actor profiles
animation
book reviews
director profiles
documentaries
experimental &
avant garde
exploitation
film festivals
film noir
film reviews
gay & lesbian
hong kong films
horror
interviews
japanese cinema
music & musicals
silent film
tranny cinema
- - - - - -
mailing list
To be automatically notified when the next issue is posted, join our mailing list.
writers gone wild!
Keep up with Bright Lights between issues by visiting our companion blog, Bright Lights After Dark.
our space at MySpace
Visit us at MySpace.
support
Support Bright Lights and get something nice for yourself, too, by shopping at Amazon via this link
 |
 |
The Northern European Protestants were not missionaries. Those Crusoes were not as interested in converting the heathen as the Catholics from Southern Europe were. They were more interested in living like parasites or vampires off Man Friday's work.
The word "manumission" comes from the Latin "manumittere," literally, "to let go from your hand, to free," and means to liberate your slave. In the Roman Catholic countries, slaves could earn their manumission after a time. In the Protestant colonies, slaves could never earn their freedom. Only their masters could decide to free them. And no slave ever liberated himself.
The impact of Robinson Crusoe cannot be understated. He is the paradigm. He is comfortable with his god, and he exists alone, outside of any community. Crusoe has no need for a conscience because he is one with his god. They see eye to eye on all issues. He sees no alternatives, no strange gods. A jury of his peers is a dozen mirrors reflecting only him. Compassion is as absent as his community projects. His only POV on relationships is completely male-absorbed and master-slave. Women do not even exist except as property. At best they are sex objects or trophy wives.
 Michael Douglas as Gordon Gecko in Wall Street  |
Crusoe sees it clearly. It is a matter of power.
Imagine Robinson Crusoe as a monk with a gun. See how easy that is. We're back at the Crusades again. We're out plundering with a gun again. Do you hear Crusoe's voice in President Teddy Roosevelt's when he said we can take land away from its current residents because they had not materially improved it? Teddy Roosevelt also coined the phrase "bully pulpit." Where does a monk with a gun stand? (Anywhere he wants?) When Jack London spoke about "the inevitable white man," do you see Crusoe standing beside him?
Robinson Crusoe is independently wealthy, alone on his island, his enemies are cannibals of color, and he knows how to shoot a gun. Is that the American dream, or what?
* * *
If Robinson Crusoe is the paradigm of the white male real estate developer, then what of Man Friday? One notion is that the ethnic sidekick represents the weaker, darker, less respectable (or less heroic) aspect of the hero. Maybe.
I contend that when Crusoe "names" Friday, language and culture intersected, that a new language of racism was born. That Man Friday became the paradigm of the ethnic sidekick, the white male hero's partner of color, who never gets to share in the rewards.
I contend that the paradigm I call the Ethnic Sidekick and its concomitant racism have both become an integral part of the New World, its language and its literature, an integral part of the Western perspective and an important, yet invisible, determinant in most multicultural relationships. That this racist paradigm has become institutionalized in the Western democracies, is perpetuated in both "canonized" and popular literature, and in fact, still influences most western thinking and behavior.
As soon as Crusoe put a name to the other man, Man Friday's previous identity — all of it — disappeared, vanished, forever. Man Friday — as a nonwhite — became a parody of a white man, an apprentice white man. As he is patronized and derided by the master race's master narrative, he is brought to more servitude and contempt. Naturally, his resentment grew.
* * *
A century after Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe, the British writer Charles Dickens wrote a trifle of a book about a Crusoe-type capitalist gone compulsive, a Christmas Carol about a money-hungry man shipwrecked on a desert island of his own greed.
Am I stretching? When Ebenezer Scrooge (along with the Ghost of Christmas Past) revisits his boyhood, he spots himself as "a solitary child, neglected by his friends" reading by "a feeble fire."
Guess what book lil' Scrooge is reading.
"Poor Robin Crusoe."
That makes Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim, and the rest of the Cratchit family a sort of lower-class (but white) Man Friday. And doesn't that make sense?
Christmas, as we know it, is only 150 years old. Before then, it was a Christian religious holiday. Then Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol to expiate his own Big Hurt. The story of a miser who sees himself for the man he really is was an instant success for the 32-year-old writer. In its first decade it outsold the Bible. It has never been out of print.
Mr. Magoo
as Scrooge
The first edition of A Christmas Carol was published December 19, 1843. It offered one new myth to the Industrial Age, and one need not be a wise man to see the book as a direct reaction to Robinson Crusoe.
Scrooge is Crusoe. Bob Cratchit is Man Friday.
Scrooge's own nephew calls Christmas "the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."
The Christmas Carol.
What is a "carol"? It's a folk song, part of an oral tradition, one passed down from generation to generation. English carols didn't appear until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Christmas carol "The First Day of Christmas" appeared before 1780 in London. It wasn't much more than a mnemonic device to help schoolchildren learn memory skills. For that reason it was used in English classrooms for a century. Charles Dickens wanted his book to become a fixture within the meta-narrative. He was lucky; it did.
What a marvelous character is the novel! Think of Dickens's characters with their distinctive appearances, mannerisms, gestures, speech patterns. Think of Scrooge's trademark "Bah, humbug!" This simple chunk of dialogue is a complete dramatic performance by itself, show business at its best. How easy it is to visualize Scrooge.
Dickens never hurries his narrative "in a sort of impetuous breathless way," as Dickens wrote to wannabe author Mrs. Brookfield. He told her to slow down her own narratives, that "the people should tell it and act it for themselves. My notion always is, that when I have made my people to play out their play, it is, as it were, their business to do it, and not mine."
A Christmas Carol affords us several notions. One is that we all can be spiritually transformed, "converted" or "reborn," a notion quite curious in a text that does not mention religion. Another is that the future can be rewritten.
As for the three ghosts, we need to remember that England since King Henry VIII has been one of the least, if not the least religious country in Western Europe. In a secular society that at least publicly and tacitly ignores any God, that religious "entity" known as the Immortal Soul can only be expressed as a ghost.
A Ghost can haunt us. What we repress, if it is repressed severely enough, can boomerang back on us. A Ghost is a Guilty Conscience.
TNT's production of
A Christmas Carol
The three Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future exist to confront Robinson Crusoe's nineteenth-century English descendant with humanity's earliest beliefs in an eternal life. To make the Crusoe "mythos," one of the most practical ever fashioned, recognize life is transcendent.
Specifically, the three Ghosts are "needed" to appear to tell Crusoe-Scrooge that his attitudes and his actions have reverberations not just now, at this Present moment, but also they are reverberations from attitudes and actions and events that occurred years Past, and that these actions and attitudes he takes now will reverberate into the Future.
The Ghosts are a demonstration that a continuum exists, that no action does not have a prior cause or a future effect. To link Scrooge with John Donne: "No man is an island."
Even more magically, Scrooge sees his life three-dimensionally. He sees its entire scope. He sees AS AN OUTSIDER SEES his beginnings, the middle of his life, and his final end. Much as a drowning man is said to see his entire life pass before his eyes.
Look at Robinson Crusoe at his worst. He is Scrooge, a quite remarkable miser. But listen to how the average American citizens in the 1990s might describe Crusoe's "spiritual clones" with whom they must work. "He'll sell you out in a minute for a better deal somewhere else." "He'd sacrifice all of your scruples on the altar of profits." "He'd undercut his mother." "If he can, he will take it with him." We despise the dark side of Scrooge that is the dark side of Crusoe.
But Scrooge also sees what happens after his death. That's the particular horror of A Christmas Carol. That Scrooge sees the marginalized peoples of London arguing over his death clothes. One is immediately reminded how the people played dice for the clothes Jesus Christ was crucified in.
Obviously A Christmas Carol focuses on Scrooge. But there are natural variations on that theme that have become classics in their own right. Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life focuses on Bob Cratchit (or rather George Bailey). John Hughes's Home Alone focuses on that Beautiful Child Tiny Tim, also known as Kevin McAllister (played by Macaulay Culkin). The character of Scrooge is here played by two actors, Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, as the Wet Bandits. (The durability of the Scrooge "mythos" made Home Alone for a few years "one of the top 3 box offices hits of all time.") Becoming classics, they become almost indispensable parts of our Master Narrative, and thus they steer us in a direction they want us to go.
NEXT PAGE: Who saved Lewis and Clark's butts?
