From the editor and writers of Bright Lights Film Journal
Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran
(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
"I dare anyone to squeeze between
two covers a more varied, useful and
flat out entertaining sampling of
the personalities that make the
seventh art the liveliest."
— David Hudson, IFC.com
— David Hudson, IFC.com
Trembling Before G-d
or Die Volkschmiere
Who will judge the judges trembling before sex? The atheists!
"Some
have made the love of God the foundation of morality. If we did a
good act merely from the love of God and a belief that it is pleasing
to Him, whence arises the morality of the atheist? It is idle to say,
as some do, that no such being exists…Diderot, D'Alembert, D'Holbach,
Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men.
Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love
of God."
— Thomas Jefferson, from a letter to Thomas Law, 1814
Unfortunately
for us, the rationalistic, upper-class deisms of Jefferson, Paine, Franklin,
and other Founding Fathers had little far-reaching influence on the unimaginatively
fundamentalist, God-fearing Christianity of the poorly educated masses
who fought their Revolutionary War. Jefferson's comments on atheism remain
sadly relevant today, when the overwhelming majority of nationally visible
elected politicians, regardless of their party affiliation, have openly
branded nonbelievers as un-American infidels,1
and even our few agnostic statesmen are afraid to publicly admit to the
existence of a godless morality. We know the American right has self-justifyingly
pretended the Founding Fathers were not post-Enlightenment rationalists
but foaming-at-the-mouth fundamentalists as dependent on mindless, irrational
ecstasy (what Freud called the "oceanic feeling") as they are themselves
— just as Christian capitalists, conveniently forgetting about that
Biblical image of a camel unable to squeeze its ass through a needle's
eye, have (mis)represented Adam Smith as a pioneering robber baron rather
than the inherently moralistic philosopher he was. But because the irrationalism
of such extremists renders them mentally immobile and tragically uneducable,
to engage them in deadlocked debate would not only be fruitless, but would
further perpetuate the illusory right-left binaries the news media manufactures
to stifle genuinely Socratic exchanges of ideas. Anyone who has witnessed
or participated in a theosophical debate between a believer and nonbeliever
knows a priori the inevitable, embarrassing result: the atheist will want
to push her argument to its logical, apocalyptic conclusion, but the believer
will reach a ceiling of irrational, intuitive faith beyond which he2
cannot proceed, at which point both parties throw up their hands in stalemate.
The glowing, oceanic believer remains satisfied; the nonbeliever, saddened
that the muddleheaded multitudes are unmoved by the roster of Sadean,
Nietzschean, Freudian, and even simple Sartrean arguments, swears off
such debates, perhaps seeks refuge in cloistered academia, and knows she
exposes her atheism at her own peril.
If religious extremists are by definition irrational, they cannot be
blamed for their crippling manias and metaphysical fevers, just as infants
cannot be blamed for misbehaving or puppies thrashed for their wanton
defecations. But American theocracy is not built solely from the evangelical
arrogance of puritans, vice squads, moral hygiene patrols, or local
societies for the negation of lewdness and harlotry. This theocracy
also stems indirectly, yet more insidiously, secretively, from centrists,
those unwitting hypocrites who claim rationality yet fail to go far
enough or follow through on moral or civil rights imperatives, who propound
feeble tolerance in lieu of boundless love, who timidly revert to moderate
positions that grant limited, Uncle Tom rights to three-fifths citizens.
Centrism is merely a cowardly reaction against extremism, and neither
necessarily nor rationally represents a logically correct civil rights
position based on true equality across all spheres. Only through half-hearted
phases of centrist "tolerance" have minorities been granted their faltering
civil rights — often first through military service, for three-fifths
minorities must demonstrate they are capable of conforming to the bloodthirsty,
morally straight nationalism required of full citizens. (Those who are
denied full participation in the social contract must uphold it more
perfectly than those who take the contract for granted.) That Bill Clinton's
gay rights agenda began with "gays
in the military" (as opposed to,
say, health benefits for same-sex partners) is therefore not even centrist
but depressingly conservative — the Band of Thebes weeps for us.
It
is both the tenuous victory and miserable failure of the moderate American
civil rights movement that being gay is now more acceptable than being
an atheist.3 This
is no accident — anything, even sexual transgression, can be tolerated
when framed within the totalized, overarching rubric of religiosity. Bill
Clinton was crucified because he denied the public the confessional, born-again
apology they expected. However, the smooth nomination of George W. Bush
— whose simian visage neatly disproves Creationism — was ensured
the moment Jesus personally forgave his cocaine addiction, thus approving
not only his candidacy but also those drug laws which, were they functioning
democratically, should have prevented Bush's ascendancy to military-industrial
buffoonery in the first place. If only we Americans had some good atheist
propaganda! While our multiculturalized industrial cinema has birthed
practically every genre, subgenre, demographic, and category imaginable,
we still lack the "atheist cinema" Europe once enjoyed, and even our atheist
auteurs — like the late Kubrick or even Woody Allen — squandered
their time creating stylistic universes of auteurist tics instead of fashioning
a revolutionary political cinema. Our next best option, "queer cinema,"
grows more reverent with age, more moderated with every step of its assimilation.
Our new American cinema will have its inoffensively humanist covenant
with the bourgeoisie, just as God will have his victorious covenant with
the faithful over the dead atheist bodies of Pasolini and Fassbinder.
In
this frame of mind, I nauseously approach Sandi Simcha Dubowski's unfortunately
praised (and disconcertingly titled) documentary Trembling Before
G-d (2001), an enragingly, spinelessly centrist attempt to reconcile
Orthodox Judaism's dogmatic irrationalism with the democratic sexual
choice the gay rights movement demands. The film's many gay Hassidic
interviewees — often portrayed in silhouette reenacting Jewish
rituals they dare not perform on camera without anonymity — continually
beg for acceptance from ashamed parents, intractable, sagaciously bearded
rabbis, psychiatrists who never mastered their own neuroses, and from
other claimants of Abrahamic authority. A typical interviewee, Dr. Yaakov
Meir Weil, a sadistic, Dr. Strangelove caricature of a psychiatrist,
proposes that one of his patients, a closeted, married Orthodox teacher
frantically besotted with one of his barely bearded yeshiva boys, can
be forgiven as long as he nobly, masochistically, and eternally represses
his sinful desire, even if his long-suffering wife knows he "can never
love her as much as [he] love[s] those boys." The wife goes further
to defend him: "He's a saint…he's been fighting his desires for years…he's
made me twelve kids." For the faithful, it is impossible to surmount
the Christlike connection between sainthood and masochism; the supplicant,
continually bowing before a dominant Orthodoxy whose intractability
must be appeased with pain, embraces that deathly cold, anti-life spirit
of ressentiment against which Nietzsche spied his Zarathustra.
One
of Trembling's main foci, David, a handsome, thirty-something gay Orthodox
poster boy, tells of a mad rabbi who recommended a steady, diarrhetic
diet of dates and figs to unblock his latent heterosexuality, and who
instructed him to deflate his passions by aversively flicking a rubber
band against his wrist whenever he became aroused by another man —
which he did for two years, to no avail. Later in the film, David returns
to Israel to confront the rabbi, to whom he had come out twenty years
before, and bluntly, though respectfully, reveals the folly of his advice.
The rabbi, of course, despite an admission that he would no longer recommend
antigay "therapy," refuses to liberalize his views — presumptuously
reinterpreting the Talmud would surely invoke the loving God's wrath.
For a moment, David plays the psychoanalyst, asking the self-depriving
rabbi if he does not also sublimate his sexual desires through the oceanic
aesthetics of Hassidism; the rabbi quickly assents, but he, not understanding
the universality of desire, fails to see that one sublimation is no
worse than any other if one doesn't live in trembling fear of s-x. 4
But, despite a flabbergasting section where we hear of a clueless rabbi
who (unlike some Christian conservatives) could not conceive of gay sex
beyond literal acts of sodomy, the film balks at seriously undermining
the hypocrisies of rabbinical authority. The closest the film comes to
a serious critique of Orthodoxy is a sequence where Jerusalem Jews participate
— anonymously, of course — in a self-flagellating "Atonement
Ceremony for Sexual Sins," where penitents pray for salvation only in
the abstract because, of course, none of those present would be so fearless
as to actually indulge. "Heaven forbid there are such sinners here," reassures
the overseeing rabbi, while the demented, chanting Hebrews present engage
in psychotically superstitious rites — performance art, really —
whose aesthetic perversity is far more intense and otherworldly than anything
Masoch could have ever devised.
Almost immediately, the film's rote, nudging humanism — the sophomoric
hallmark of our "indie" film movement — becomes an insurmountable
flaw. Of course, we cannot help but sympathize with closeted queers
pressured into loveless marriages, or be affected by the superbly moving
sequence where fifty-something Israel extemporaneously pours forth to
a strange passerby a confession about his religious disillusionment
and the homosexuality that drove a wedge between himself and his estranged,
ninety-eight year old father ("I'm fifty-eight years old and I want
my daddy!"), with whom he is finally reunited at the film's teary-eyed
close. But the film's centrist, whitewashed liberalism never indicts
Jewish law itself, only those heartless, literalistic practitioners
who fail to overlook the Talmud's intolerance and excavate the warmhearted
mush beneath. (A long literary heritage of light clerical satire has
made us soft and vulnerable to this kind of moderated liberalism: even
Chaucer's "Friar's Tale" gently mocks the corruption of practice but
not the foundations of belief.) Rather than properly discarding irrational
texts entirely, Trembling's centrism instead argues (unlike that
madly antigay rabbi) for freer exegesis of religious text. But director
Dubowksi, then, should (but does not) tellingly compare Orthodox to
Reform Judaism, whose secularized emphasis on the mitzvah champions
modern ethics (relativism) over received morality (absolutism). Indeed,
Orthodox lesbian interviewees Malka and Leah dearly hope, in a manner
more befitting Reform Judaism, that their earthly good deeds will compensate
for their indulgence in a practice for which the 16th century Shulchan
Aruch — still the official legal manual for Orthodox Jewry —
prescribes lashes with a whip. The only brand of Judaism for them, however,
is strict, unforgiving Orthodox, though the film never explains why;
perhaps it is because for Dubowski Orthodox hypocrisies are at least
internally consistent, while non-homophobic Reform Judaism hypocritically
adopts secular humanist ethics while still insisting on the moral necessity
of God. Malka and Leah's Orthodoxy, like Dubowski's, presumably, is
internal and immutable — this is the fundamentalist ideology of
anti-Semites and Zionists, who believe Jewish culture is neither an
institutionalized religion nor even a semi-voluntary calling, but is
inextricable from one's ingrained, pseudo-racial identity.
Nevertheless, Trembling longs for an Orthodox Judaism innocuously
recast as an avuncular cultural heritage rather than a patriarchal terror,
particularly every time John Zorn's simplemindedly nostalgic klezmer
noodlings intrude on the soundtrack to undergird those anonymous silhouettes
going through their ritual paces, or accompany Malka and Leah's preparation
of a Sabbath challah. Again, the film's tepid, pleading humanism is
totally inadequate, for while Dubowksi generates sympathy for the lesbian
couple he utterly fails to critique Hassidic Jewry's proudly medievalist,
"back of the bus" misogyny,5 which still prevents women from becoming rabbis, separates
infectiously immoral female congregants from their morally male superiors
in synagogue, and forbids festival dancing in mixed company. Furthermore,
Hassidic misogyny affords the men precious few sexual advantages, trapping
them in the gaol of mandatory monogamy.6 Apparently, there lies no secret romance
in the asexual Hassidic boys' club, none of that allegedly subversive
homosociality into which queer theorists love plunging their sticky fingers,
nor any of that romantically reactionary eros through which monks, inmates,
English schoolboys, and other institutional captives discover both sublimated
desires and straightforward buggeries. We will never be able to convince
archconservatives their misogynies are merely standardizations of historical,
millennia-old error, stemming from the outmoded, arbitrary tribal governances
of diluvial clans and petty Mesopotamian despots. Modern corporatism,
meanwhile, has simply recast these oppressive legal errors into the newly
standardized (if equally patriarchal) mold of slang-infested bodily commerce.
I am reminded of Nagisa Oshima's suggestion, during his In the Realm
of the Senses obscenity trial, that "municipal police headquarters"
should replace "mound of Venus" as conventional, pulp slang for female
genitalia, such that a newly coined vulgarism like "she was fucked in
her municipal police headquarters" would metaphorically expose the truly
immoral institution. But I digress, slightly.
We
should not excuse the false consciousnesses of Jewish lesbians who defend
an Orthodoxy centered around gynephobic values, even if they are doubly
excluded by both male Hassidim and mainstream secularists. One closeted
lesbian interviewee in Trembling describes her nervousness at
attending her first Israeli gay pride march, where, among a throng vehemently
condemning the right-wing political minority controlling Israel, she
felt more uncomfortable as an Orthodox Jew among indignant secularists
than as a lesbian in a country run by religious extremists. "It's not
secular versus religious values," she says, though neither she nor the
film offers to define the problem in any other terms. But even these
"secular values" mean neither atheism nor agnosticism but, at best,
a separation of church and state conspicuously lacking the Jeffersonian
acknowledgement of godless morality; I cannot speak for modern Israelis,
but today Americans separate church and state only by assuming they
are equally important halves of a harmonious whole. Yet this female
interviewee is also ironically correct: the issue is not "secular versus
religious values," but, more correctly stated, "rational versus irrational
values." We are disinclined to frame the issue this way, however, because
the definitive irrationalism of religious faith has been so consistently
equivocated, euphemized, and camouflaged: George W. Bush's "faith-based
initiatives" sound more plausible than "irrationality-based initiatives."
This equivocation is epitomized by the incorrectly standardized use
of the word "hate" in phrases like "hate speech" and "hate crimes,"
which misdirect our criticism from something innately bad (irrationalism)
to something basically neutral (hate or dislike). Whether or not "hate
speech" is harmful or antisocial depends entirely on whether its predications
are rational or irrational; if someone hatefully yet rationally argues
against Nazism, an irrational threat to civil society, then it is beneficial
hate speech acting in the public interest. Apologists who deploy euphemisms
like "hate" cannot use the more accurate verb, to persecute,
for that would too clearly reveal who is empowered, who is active and
not merely reactive. When conservative sophists call even rationally
pointed criticism "hate" or "bashing," they use a fallaciously borrowed
premise of egalitarianism to deceive us into thinking all hatreds, and
all causalities, are democratically equal, allowing the mightiest hegemonies
to play the victim and accuse the powerless of "bashing" it simply because
they refuse to submit to its authority. I recall gay conservative Andrew
Sullivan chastising homosexuals for "bashing" the Church, as if civilly
disenfranchised minorities actually had power enough to dent the Church's
governmentally reinforced armor, as if hatred alone had insurrectionary
power regardless of the sociopolitical power of those who wield it.7 By this logic, hating Nazis is the equivalent
of being an anti-Semite — for both hatreds can be quantitatively
equal in their negativities — and even rational criticism is indistinguishable
from irrational prejudice.
The
right's irrational claims to sweet victimization, and its failure to
distinguish between (rational) critique and (irrational) persecution,
were most recently echoed in Supreme Court Justice Scalia's dissent from
the Lawrence v. Texas (2003) decision, wherein Scalia worried
that, were states now disallowed to legislate sexuality, provincial
standards prohibiting bestiality, pedophilia, and masturbation would
be disastrously "called into question." At least Talmudic law's sanctions
against lesbianism are unambiguous; American law, born of Puritan misogyny,
reverts to outlawing "sodomy," supposing that female homosexuals, because
they have no penetrative organs, haven't even the power to pierce the
immaculate conception of the theocratic social contract.8 Obviously, archconservatives' smokescreen use of the
word "morality" is merely a euphemism for tremblingly fearful sex, for
many genuinely immoral acts, such as cheating at cards, betraying a friend,
or breaking a promise, are not only wholly legal but are promoted as "healthy"
ingredients of American capitalism, competition, and manly victory.9
But this aside, even a first-year biology student would wince at the embarrassing
categorical error of lumping masturbation together with pedophilia and
bestiality.10 While pedophilia is often culturally determined,
as it was in ancient Greece, and while bestiality is a rare taste cultivated
through specific detours in an individual's environment or psychosexual
development, there is no more universal act than masturbation, the most
primal expression of natural curiosity and exploration. Scalia, whose
religion places him immaculately above the masturbating orangutan George
W. Bush so resembles, and delivers him safely into a higher species so
pure it remains untouched by its own worldly hand, would, if pressured
in an argument, never admit to having ever masturbated himself. But if
we believe his denials, it is then undemocratic and illogical for one
who has never explored his own nature, and who by his own admission lacks
natural curiosity, to pass judgment on others' curious natures.
Does the Godlike judge, the lawgiver, wish to outlaw masturbation?
Should there be a referendum on this issue, what would the voter turnout
be? Of course, if J. Edgar Hoover was compelled to ensconce his morally
upright genitalia in tightly constricting women's lingerie to fulfill
sensual, psychic, or moral purposes — for indeed, sexual rapture
and gratification have moral implications — we may safely assume
Scalia, along with William Bennett, Jesse Helms, and other State dinosaurs,
have at various stages of their boyhoods irresistibly fondled, oiled,
stroked, pumped, and punished their big guns, tremblingly or otherwise,
even if not to ejaculation, and even if this libertarian act of "self-abuse"
later caused them shame or disgrace. But while the conservative elite
have indubitably primed and lubed themselves for autocratic autoeroticism,
they have figuratively lubed us, too, with politicized, legalized incarnations
of their own masochistic shame. A German neologist might dub this Die
Volkschmiere ("the lubing of the people"), to conjure the metaphorical
image of the oligarch projecting and recycling his sexual shame (or
other moral failings) in order to grease a farcical, provincial moral
hygiene policy designed to disguise his own shortcomings. 11
However, Scalia would never confess to masturbating not because the
act is sexually shameful but, contrarily, because the act apotheosizes
sinful pride: to masturbate oneself is to reenact the loneliness of
the creation myth. God's loneliness, imperfection, and lacking —
for the very act of creation implies a lacking, a hole, a need to be
filled — prompted him to create a male other, Adam, narcissistically
created in his own image. This creation was for God an exquisitely empty
masturbation, a morally pleasurable act whose dripping residue was as
worthless and immoral as mankind turned out to be. Before God fashioned
Eve from some bony scraps (perhaps to prevent Adam falling homosexually
in love with Him), lonely Adam most likely masturbated himself (perhaps
with the snake's assistance). So what is the difference between God's
masturbatory loneliness and Adam's naturally curious masturbation in
the Garden of Eden? Not much — each time we masturbate, we retread
that most natural act of seminal creation, that onanistic big bang,
whose self-serving agenda quickly became politicized into a self-serving,
masculinized religion desperate to conceal its onanistic origins and
advance a paradoxically asexual creator God. The ways in which the Church
has controlled homosexual conduct follow the same pattern of paradox
and self-concealment. The supposedly homophobic Church craftily recruits
homosexuals into its fold by using guilt and shame to turn them celibate
and asexual, then convinces them the priesthood is their only salvation,
and then finally, belatedly, allows them behind confessional doors to
lube the altar boys in open secrecy. (Thus, evangelical homophobes'
idea that homosexuals recruit unwilling boys conceals the fact that
the Church itself has been the most historically effective homosexual
recruitment agency.) The masses have no right to be surprised at clerical
sex scandals — forbidden homosexuality has always been the priesthood's
foundation, and barely suppressed pederasty its raison d'etre.
Knowing
the masturbatory, neurotically sexual, and often homosexual functions
of organized religion, we cannot believe Trembling Before G-d's
centrist ideology represents progress for gay Jews, or believe the false
consciousnesses of pleading, illiberal gay fundamentalists are any different
than, say, the false consciousnesses of impoverished filmgoers whose purchase
of overpriced ticket stubs subsidizes the immoral salaries of manufactured,
multimillionaire celebrities. The dark side of multiculturalism is that
its celebration of diversity, and its legitimizing of essentialist cultural
identity, pretends all cultures are equal regardless of their rationalism
or irrationalism, encouraging the identity-hungry to passively pride
themselves in accidentally received heritages rather than finding themselves
in choices as actively rational as atheism. 12 We must reject multiculturalism's
pretentious objectivity,13
and insist on a terribly ruthless rationalism more stubborn than the slaveholding
Enlightenment of our elitist Founding Fathers. We cannot prevent moderate
liberals and pseudoprogressives from praising Trembling Before God,
but the least we can do — as I have just done in this sentence —
is to refute the delusional filmmakers' wishes by rejecting their repellently
reverent spelling of the film's title. When the demystified word can be
read clearly, our defiance becomes the first step toward freedom.
Notes
1. A notable exception is Minnesota's Independent governor Jesse Ventura, a vehement critic of the Church. However, as an amateur (as opposed to career) politician, he enjoys this rare freedom.
2. Here, I use the male pronoun intentionally, for this religion is made by misogynists. In fact, the only interesting point of comparison among Islam, Judaism, and Christianity is seeing how their brands of misogyny historically overlap and diverge.
3. In America, it now seems only critical obesity, gross physical deformity, and mental retardation remain as stigmatized as atheism; indeed, primitive societies will make the equation between physical abnormality and heresy.
4. This is not to say, as would Freud, that all religions are sublimations of sex; indeed, sex is often a sublimation of creative impulses, as a behaviorist would argue. In this case, however, the Freudian idea seems correct.
5. Is "misogyny" the correct word? I cannot say "phallocentric" or "phallagocentric," for Orthodoxy does not fully acknowledge the phallus.
6. In the medieval shtetl, boys would be married at thirteen or fourteen to quickly satisfy their sexual cravings; once appeased, they could return to their studies, and hopefully forget about sex altogether.
7. This very evening, as I was returning from a typically evil shopping mall, a group of young black males was boisterously revelling adjacent to my car. As I opened my car door, I heard one of them angrily shout behind my back, "Fuck you, whitey!" Unprovoked as it was, I would never call this attack "bashing," however, for its expression of unorganized frustration was directionless, and thus impotent to undo power structures. True, instead of happily absorbing their barb, I could have explained to them that my skin color did not automatically make me a pawn of the white power elite, but I doubted they would have accepted my queer or atheistic arguments, even if they might have been open to my socialistic ones.
8. It is unclear if dildo-wielding (or fruit-wielding) lesbians can perform sodomy as defined by American law; because Lawrence v. Texas regards only male homosexuality, the distinction between gay rights and lesbian rights was intentionally blurred.
9. During the Supreme Court debate, one non-homophobic Justice asked Scalia if "lying at the dinner table" would also be considered an immoral act states should be empowered to outlaw. Scalia, stunned by the logic of the question, was speechless — and as unconvinced as an Orthodox rabbi.
10. What is the offense of bestiality? Forget about the perpetrator — lonely with his sheep, billy goats, or cattle, he is a rational actor. Council instead the animals, who cannot consent to their buggery. Sending the shepherd to prison will find him a partner, but, wanting a woman, he will have to sublimate again when he, a penitent, assumes the sheep's position.
11. This metaphor is compounded by the fact that the German schmiere is also a slang term used to dismiss bad farces or provincial dramas that are quickly "smeared" or "scribbled" on paper.
12. My criticism of multiculturalism has nothing to do with Eurocentrism; on the contrary, we've clearly demonstrated that Western culture almost has the market cornered on irrationalism.
13. This objectivity often reveals itself in ludicrous understatement. I recently saw a jaw-dropping BBC newscast that euphemistically deadpanned, "Liberia has strong historical ties to the United States." One might as well say Jews have strong historical ties to Pontius Pilate.
Subscribe to BLFJ
Contact Us
Never miss a movie again -- by using online video recorders! Start recording online now!
Deals for Our Readers
