KAFKAESQUE

 

Kafkaesque: relating to, characteristic of, or resembling the literary work of Franz Kafka; marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity. 

I suppose some people are vaguely aware of Franz Kafka's novella Metamorphosis, about a man who wakes up one morning turned into a beetle, and the various complications in his life thereafter, ending in his decision to allow himself to die after his family has left him abandoned in his bedroom. There is also Orson Welles adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial, in which Anthony Perkins’ character is informed he is accused of some unnamed capital crime for which he cannot defend himself from, and no one can seem to help him determine what he did wrong.

When films go “art” these days, it is just a lot of camera and CGI tricks with minimal “plot” with the apparent intention of being a vanity project for the director and a total mindfuck for the viewer. Last weekend I finally got around to watching Joaquin Phoenix in the “horror-comedy” Beau is Afraid, which passed mostly unnoticed last year. I thought it was Fellini on an LSD trip, while at least one reviewer called it “Kafkaesque,” which I think is an accurate assessment given the above definition. 

Beau is apparently a very paranoid individual living in a literal nightmare world that he has no control over and where it is finally "revealed" that his torment is being orchestrated by his supposedly dead mother for various personal offenses. The film ends in a “trial” in which Beau is tried for “offenses” for which he is allowed no defense against; even his “defense lawyer” is killed half-way during the proceedings.

After that I watched Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, which was another “trip” into mindless weirdness, where a drug dealer in Japan in a seedy part of Tokyo where all the place names are in English is set-up by his best friend in a drug bust where he is shot and killed, and spends the rest of the film gliding through the air to view the various ramifications of this event. Neon lights give the film an otherworldly appearance, which is about the only saving grace of watching this incomprehensible film where we are simply given an outsider’s view of people moving and talking and doing not “normal” things. Kafkaesque for sure, and I should have been prepared for that, having also seen Noé’s Irreversible.

I must admit I only dug it up from my collection (another disc I bought on impulse but never got around to watching) because the Colonel posted this video…

 

…of one of the actors in the film, Spanish actress Paz de la Huerta, who in this video is seen pushing back at the claims made by a trans individual, who “speaking” for her claimed that Marilyn Manson had done some bad thing to her. Paz was so angry about this that she threatened to sue this person unless her name was blotted out of the video, and then posted a message on her Instagram site reiterating that Manson was a friend and had never did anything untoward against her. Instead she turned it around and accused this accuser of abusive behavior toward herself.

Anyways, I had to find out when I had purchased it so as to find the correctly dated external hard drive I copied it too. During the course of this investigation  I noticed that Paz had done a photo book that was now OOP. These are the "senseless" and "disorienting" prices that third-party sellers were asking for it…

 

…somewhat more inflated that the prices eBay sellers were asking for, in the $274 -$360 range. There must be a lot of “nice” pictures in this book, given that Paz wasn’t particularly “shy” about doing certain things on film, but I had no plans on blowing a whole paycheck on it. But wait, what is this:

 

I seemed to remember that I waded through the book once, and put it away and never looked at it again. Did I miss something? It took me four hours of work to find it…

 

…and I rediscovered a slim volume with mostly images of Paz in various costumes in various poses in various locales. Interesting if you are a fan of the photographer’s work, but damn, if anyone with a prurient interest in this and shells out that kind of money, they are going to be sorely disappointed. Oh sure, she looks “sexy” for the most part, but there were maybe a half-dozen images of strictly incidental “naughty” stuff; in fact, if you were just thumbing through the book, they  would be the photo equivalent of “blink-and-you-missed-it.”  

So what is the antidote for watching such films? Why not one where the writer/director wants us to believe that he wasn’t "hurt" by the all the negative reviews and “admits” that he and the cast set out to make the most “brain dead” movie ever made, in this case the 80’s “horror-comedy” Surf II, the title meant to be an “in-joke” because it implied it was a “sequel” of a film that was never made. At least it got the “senseless” part down pat, about some put-upon “nerd” who to get even with the cool surfer dudes creates a soft drink called “Buzz Cola” that turns surfers who drink it into zombies. 

I admit the only reason why I purchased this “special edition” Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray release was because Laugh-In’s Ruth Buzzi and Fridays Brandis Kemp both showed up in this in one of their infrequent film appearances. If this movie accomplished anything after watching those other two films, it was that it reoriented my mind to a place where I could recognize what a really bad film was.

But the times we live in now isn't a bad movie we can laugh at (not with), but a seemingly Kafkaesque world that escape from seems increasingly unlikely. It is a living nightmare world where “real life” in the Age of Trump is marked by that “senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity" where nothing is safe for sensible people. 

I suppose that for people with any common sense and desire for civility and simple human decency find this country in the depths of something that seemingly is in the hands of those who are blinded by the their desire to see the world as nightmarish terms that only nightmarish "solutions" can "fix." You have a U.S. Supreme Court that was once a sensible bulwark against fascism and culture war fanaticism now having a majority that has metamorphosized into the very corruptions that it was meant to protect a democratic society based on laws and civil rights from.

The Court's ruling in 2013 vacating the preclearance stipulation in the Voting Rights Act that oversaw any attempt by states with past records of voter suppression targeting minorities has been the stuff of mischief in red states ever since, and the court ruled today that partisan politics was not a reason to block an obviously racially-gerrymandered district. Clarence Thomas claimed that since the rule was vacated, federal courts no longer have the right to even examine such cases.

Samuel Alito, the man accused of posting flags in his front lawns supporting the January 6 rioters, election conspiracies and white nationalism (he blamed his wife for them), made the absurd claim in his majority opinion that South Carolina Republican lawmakers had acted in “good faith” when they redrew a map that removed black voters from a district that far-right extremist Rep. Nancy Mace had won by just 1 percent before the gerrymander, and blamed black voters for not presenting an “alternative” map—ignoring the fact that there was an “alternative map” before the gerrymandering.

The AP noted that Richard Hasen, of the University of California at Los Angeles law school, observed that the ruling “makes it easier for Republican states to engage in redistricting to help white Republicans maximize their political power.” Could we have imagined a nightmare vision where we would return to the days of the Roger Taney Court? Could we have imagined that a "settled" case like Roe v. Wade would be vacated by culture war extremist chosen just for that reason?

You see Republican politicians tramping into a court room in support a moral and ethical criminal at least; the Trump’s “star” defensive witness was exposed on cross examination—rather than providing the “kill shot” against the prosecution that Fox News commentators were boasting about—as just another loyal lying gangster in Trump’s mob organization.

You sit back and take in all in wonder “Is this for real? Or is truth more monstrous than fiction?

David Graham in The Atlantic is among those (including the Washington Post) who is trying to “excuse” the posting of the “Unified Reich” post on Trump’s Truth Social website, but who is kidding who here?:

 

 

Trump’s fascist and authoritarian impulses are no mystery, and his former Chief of Staff John Kelly wrote in his memoir that Trump did indeed express admiration for Hitler and those who were “loyal” to him in carrying out his wishes, no matter how inhuman.

Trump promises to deport 15 million “illegals” which he claims will “grow” the economy; economists and employers say the exact opposite will happen. The destructive impact of Trump’s use of Nazi rhetoric in regard to Hispanic migrants suggests a symbolic form of genocide, and before Jewish people get all in a huff, the de facto genocide of native peoples in this hemisphere, and in particular in the U.S., was far worse (admittedly occurring over a greater time period) than what occurred in World War II. People may roll their eyes at the suggestion, but people in this country have a bad habit of doing that when confronted by truths that expose their hypocrisy. I mean how do you explain the decrease from 3.3 million people in pre-Columbian times in the U.S. to less than 200,000 by 1890, and that not including all the births during those several centuries in between?

Historian David Stannard noted that many white historians’ claim that the majority of Native American deaths relating to the presence of Europeans came about through the introduction of diseases is a way to “distance” European invaders from responsibility for the mass dying. But Stannard noted that while there was anecdotal cases of the spread of disease from European traders and settlers through Native American communities, there is no actual study that even pretends to claim that disease was the primary cause of “unnatural” death in the Native American community, from lack of evidence to support such a claim. He goes on to say that

The supposed truism that more native people died from disease than from direct face-to-face killing or from gross mistreatment or other concomitant derivatives of that brutality such as starvation, exposure, exhaustion, or despair is nothing more than a scholarly article of faith.

Those defending Trump’s use of Truth Social as a platform for fascists and racists is from “ignorance” need to bone-up on their knowledge of Trump’s family history. His grandfather, Friedrich Trump, immigrated from Prussia to the US to avoid military service in 1885; in Seattle he “speculated” in real estate, and then during the Gold Rush became rich providing miners with prostitution services. Odd, but somehow this seems to be things that his grandson inherited in his DNA. 

Friedrich Trump returned to Germany in 1901 with the intention to stay there, but authorities there remembered him and removed his German citizenship, whereupon he decided to immigrate back to the U.S. Would we not all be fortunate if he and his family decided to stay in Germany?

His son and Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was arrested in 1927 when he joined a KKK group marching on Memorial Day in New York; of course there are those who “question” whether Fred Trump actually was affiliated with the KKK, but that is beside the point; he was a racist and he apparently handed this attitude down to his children. Folk singer Woody Guthrie even told us about him in a song he wrote in 1954 but never recorded himself, about racial discrimination at Trump’s Beach Haven properties:

I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate
He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed that color line
Here at his Beach Haven family project

Beach Haven ain't my home!
No, I just can't pay this rent!
My money's down the drain,
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower
Where no black folks come to roam,
No, no, Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!

I'm calling out my welcome to you and your man both
Welcoming you here to Beach Haven
To love in any way you please and to have some kind of a decent place
To have your kids raised up in.
   
Beach Haven ain't my home!
No, I just can't pay this rent!
My money's down the drain,
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower
Where no black folks come to roam,
No, no, Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!

Both Fred Trump and his son Donald were the target of a Nixon Justice Department lawsuit charging them with racial discrimination at their residential projects in 1973, but they “settled” without admitting guilt, and apparently continued to discriminate in a less “open” manner against black renters.

This is who this man is. You can’t just “erase” it from his character. Let’s remember Trump’s activities surrounding the Central Park 5. Prosecutor Linda Fairstein, a fanatic who specialized in sex crimes, couldn't overcome jurors’ doubts about the forced “confessions” but they were impressed by the amount of so-called physical “evidence” that she produced that surely must “prove” the accused' guilt. But she certainly knew that as an FBI expert testified, none of that “evidence” could be tied to the accused, or any other suspect in custody at the time.

Fairstein didn't have the guilty party on trial and probably knew it, but in the rush to convict someone given public anger, someone had to “pay,” and Trump’s personal public relations campaign for conviction, highlighted by this paid newspaper advertisement…

 

…was according to defense attorney William Warren instrumental in “poisoning the minds of many people who lived in New York City and who, rightfully, had a natural affinity for the victim…Notwithstanding the jurors' assertions that they could be fair and impartial, some of them or their families, who naturally have influence, had to be affected by the inflammatory rhetoric in the ads."

Trump of course didn’t admit he was wrong after the Central Park 5 were exonerated of the crime after spending years in prison and receiving a multi-million dollar settlement, which Trump called a “disgrace,” still claiming that there was “so much evidence against them” despite the fact that no physical evidence tied them to the crime and that another man who was known to police as a serial assaulter at the park confessed to the crime. Trump insists that “5”  were still “guilty” because he can never admit to being  wrong.   

Apparently neither can his supporters. Nikki Haley has predictably abandoned her criticisms of Trump and is going all-out with the hypocritical, false and inflated rhetoric against Biden. This is the same person who is unable say the word “slavery,” despite the fact that she was the governor of the state that “famously” was the first to declare secession from the Union after the election of Abraham Lincoln (who Republicans hypocritically claim as their "own"). In its “declaration of secession,” the delegates voting for secession were not hypocritical about what the “issue” was:

The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.

Is it any use banging one’s head against the wall at all this senselessness, leaving one disoriented about where this country is headed? Is it too “complex” as it apparently is for a certain incompetent and partisan "judge," in a case to most everyone else is an “open-and-shut” regarding the classified documents? Trump stooge Aileen Cannon claimed the other day she doesn’t “understand” how a jury could make a reasoned judgment when she is so “confused” about the “complexity” of the case. 

If this “confusion” isn’t deliberate, then we are in a very dangerous, “menacing” place—a living nightmare whose end can only be speculated upon at this moment, and we are heading straight into that runaway train because many people want to keep living that nightmare and never wake-up.