Neo-pagan Popularism on the Rise

The naïveté of modern persons was sold a bill of sale by the post-Rousseau romanticists. At the heart of this faulty ontology remains the myth of the autonomous self, the pipe dream that our identity is a "blank slate" that WE choose regardless of the desires and influences of others.

Balderdash, tripe, and piffle.

Keying off René Girard's mimetic theory, the great French psychiatrist, Jean-Michel Oughourlian ( Puppet of Desire, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World) knows that we are interdividuals, porous to one another's desires. Madison Avenue knows it well. Shouldn't we, too?

With this in mind, LifeSiteNews.com worries, Should We Fear Imitation of the Joker?

Some have pointed to the extreme violence in the film, but my concerns go well beyond that. In a Canwest News Service review Jay Stone refers to Joker as a "psychotic butcher"; Jenny McCarthy in her August 2 review in the London Telegraph wrote, "The greatest surprise of all - even for me, after eight years spent working as a film critic - has been the sustained level of intensely sadistic brutality throughout the film." One reviewer even called the film "torture porn." (My emphasis)

The story's focus is the Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger of Brokeback Mountain fame. The Joker is portrayed as a man engaging in a purity of evil rarely seen. An anti-Christ type figure, he engages in evil for evil's sake and not for any material motive, and is totally unconcerned about his own well-being.

So youth seeing the film will see the evil of the Joker, be repulsed by it and turn away from it, right? Wrong.

What LifeSiteNews.com rightly worries about is what Girard calls mimesis - that unconscious influence, indeed contagious copying of the other's desires at the heart of mimetic theory. What I express in my review of the Dark Knight film voices a similar indicative warning. Sure, screenwriters are "just giving audiences what they want," but they also raise the ante by making each film monster like Joker MORE torture-loving, MORE hideously violent, MORE insidious, cruel, and admirably (?) clever.

But don't blame us - we're just screenwriters. We just give the public what they "want". Nota bene: With the diminution of the influence of the Christian faith in the West, the rise of paganism is a default reality. So movie houses become theaters of the cruel, monstrous, and violent. Just like the Roman Circus. Just like the Joker's plots and schemes. Just like reality TV.

What is sufficiently strong to hold back this rising tide of neo-pagan religion of the cruel and inhuman? Refer here. No love of heritage, notions of past greatness, or patriotism is strong enough. Only the sacramental truth, goodness, and beauty of what Our Lord established on his disciple, Cephas. At least, we'd better hope so.