Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

November 24, 2016

Faeces on Trump 3

Jack Graham chapter two, Coen Bros, fascism, ferguson, militia, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (NES), trump 3

Or ‘These Theses on Faeces and Fasces’

First some very important business. There’s a new podcast in town, Wrong With Authority, created and starring myself and my friends, familiar to you all, Daniel Harper, James Murphy, and Kit Power. It’s yet another movie podcast… but it’s also about History. So that’s exciting then. Specifically, it’s about movies about historical events, and how full of shit they are. Our first episode is just out and it covers the movies Murder by Decree and From Hell (adapted from a graphic novel some of you may have heard of) and their relationship to the historical ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders. Download our first episode here. And please feel free to recommend and share. We won’t mind, I promise.

As you probably noticed, the word ‘fascism’ is being thrown around a lot in response to Trump and his election. I don’t happen to think terminological issues are unimportant. I think this issue is worth investigating.

For instance, I agree with Phil that the term ‘alt-Right’ cannot and should not be reduced to ‘neo-Nazi’. Just to be clear (as if I haven’t made it clear where I stand): this is not in any way to defend the alt-Right, who I think are just about the most contemptible rabblement of toxic shitbags on the planet. But they’re their own distinct flavour of toxicity, and the emergence of this flavour helps us know where we are now, and why. Terminology is important precisely because it enables us to get a grip on complexities like this. The intentions of many who are saying that “alt-Right = Neo-Nazi” are, no doubt, honourable, in that they are trying to expose a dirty truth that is being concealed. And the claimed equivalence has more than a germ of truth in it. However, the conflation is potentially damaging. The alt-Right do, no doubt, share much that is crucial in common with Nazis, whether we use that term specifically or colloquially. And I’ve referred to both Milo Yiannopoulos and Davis Aurini as Nazis in the past, with justification I think. However, the alt-Right are a distinct phenomenon.

This terminological issue is why I took a post to (roughly) define fascism in what I think are the correct objective terms. There is a risk when you take this approach of falling into pedantry for its own sake, which won’t help anyone. But I hope I have more to offer than just doing the equivalent of quoting the dictionary during a debate. I’m going to try to test Trumpism against my definition. Not in an attempt to decide whether Trumpism ‘is’ or ‘isn’t’ fascism in some simplistic way. As I said at the head of my last post, fascism shouldn’t be reified and essentialized into an alien thing squatting outside the real world, a distinct and discrete entity that can be identified in the same way as a specific variety of phage or bacterium. Political realities may have lineages and heredities and families but they don’t have DNA fingerprints.…

June 8, 2014

Sensor Scan: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Forest of Illusions Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Sensor Scans 9

My house sits on a small meadow, at different tiers owing to the craggy glacial deposits that make up this part of the country. The lower portion of the meadow is flat, tapering off from its hilly upper portions and ending in a small pond we used to swim in a lot when I was younger. We don’t swim in it anymore though because a series of powerful rainstorms followed by two consecutive hurricanes in recent years, caused the pond to overflow its banks, kickstarting the process of ecological succession. It’s now slowly transforming into a wetland. The children of the previous owners liked baseball a lot, and used to use this part of the meadow as a baseball field. In fact, you can still see the small piece of shale they would use as home plate, though each year it vanishes further and further into the ground as the grass grows around it. The meadow is surrounded on all sides by mixed broadleaf forest, and on certain summer days in June the wind hits the deciduous trees at such an angle that the sunlight is reflected brilliantly off the bottoms of the leaves. If you were to look up on those days, you would see towering, rolling structures of cloud drifting by in the endlessly deep blue summer sky, and might catch a glimpse of a distant plane travelling far overhead.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is not a movie. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is not a manga. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is somebody’s magnum opus. This is a life’s work collected to chronicle one person’s metamorphosis and growth over the course of a career. The piece we get to look at today is but a tiny, tiny fraction of an indescribably, incomparably sprawling work of philosophy and emotion (as all works of art ultimately are, but this one embodies this truth better than others), and yet even so it still manages to be a crystal clear, defining statement by and about its creator, even if it only catches him at one specific moment in time.

Where can I even begin talking about something like this? I suppose with Nausicaä’s medium, Hayao Miyazaki, an artist who is as acclaimed and beloved as he is misunderstood. Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli are major players in what’s often called the Renaissance Age of Animation: Roughly lasting the period between 1985 and 1995 (though people do squabble over the start and end dates), this period saw animation as a medium almost completely casting aside the negative connotations it had accumulated, however fairly or unfairly that may be, over the course of the Long 1960s. For the first time since the 1940s, critics began to sit up and take notice of the work animators were doing and cartoons began to be taken seriously as legitimate forms of creative expression for what was, in retrospect, probably the last time.

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