“In truth we care about our need
To feed our all-consuming greed!
So occupied we paid no heed
The night the insects came to feed!!
The human race was meant to fall!!!
The bugs came back to take it all!!!!”
- From HAIL TO THE BUGS
(a greeting-card rhyme by Zachar Laskewicz)

In disaster movies, a genre that really got big in the seventies and then petered out again until a sporadic resurgence in the nineties and then again more recently, it’s hard to hate the disaster itself. So characters are created who the audience are absolutely designed to hate often because they are at best coldly pragmatic and at worst greedy and self-serving. Characters like this in the context of disaster movie tropes are often referred to as “hatesinks”: people who we can love to hate…

With invasion type horror movies, however, it’s far easier to create characters for the audience to invest their negative feelings in. As the invading force most often lacks any emotion at least as humans understand it, although we can dislike them, we can hardly hate them as it would be unjustified. I mean, what are invading forces going to do BUT invade? It’s all they really know how to do…

The characters that are designed to attract the most venom from the audience are often, however, the collaborators who sell out the protagonists and thus assist the invading force in their attempt to defeat the human race.

Let’s all hate on those guys!

…Which is really a bit strange considering that in truth our culture venerates the people who exploit others for financial gain. It’s the very goal of capitalism! They’re only, after all, doing what capitalism has designed them for. Alien menaces invade. Rich people exploit. It’s just what they do. Making money is good and we’re taught to aim to be like them. The only reason they are not judged more harshly if at all for exploiting the masses for personal profit is the general longing to become exactly like them in the future…

Oh well, the trope is apparently deaf to this particular contradiction…

Anyway, as bizarre as it may seem, this ridiculous screwed up vision of reality suggests that working joes are the true heroes who always win out in the end. Yes, in the disaster movie invasion trope, a group of straight, white rough and tumble ragamuffin worker types (often accompanied by a dog) are fighting against the evil capitalists who have thrown their lot in with the invaders.

How dare they?!?!

At the end of 2020 I sent to a small number of people an end of year greeting card which introduced and explored many of these themes. Not bad for a tiny little greeting card with a few sentences scratched into it…

It was actually a great starting point for the “Bug-Eyed Stalkers” writings (of which this has become one) but also the face masks, movie posters and the GIF series that were influential to and influenced by these writings. At the time I wrote this more complete analysis of my creation – September 2021 – many of these works were still being worked on, rethought and revitalised.

Today they seem no less relevant when I started on this project!

In the card, I explain the downfall of the human race who are being punished for their greed It’s obviously a metaphor for the pandemic, and to do this it uses the expectations we have of greeting cards as well as various specific cultural references including movies, literature... and even the bible.

Upon opening the card, the viewer is immediately confronted with a greeting card poem which starts off saccharine sweet, but quickly descends into absurdity… and a hilarious indictment of capitalism.

You can read the original poem here:
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=117780467038187&id=105160588300175

It follows the logic of disaster movies: capitalism is the true evil, I mean despite our culture venerating it and everything...

But no, in spite of this, us giving in to exactly what society teaches us is the very goal of life, we are committing terrible debauchery and deserve absolutely what we get from the insect menace…

Here’s the thing: maybe we can fight this menace by... by… sending each other greeting cards about world peace and stuff and further participating in the system…

You know, buying stuff we don’t really need and giving it to other people who don’t need it either…

I mean, seriously?!

Christmas, after all, is just a bland attempt to get us to consume even more stuff we don’t actually need. Yes: the ultimate goal of advertising: keeping the whole self-perpetuating interminable machine rotating ever onwards…

And although this deliberate twisting of greeting card expectations and disaster movie tropes to create the sort of absurdity that I find so essential in life, there are actually more complex things going on here...

You can actually read the complete analysis of the entire greeting card here:
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=111933107605229&id=104129591718914

You may wonder what is the most important part of a greeting card?

It’s the message your friend writes in it of course! Bu**er the generic illustration on the front or the insipid rhyme inside it.

I mean, in this card, the bug illustration on the front and the rhyme are both hilarious and sublime, but Zachar jus'’sayin’; they’re mostly forgettable.

The only thing you really look at is the kind message your friend or family leaves, no matter how generic it may sound. I mean, you usually read it at least to remind you who sent it to you in the first place.

But in this particular card, I suggest that there are some people who have thrown their lot in with the invading insect hordes…

AND THAT’S ME!

I am now worshipping the insects who are clearly the only ones worthy of devotion in this equation, and in receiving this card, the insects will soon be upon you!

YES, THEY’RE COMING FOR YA!

Scrawled on the bottom of the insert is a last message written on the card which happens after the insect betrayal leads to the people who received the card being trapped in their basement…

The only paper they could get their hands on was the damnable greeting card that had led to their being captured and imprisoned in the first place…

How could I do that to my friends!

Confound me for my betrayal!!

How do I reveal the treachery that led to you opening the door and getting distracted enough by my greeting card to allow hordes of insects into your home?

In the card there’s a full embossed insert within a colourful cardboard cover. In each of these cards I wrote an individualized message, although most of them contained the following text scrawled in my godawful handwriting:
“Hail to the bugs for they are legion!”

The intention here was to point directly at the disaster movie metaphor and to deliberately subvert greeting card expectations. The protagonists (the people who receive the card) are set against the collaborators; this is a simplistic societal division comparing working joes to upper-class elitists or, like, smart people.

Those who collaborate with the invading force are just plain evil: the logic is almost inevitably the logic of colonialism: divide and conquer.

THEY BAD. WE GOOD.

Here I’m implying that I threw my lot in with the insects: let’s not fight them; let’s embrace them instead! Hail them Bug-Eyed Stalkers because they’re now the leaders and the human race is getting exactly what it deserves!

Go insects!!

In writings and graphic art that would follow this greeting card, I concentrated more closely on the particular forms of treachery specific to the disaster invasion movie trope, but only insofar as it is significant to the very actual nightmare we are still enduring at the time of this writing: the pandemic. The actual invasion of the virus; the true bugs!

The people who are profiting from the spreading of misinformation – perhaps the clearest collaborators and/or traitors who seem to be working to HELP rather than hinder the virus are the ugly face of those who work against mankind’s best interest, i.e. satisfying the desire to amass wealth by collaborating with evil.

Why, oh why did we listen to them?

Furthermore, why on earth do we venerate them?!?

I’d just like to add here: I’m not REALLY evil at all, I’m telling you!

I don’t collaborate with no bug!

There is, however, another important reference in this single salutation; and it’s a biblical one:
“My name is legion, for we are many…”
Mark 5:9

Needless to say, I who doesn’t really know anything about the bible and couldn’t quote it in any meaningful sense even if you paid me, am actually referencing this biblical phrase as it has been realized by popular culture.

That is that evil could exist inside the people we know.

This is expressed in horror movies when people who you know and love reveal themselves to be, well, EEEEEEEEEVIL!

For example, one’s child in The Exorcist (1973) or The Omen (1976). Or for that matter one’s step-mother, step-father or babysitter, to quote actual recent films.

It could be just about anyone!

There are actually some films which refer in particular to this biblical verse. Popular examples that come directly to mind include “Exorcist 3: Legion” (1990) or “Legion” (2010). Arguably horror films like these – ones which appear to believe in the existence of not only evil, but angels and demons as well - are the most stupid of them all. I mean, everyone says that The Exorcist (1973) is a great horror film, but as much as I may love Linda Blair and projectile vomiting, I find the whole thing with the priests like super cringe!

In disaster invasion movies, however, the influence of this biblical passage is a little more subtle. Here the invading force is viewed as the ultimate source of evil. Examples includes either of Stephen King’s biblical end of times works: “The Stand” (1978) which was first a novel and then a mini-series, or “Storm of the Century” (1990) which was actually written as a teleplay. In these works the disaster is embodied in human form. Evil, however, is also represented by humans who are tricked into serving the devil.

Just more traitors to us good guys (and our dogs) who only mean well!

The most popular realization in disaster/invasion movies lines up with another interpretation of this biblical verse: that not only is evil present and that it could very well be present in someone you know, but that it is ever present. In this trope, the invading force is still evil; but those who collaborate with it are somehow even nastier.

Follow the logic of Kennedy’s famous misquotation of Edmund Burke in 1961: “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing…” People who collaborate with the evil are therefore even WORSE than those who do nothing. This lines up with the biblical phrase “my name is legion”. Not only does evil exist, it’s prevalent.

After all, there’s nothing that is quite so awful as the evil embodied by the invaders. Nothing except for the people who collaborate with them, that is. They’re somehow even WORSE than just plain old evil.

…And they’re f**king everywhere, man!!!

____________________

HAIL TO THE BUGS FOR THEY ARE LEGION
…on the traitors who betray us to the invading menace…

Part 3 of the 10-Part Analysis of the Multimedia Creative Project:
BUG-EYE STALKERS..the night they turned against us was the end of days...