Some persistent bug had me under the weather last week. Consequently I watched even more movies than usual, with shows divided between those I stream while knitting and those I devour intently. Given the quality of what’s currently out there, the “knitting” category covered about 90% of my movie diet, with the remaining 10% providing a sigh of relief.
I photographed at the waterfront in San Francisco in September 2020, around noon. The smoke from the fires blocked out the sun. These colors are not manipulated.
In the latter category, one series stood out in particular. It’s a French/Belgian production from 2020, now playing on the Sundance Channel, called Moloch. Not for the faint of heart – the series contains not just very violent images, it also creates pervasive fear in any viewer sensitive to horror and asks disturbing psychological questions that we have to answer ourselves. It offers magic realism as a plot device, but it is also as smart a documentation as they come of what ails our societies, and delivers superb psychodrama. Next to the terrific acting, the cinematography is brilliant, mirroring the suffering of its protagonists in the desolate land- and cityscapes that are as beautiful as paintings. If you plan on viewing it and don’t want spoilers, stop reading here!
The plot revolves around people spontaneously combusting into columns of fire in a Northern French coastal town. An unlikely duo of a young journalist and an older psychiatrist team up to solve the mystery, both burdened with tragedies of their own. A number of the psychiatrist’s patients are peripherally involved, as potential victims or perpetrators of the deeds, no one knows. As the story unfolds, the crimes are attributed by the increasingly riled population to Moloch, the ancient God of Fire to whom children were regularly sacrificed. (Evidence concerning Moloch worship in ancient Israel, by the way, is found in the legal, as well as in the historical and prophetic literature of the Bible, in the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy, the Books of Kings and Numbers. The Moloch cult was an established institution with a fixed location (the Topheth), at Carthage, a colony founded by Phoenicians on the coast of Northeast Tunisia. Archaeological discoveries at Carthage attest some 20,000 burials of infant bones along with animal bones in what are evidently was institutional sacrifice. )(Ref.)
The film’s victims of these seeming self-immolations are all revealed to have been violent, cruel and abusive in their own right, and the steady background noise of radio and news reports points to larger syndicates as well, recklessly polluting the sea with toxic run-offs, setting a general tone of late-stage capitalism dysphoria.
Some part of the population, however, thrives on the sense that justice is done in an unjust world, a world that sees repeat areas of violation: child abuse, sexting among teenagers bent on shaming young girls, crimes related to drug dealing, bankers driving people into ruin, and so on. The treatment of immigration – refugees as witnesses or potential perpetrators – slowly emerges, with a compassionate lens on the fate of African migrants whose suffering makes them buy into religious frenzy of an avenging God.
The core issue, though, turns out to be anger, depicted in various degrees and various manifestations, ultimately so intense in those who have no means to escape it, that it becomes fiery enough to immolate hated targets. And what, at first, was meant to be a crusade for a better world, with victims given a chance to change their behavior lest being punished, becomes in the end a reckless tour of revenge, blind with fury. The allegory of a society devouring its young who then strike back by sacrificing representatives of said system, ultimately ends in self-sacrifice of the perpetrator. And the viewer’s own moral compass is by then upside down, feeling only compassion for a life un-lived, turned to evil. All this is narrated in long, calm, pensive scenes, only occasionally disrupted by action shots.
Who needs such bleakness, you ask? My answer: any work of art that teaches us something about our state of affairs might help us, in turn, to promote some change, if only we are courageous enough to look. Regarding the particular theme of Moloch, the best artists of their times picked it up – just re-watch Metropolis from 1927 or re-read Allen Ginsberg. (More below.)
I think the question why so many young men (and increasingly some young women) are turning to dreams or actualization of violence, to revenge fantasies concerning a world that is seen as depriving them, trapping and suffocating them, needs to be investigated. How can we convey that it is not feminism, or DEI, or some other convenient subgroup thwarting them, dangled as culprits before their eyes by some politicians eager for foot soldiers? Flooding them with ideology that keeps them in suspension, unable to think of and realize a productive future for themselves?
What can be done to unravel myth from reality about the causes of inequality, injustice and purposeless lives for entire generations experiencing a steady drop in life quality and life expectancy, leading to ubiquitous anger? If a film makes you think about those issues along parallel lines, brings them up with metaphors that grab you emotionally as well as philosophically, more power to it, even if it uses the tropes of thriller-cum-horror movie as a vehicle.
Here is poetry published in 1956 (!) alerting us to the point: an excerpt of Allen Ginsberg‘s Howl.
II.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
(The entire written poem can be found here. A reading by Ginsberg himself here.)
Here is new music for an old (1927) silent movie: the Moloch Scene in Metropolis, rescored by Matt Mason.
