Oh I get it. Everyone pretends to be Holist and then there's a mass crucifixion?
I think it's more like "bury the attention whore alive".
I see. Nevertheless, 'Kirk Douglas' still dies at the end of the movie. 
Not in the Disney version. He's rescued by a genie and a loveable scamp.
Godammit!! You should see what they did with Naked Lunch.
What part? The animated, talking noose, or the cuddly cockroach?
The animated talking noose I could cope with. It was the McDonald's 'Happy Meal' tie ins that I thought crossed the line. Milk should be served out of a basic cardboard carton.
in Soviet Hungary milk serves you in cardboardcartoons.
The infrastructure of implied humor - A SSOOKN product.
Oh god, I hate to explain a joke or series of jokes, but here goes.
I log onto PD.com this morning to see a proliferation of Holist clones. This put me in mind of the final act of Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film, 'Spartacus' starring Kirk Douglas. In said movie, the loyal followers of our eponymous hero; in an act of noble self-sacrifice, attempt to protect his identity by yelling 'I am Spartacus!' in hope that he might escape capture/torture/execution by the Romans.
Roger, being well versed in many aspects of North American popular culture, understood my allusion but counters my point. He suggests that instead of sacrifice, the thrust of the Holist clones is not to protect your identity but to drown it out. In return, I understand what he's suggesting but remind him that, at the end of the day, the death of Kirk Douglas' character is still the climax of the movie.
Now, not only is Roger well versed in popular culture, he has a particularly dark and satirical way of skewering this selfsame culture. While I was referencing an example of mass crucifixion, he linked this historical and Hollywood event to the company founded by Walt Disney because of its modern reputation for sanitizing what is, otherwise, serious subject matter. They are well known for the application of style over
gravitas. This is frequently an irritant to intellectuals with left-leaning inclinations because shallow portrayals of complex situations and people [eg: Pocahontas] is something they find culturally insensitive.
Because Roger yoked my Spartacus reference to Disney, I decided to 'play along' with his mention of 'the noose' and 'bugs' as they both feature heavily in the novel 'Naked Lunch' by William S Burroughs. As I am quite familiar with this work in particular and the author in general, I pretended that I witnessed a Disney-fied version of Burrough's hallucinatory & hellish depiction of drug addiction, control and sexual sadism which, I should mention, is Burrough's satirical comment on the practice of capital punishment.
In advancing this exchange of cultural memes, I offer that what is really disturbing about the Disney corporation, is the way in which they mass market their movies through the use of tie-in products that are targeted specifically at children and their predeliction for fat, salt & sugar laden nutrition. (aka junk food).
PDers familiar with 'Naked Lunch' (my linkage to happy meals being an ironic and unintentional co-incidence) may remember that one character possessed a mechanical dildo that discharged warm milk as a semen substitute during the act of coition. Obviously, serving milk to children out of a mass produced toy dildo based on Naked Lunch is entirely inappropriate which is why (here comes the punchline) that I believe that milk is more safely stored and served in the now ubiquitous Tetrapak cardboard carton. The more media savvy among us may find further irony in that, the fate of the heirs of the Tetrapak fortune ended up in drug addiction and a death that is oddly reminiscent of Burroughs ouevre.
At which point, you include the currently popular 'In Soviet X, Y happens to you' meme. Unfortunately, it landed as a not especially funny non sequiter because it interrupted somewhat abruptly, the exchange between myself and Roger. I like to think of it as a 'rally' in a game of memetic tennis.
That I can do this with him in only a few short sentences is because we are (a) aware of the cultural terrain in which we were playing and (b) we have both been on this forum for some time and are thus, acquainted with each others personality and writing style.
Not wishing for this now re-purposed thread to lose momentum, I believe that Roger's strategy was to pivot out of the Disney/Burroughs confabulation and, instead move towards a comedic strategy known as 'a cheap shot'. In this case, the intended targets are Canadians. Canada's global reputation for being a largely inoffensive nation has resulted in them becoming something of a blank canvas for humorous slights. The entertainment value of this is, for me, greatly enhanced owing to the fact that Roger and myself were both born in that country thus, we can share jokes based on a set of common national assumptions. No doubt, there's lots of Hungarian jokes that we would be ill-equipped to appreciate.
Hopefully, this will give you an insight into the Byzantine levels of subtext that exist in a typical PD.com discussion.
Mangrove.
PS English is my first and only language. Don't judge me too harshly, I never finished college.
Show Posts
