Announce Grosseteste

The greek gods were like the MCU back in the day

— Dan Power (@therealdanpower) October 8, 2020

Remember when Scorsese said he's not crazy about Marvel films, and then everyone got mad, and then Francis Ford Coppola said "I'm backing, though," and then it was a whole big problem? That was eighty-seven years ago, feel old yet? Anyway, let's go back to that. Scorsese wrote a fantastic defence of his position in the New York Times that makes all the filmic points for me, which is good because I know so little about film that I think Garfield II is the pinnacle of modern cinema, but the problem is not that Marvel films are dumb explodey nonsense with simple messages and no 'substance' compared to a gritty Ken Loach character study, and Scorsese knows that. People like fun, dumb stories, and we always have. Bellerophon rode around on a flying horse and solved mysteries. Jupiter and Mercury went around doing epic Expecting Hospitality Off Our Subjects Pranks (Gone Wrong) (In Phrygia) (Town Destroyed!). Ragnarok - actual Ragnarök, not Marvel Ragnarok - is ironically Avengers: Endgame but in Icelandic, not Thor: Ragnarok.  The content is not the problem. The problem is actually that Marvel combine all the financial muscle that comes with being part of the biggest media entity on the planet until tencent finally take over, and all of the religious fervour that we would have once associated with saints. Here's why that's bad.

So cinema is an artistic discipline, and like all art, there's this horrible disconnect between what normal people think is good and what those "in the know" think is good. This is widely decried as gatekeeping now, but I truly believe that gatekeeping is one of the best thing that can happen to a medium. The higher the barrier to entry for a subculture, the better the subculture is likely to be. You just have to gatekeep the right people. With regard to film, the New Hollywood period was a boon for people that give a shit about "real film" - to drastically oversimply, with the fall of the studio system, filmmakers were suddenly able to indulge themselves and create what they wanted to create, and that work mostly upheld the values of 'true cinema.' You'll note that Scorsese, Coppola et al came up in this time period, and still think about their craft in this poncey post-pre-Raphaelite "art for art's sake" way.

Unfortunately for them, film criticism has, like the music criticism we touched on last week, gone in the direction of poptimism - the idea that what is popular is not necessarily inherently valueless, and deserves at least as much consideration as more consciously artistic fare. At least, that's what poptimism is in theory. In practice, poptimism just ends up being criticism that implores you to listen/watch what is already being pushed, not necessarily what's the most popular, nothing more than advertising for the biggest hits with a sheen of credibility and moral goodness attached. In extreme cases, it becomes a moral failing for you to ignore the zeitgeist, "it reveals not your taste in music, but your prejudices. In the worst-case scenario, you may be revealing your unconscious racism and sexism." It's very simple: if they were actually focusing on things that were popular with no ulterior motive Gerry Cinnamon and Sam Fender would be on the frontpage of every music publication on the planet and not whatever meme bedroom pop Sony are backing this month. Nowhere is this bias more obvious than Pitchfork, who went from championing obscure music from all corners of the musical map, to being a Condé-Nast-run hype machine for artists signed to one of the Big Three record labels. The below tweet is fake, but only just.

Pitchfork: King PU$$Y Eater revolutionizes our perception of bodies and spaces with his hit single "Goop on Ya Grinch" [7.6]

— bucks hat atelier (@JucheMane) April 14, 2017

It's the same kind of deal for film, which, of course, plays right into Disney's hands.

My dad once told me about a radio programme he'd listened to that suggested the reverence we now show to celebrities was previously given to saints, and I've not been able to get that idea out of my head since. Of course God is dead, and that has its own ramifications, but the loss of the saints is an altogether different problem. The best thing about saints is that they are a local phenomenon, and you guys know how I feel about keeping things local. "Isn't this about Marvel?" I'll get back to it, I promise. Of course, there's George, David, Andrew, and Patrick, but I mean even more local than that. Consider St Edmund of East Anglia, the actually English patron saint of England; Werburgh for Cheshire, Piran for Cornwall, Candida for Dorset; or Robert Grosseteste. Grosseteste was bishop of Lincoln and widely beloved, and thought of as a saint, across England at the time of his death, but he was never properly venerated by the Church, despite numerous campaigns. The title of this post is me imagining how our medieval forefathers would've used Twitter in order to try and bait the pope into finally venerating Robert. 

@theVatican: "Here are todays scriptures and diets, stay #blessed!" 

@StEddieSZN: "fuck off and announce grosseteste already"

Robert Grosseteste | Welcome To The Canon??? | Skills and Miracles 1175-1253

This is the point. God is all the omnis and everything, but saints were a bridge between the supernatural and the quotidian. Maybe they were from your ends, maybe they shared a profession with you, but in any case the stories behind them resonated, and were shared amongst you and your people - "St Edmund stood up to the Great Heathen Army, and though he perished, we honour him in St Edmundsbury," or "St Piran reintroduced tin smelting to our great county of Cornwall" or "St. Martin de Porres was a Peruvian literal bastard that was able to overcome the inherent racism of the Catholic Church at the time and embody the teachings of Jesus in his daily life." Everyone knew the story, everyone would come together at the right time of year and celebrate as a group - "is it Saint Swithun's Day already, Aunt Helga?" - and this connection of people, this shared well of understanding, is the job of a mythology more than anything else. Pure metis over the episteme of "ACTUALLY TIN SMELTING HAD EXISTED IN CORNWALL SINCE-" No one cares, sweetheart, remember that knowledge =/= wisdom and go back to being correct but alone, yeah? "You know Tyr didn't actually get his arm eaten by a massive dog, right?" There is absolutely no hope for you.

This practice is still upheld in places that are still culturally Christian, and they often skip the Grosseteste nonsense and decide people are saints without waiting the Church. "England is culturally Christian!" England is culturally Anglican and Methodist, or more simply "Christianity with all the bantz taken out." I'm talking about Catholics, the Orthodox Churches, that kinda thing. By the way, this is how you know if an atheist converts to some boring, austere subdenomination of Protestantism they are serious about the Jesus part (or they really, REALLY fucked up their life and want to feel extra guilty), and if they convert to Orthodoxy or Catholicism they are doing it for all the banter parts like the free wine and Byzantine art and, indeed, the folk saints. Russians have taken to treating this man killed in the Chechen war as a saint, and in fairness he did die in the exact same way (with updated tech) as Saint Edmund, for the exact same reason. Latin America has a rich tradition of valorising random people they believe to have done good works, to the point that northern Mexico has a patron saint of moving weight. Of course, actual ecclesiastical authorities hate this bullshit, but, without going too Blakean here, that's a good thing. We just read how the Peruvian church hated San Martin, and he's now the black Christ of the Andes. This is how you gatekeep the right people. Saints belong to you, not the Vatican, and Sam Fender belongs to Novocastrians, not the NME.

Mythology is a group of archetypes and classic stories that allow us to develop a shared understanding of the world; this is true for Greek mythology, Roman, Norse, even the Bible - in the correct milieu, you reference a story, a person from these mythologies and everyone understands what you mean. Problem is now, unless you are either a nerd (hey, it's me!) or a church girl that go to church and read her bible, these references mean nothing to you. Be honest, how many of you man knew who Bellerophon was when I mentioned him earlier? Freyja? Isaiah? What is one of the few things left that a large number of your peers WILL understand when you reference it? The Avengers! I would also have accepted the Simpsons.

You may be able to see where I'm going with this. The MCU is our canon, each individual film a hagiography, and each moviegoer a disciple. People know what you mean when you say "oh man he totally hulked out," they know what you're referencing when you say "I understood that reference." The release date of a new film is your feast day - the whole community comes together to eat, drink, and be told a good story. And sho on, and sho on *sniff*. The result being, any dissent is tantamount to blasphemy, except instead of saying you'll go to hell, people send you that horrible "let people enjoy things" comic. The fans take an attack on the films almost as seriously as a Christian would take an attack on their faith. Remember, 'fanatic' was a Christian term first, and not a particularly positive one. Scorsese and the mandem are therefore edgy iconoclasts who simply cannot mean what they say about the Marvel films in the eyes of the sycophants. I look forward to him and Coppolla co-producing a film called 'Triggered?????' by the fourth quarter of 2021.

This is where things get problematic from an artistic perspective. You see, I'm personally of the opinion that all artistic innovation is driven by reaction and, most crucially, hatred, just as much as it is love. I will expand on this more in a later post but using the metaphor I've been using throughout this period, the Renaissance was a rejection of prohibitive Christian tradition as much as it was a return to the Classicism of Ancient Greece and Rome. The Renaissance was ALSO Italy (what's now Italy, anyway, it was all sorts of nonsense states back then) saying "fuck you" to the Northern Europeans they'd despised since the Goths had sacked Rome. Then the Mannerists react to the Renaissance's obsession with mathematical, quantifiable beauty in favour of elongated, unrealistic proportions and unnatural light sources. Mannerism lasts a lot longer in the newly rich (i.e. newly blessed with "fuck you, Italy" money) Netherlands and Germany than it does on the Mediterranean. Fuck you, Southern Europe. The Enlightenment thinkers and writers were trying to escape the shackles placed upon them by that austere English Christianity only to have the Romantics rebel against the mind forg'd manacles the Enlightenment produced in place of Jesus and Cromwell. You want poptimism? "Romantic" means "in the style of poor fuckers that speak Vulgar Latin and not Church Latin like us" . You know, the populace. "Gothic" means "in the style of those fucking ugly Germans that destroyed our gorgeous Roman Empire." Beauty and art is when you piss off Italians, is the moral here. You gatekept the right people.

"my name is Cathedral Church of Christ and the Blessed Mary the Virgin, of Worcester, i hav long ogives of Cotswold limestone that reach down to my mid-back, an me an my frends St Edmunsbry an Cantabry are goffik as hell. FUCK ITALIAN PREPS!!!!1!"

But how do you artistically rebel against Marvel? They're part of, according to Forbes, the thirty-sixth biggest company on the planet. You're not getting them monetarily. They routinely collaborate with the CIA on weapon and set design-type things, so you're not hitting them militarily. Martin Scorsese, one of the most respected film makers on the planet, the living director with the most Oscar nominations, one of the 100 most influental people in the world according to this other dumb magazine, expressed some mild discomfort with Marvel's utter domination of the movie industry, and was immediately excommunicated by an entire swathe of people that claim to love film as out of touch, old hat, and probably some kind of -ist because Marvel has [minority] in. I am a twenty-something with: a Squier Jazzmaster with a broken bridge pickup, 34 33, I drank another one while writing, cans of Carlsberg in the kitchen, and an infrequently-updated blog. I somehow doubt it will be me to break the critical hegemony.

Thus, the reason "Marvel discourse" is undending and so full of vitriol over what are objectively just normal, perfectly 6/10 films, is the wider cultural and political questions hidden in "they're just good films!" It's another classic Twitter topic where people are talking past each other; one group is saying "I like Thanos,", another is saying "I dislike one company dominating art", and they cannot see that this discourse is driven by this third group of brain-damaged nonces that think Captain Marvel is the patron saint of being a heckin' #GirlBoss. Blame the handmaidens for capital at your shitrag magazine of choice saying Black Panther represents a triumph of unfettered Blackness on screen, not your mate that thinks Iron Man is pretty cool.

One last tangent: for all the talk of art being the most effective political statement in 'left-wing' circles there is strikingly little attention to paid to actual artistic decisions and political realities. If you want to analyse my art, it is not simply enough to say that I am a Black person making music in 2020, and isn't that the strongest statement of all? That's actually your politics being projected onto a Blank Black slate. You need to analyse the fact that a song was sung in Portuguese to make its boring and unpalatable subject matter sound more beautiful. You need to note that the guitar solo in said song is simply the melodies to 'London Is The Place For Me' and 'Cricket, Lovely Cricket' pasted together and what that says about my understanding of the immigrant experience. And if you want to go further you can analyse that writing an entire album akin to staring at a photo of Tooting Market and howling "look how they massacred my boy!" is sadly symptomatic of the modern social-democratic tendency to look to an unreclaimable past as a gold standard (or clock that I just used a line from a Coppola movie to tie this tangent back into the main point. Blogs are art, too.). 

Or you can leave it at "wow the girl is horny just like Robert Plant was horny amazing!", it's honestly up to you. Obligatory TLP: 'What's crazy about this crazy person is that she's crazy, if she did this in the name of her own psychopathology we could happily ignore her, but she's doing this for women, she's saying it's for women, when what you want to say is, "you know this makes people hate women, right?"  Mr. McDonalds didn't do it for men, or even as a man, he just did it, why do you have to drag the rest of the women into your delusions?' (note: I actually quite like that Marika Hackman album, it's just ridiculous to pretend being detrimentally horny is a political statement).

ronaldo and messi are both folk saints but i'm not explaining how until next week

Some people think politics gets in the way culture, some people think the inverse, and some people think the link should be constantly made explicit. You're all fuckwits. A friend once half-jokingly said to me "there should be more politics in football." as the players kneeled for Black Lives Matter. Next week I'm going to try and tackle why that's hopelessly backwards. In the mean time, read this quote from a believer, in the NYT article on Russian folk saint Yevgeny Rodinov. Read it as many times as you can. There's a lot going with it.

''He proved that now, after so many decades of raging atheism, after so many years of unrestrained nihilism, Russia is capable, as in earlier times, of giving birth to a martyr for Christ, which means it is unconquerable.''