Welcome to the existential nightmare that is known to most as STARGATE. Stargate was a PG-13 sci-fi epic that was released in the summer of 1994 to lack-luster reviews, but some popular acclaim. The many critics that panned this film concentrated on what they believed were plotholes and sub-standard creative abilities on the part of the script. Stargate, they belived, was a badly written story, and with their strict time restraints in viewing new releases, the critics were forced(?) to move on to the next lemon without giving Stargate a more careful look. The general audience did more or less the same. That had turned out to be an earth-shattering mistake.
The official synopsis is as follows: A discredited Egyptologist, Daniel Jackson (played by James Spader), decyphers the function of an ancient mechanical portal, long buried in the sands of Giza. Upon which, the air force dispatches a team of "military specialists" to utilize the portal to transport themselves halfway across the universe to a desert planet inhabited by north africans, "enslaved" to labor in quartz mines by an astounding being identified as the Egyptian god, Ra. In the coarse of events, the specialists do battle with the sun god, "liberate" the down-trodden inhabitants from forced servitude, and rescue the earth from total inihilation at the hands of Ra. An erroneous social and political context was applied by the audience when they had viewed this film and certain salient details about the characters, their behavior, and their motivations have all been left unsaid…or even unnoticed. The erroneous context applied was simply that this is just a "movie". Stargate is not just a science fiction film. I would be more accurrate if I were to refer to it as a parable about a particular event….our present situation in Iraq, how we came to be involved there, and the moral, ethical, and psychiatric disposition of the people who got us there.
The movie STARGATE never made any sense as a science fiction tale, but as a primer of ideological aggression of the reactionary persuasion, it is nothing less than an emotional template of what may be going on in the heads of the Bush Crime Cartel and their immeadiate adherents in the right wing. Certain details may not match up, but, as we all have seen, the results are generally the same.
It is with this that I find Stargate so facinating. There were many films that tout, explicitly or implicitly, sociopathic erges and bias, but I believe that STARGATE is the first film that is so totally self-aware and accepting of its anti-humanist leanings, that for reasons only known to themselves, the producers allowed, in the script, subtle hints and clues that the sun god RA is actually little more than the victim of Colonel O’Niel’s military aggression, and it is the Colonel himself who is more worthy of being designated the "villian". These so-called clues are definite and unshakable, once they are percieved.
Unfortunately, "perception", as in the case of watching this film, is a matter of political outlook. Far too many people watched this film and could not see below its glossy, symbolistic superficiality. Noone was watching too closely, or listening too carefully.
The "facts" are as follows:
Colonel Jack O’Niel, a deranged and suicidal individual, was given charge of an atomic weapon, presummedly under circumstances that would preclude a sane and well-adjusted man.
O’Niel secretly transport the weapon, unbeknownst to his subordinates in his recon team. The Japanese would refer to this policy as "kamakaze". A recon team without a nuke would be considered "expendable". A recon team WITH a nuke would be considered already "expended".
You know, if a squad of american soldiers were to travel billions of light-years through a stargate, only to arrive on a planet inhabited by harmless, pre-industrial north africans, you would think that relations with these people would go with little trouble….instead of: In the very first instant upon meeting the africans, O’Niel drew his weapon and brandished under the nose of a frightened teen-ager. The boy screamed and fled. Noone else in O’Niel’s team saw it fit to draw their own weapons.
Later, and with the very same boy, O’Niel again found it neccessary to menace the boy again with an automatic weapon. The child, merely curious, had attempted to pick up the weapon to examine it. He screamed and fled again after O’Niel’s second assault.
And later still, when O’Niel and his men were, in every respect, "legally" apprehended by Ra’s guards and brought to the throne room to answer for, among other things, the presence of an atomic bomb among their personal effects, O’Niel’s only response was to physically attack everyone in the throne room. All this, within close proximity of a dozen young children, mostly pre-teen. And at the climax of this scuffle, O’Niel trained his weapon at these same children, struggling with the idea of killing them in order to get at a seated and unarmed Ra. At the instant that O’Niel was struck down from behind, it was clear enough that he was losing his "struggle" and was about to pull the trigger.
With a movie audience that’s an expert at drawing moral conclusions based on a quick sketch of moral character in action, how could so many have accepted what has taken place in that room to the point that they ignored all the subsequent war crimes accumilated by O’Niel by the end of the movie? They were numerous:
Needless to say, according to continuity, those same schoolchildren were still in the pyramid when it was destroyed by O’Niel and Jackson. Prior to that, O’Niel led a battillion of heavily armed teenagers on a frontal assault against Ra’s pyramid fortress( All individuals deemed "teenagers", are, in my estimation, well below 18 years in age.). A situation made worse as they took on heavy casualties. If the boys had decided to do this on their own, it’s a tragedy of it’s own making, but they were, apparently, illegally conscripted by O’Niel for combat they weren’t trained to win, in a situation instigated solely by O’Niel. during the same firefight, according to editing, it appeared as though Jackson accidentally shot one of his own boys…he squeezed off a couple of shots backwards over his shoulder without aiming, looking in another direction.
Prior to that, O’Niel captured one of Ra’s guards, an individual barely out of his teens, himself. This person, who surrendered without resistence, was executed with his own weapon by O’Niel, solely to prove to the north africans that the guard was a mortal, like themselves. Prior to that, while hiding in a cave, O’Niel had made the partial admission that his case was less than defensible, but now "that Ra has the bomb", something must be done. Considering that "the bomb" was actually the weapon that O’Niel secretly brought with him from earth in the first place, that kind of circular logic to justify an action movie maybe a disturbing indicator.
And prior to that, During the one verbal confrontation with Ra, The sun god essentially made a rational ultimatum of exchanging the life of O’Niel for the lives of "all who knew" Jackson…implicating the planet earth. By this time, O’Niel was so criminally culpable, that the choice was perfectly easy to make. Needless to say Jackson didn’t make that choice. To be fair, the dialogue did not make that point explicitly clear, but that was the underlining jist of what Ra meant. And although one may resent being dictated terms to by an enemy in a position of power, You must remember, Ra didn’t CHOOSE to be the enemy. It is the most disturbing moral aspect of this movie.
However, on the other hand, the conversation could also be interpreted as your run-of-the-mill "Ming the Merciless" tirade, threatening the earth and it’s inhabitants if Jackson didn’t comply with his demands.
The grammer and syntax of the verbal exchange was so precisely ambiguous, that it was possible for even the most discerning observer to derive two different meanings from Ra’s statements. The verbal acrobatics of this dialogue seems to indicate to me that the producers were well aware of the moral and ethical ambiguity, but sought to lean the movie audience toward the reactionary side by using certain stereotypical cues and signs, like menacing mood music and indicative posturing, to "demonize" Ra’s character before the audience. For example, when I first saw Stargate, I thought Ra was the "heavy", solely because of the way he walks about the throneroom; sexually suggestive, stalking like a cat almost, with a soundtrack that’s just as feline as he is. I knew that no good could come from such a person…..and he hasn’t even spoken his first lines yet. Somehow, "content of character", the exact criteria in judging "good" from "evil", was completely absent from these procedings. When one produces a "good vs evil" action film, but shows a certain disinterest in the core meaning of what "good" and "evil" stands for, then it stands to reason that this character flaw will somehow translate itself into the screenplay….as it did here.
But we needn’t fuck around with such hub-bubbery as this. The film, STARGATE, is obviously politically driven. Do I have a problem with it? I sure do, but it’s not the main thing. The main thing is that so few people percieved the true motivations of this greek tragedy, that if anything like this were to take place in real life, at the expense of american taxdollars, would there be enough people to garner political support to put a stop to it?
Tragically, in our particularly sad case, the answer is no. STARGATE STARGATE STARGATE
STARGATE
supermann Aug 29, 11:41 am show options
Newsgroups: alt.current-events.wtc.bush-knew, alt.impeach.bush, alt.politics.bush, alt.politics.liberalism
From: "supermann" – Find messages by this
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Date: 29 Aug 2005 08:41:22 -0700
Local: Mon, Aug 29 2005 11:41 am
Subject: Re: Christo-Fascism: Apostles of Psychosis
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Day, you paint a rosy picture that makes me glad that Vincent Price is dead. We should expand the number of headers to bring in more people.
The moral contriditions of the scriptual tribes in transit are well known enough, but I always assumed that much of what we’ve discussed could be attributed to bad socialization; deficient moral upbringing, etc. Evil is a deliberate philosophy…you spoke of endocrinological haywiring and mis-fitting genes as if all this dogshit we’re swimming in is the result of some involuntary process, like a rube goldberg machine with a couple of screws missing.
It’s true, what you said about neurotics, and we’re churning them out by the hour, but I don’t think it’s from neo-natal tampering. What we got going on now is enough to fuck up just about anybody. The people
in the middle are simply frightened and they want "the man" to make it all "go away". But "the man", however, has other business. Surely you see criminal intent in all this, don’t you? Cindy Sheehan
wouldn’t be standing out in the middle of "armadillo alley" if she thought that the president only missplaced his medication. I was hoping, really, that we would concentrate more on the socio-economic history of evil, rather than pull out private medical charts on sorted bit-players who are only a fraction of the whole. For example, did you know that western financial institutions during
the 1930’s bankrolled Adolf Hitler’s accendency to the german chancellorship as a military buffer against Stalin, in the east? As difficult as it is for me to speak for pre-war america, I’m almost sure
that the brits had enough fishoil in *their* diet….
supermann,
truncated for
your protection
