How things that want me to write about them find me
If I’m lucky I’ll still be able to sneak this post in on April 1st. I wasn’t even going to write it until I saw the date this morning. The content had been amassed, but I’d been thinking in terms of fleas and elephant guns and was going to give it a pass, but here we are…
Told you before that I keep the TV on all night to bore me to drone me to sleep or drone me back to sleep when I wake up with some harebrained idea in the dark. One of my reliables is a weird ROKU channel called Screambox, which takes pride in showing horror movies that are really gory and edgy in terms of their, uh, inspiration. How I finally saw Re-Animator and the Puppet Master series. Low budget flicks with a cult following but often not easily found on other streaming services. Not recommended films even if they are buried in the searchable archives. Screambox is kind of a Zuckerberg ideal, however, featuring a neo-Victorian prudery that is content to show you decapitations in closeup but blurs offending parts,of the screen the instant breasts or buttocks swim into view. Which makes movies like are-animator and its sequels unwatchable in their blood-drenched climactic scenes involving unclad woman parts.
Sometimes curiosity get the better of me. What’s so awful that it’s more offensive than a cannibalistic brain devouring everyone in the mad scientist’s demolished laboratory? Thanks to IMDB, It’s possible to unearth unbowdlerized versions of (some of) these movies on other streaming services. How this post came to be. A strange little horror fest called “The Editor” kept showing up on Screambox in the middle of the night. I never saw more than a few minutes of it at the time, but there were the usual infantile body blurs and the script was its own extended blur of semi-serious intention and grotesque violence. Found it the other day at Plex and half-watched it while aI was working on other stuff. The parts I saw still made no sense and the movie ended as abruptly as it had begun. I thought maybe Plex had glitched (it does that) and backscreened to where I’d started it. But it took me to a screen with “The Editor” and another box graphic displayed side by side. Maybe Plex was actually trying to help. The other title was “Director’s Cut.” Could this be an explanation of what the half-assed director/writer combo had had in mind?
So I watched “Director’s Cut,” or a little more than half of it with nearly undivided attention. It wasn’t about “The Editor.” It was an experimental moviemaking effort by the fading celebrity magician Penn Jillette. Why I’m writing this right now.
During his rise to fame I had been sort of a fan. He was a brilliant magician, who combined humor and with with innovative illusions and presentation style. He had a kind of carbuncle attachment named Teller who never spoke but was always there and always presumed to be part of the brains of the ‘team,’ such as it was. Teller mostly performed the setup functions a magician’s assistant usually handles, unless a pretty girl was called for.
They weren’t exactly Laurel & Hardy or even Abbott & Costello. More
like Groucho and Harpo without the harp or any other funny business.
When Penn grew bored with doing mere magic shows, he began snitching on his own profession, revealing some of the “how-to’s” that distinguish illusions from actual magic. This bore me pretty quickly, since I had never confused magic tricks with the paranormal, and I only looked in a few times when he got more ambitious and started doing the same schtick with religion and other belief systems, which affirmed his increasingly outspoken atheism and cynical political views. He seemed lefty without the “Save the World” mentality, which isn’t entirely a bad thing except that it also gets pretty boring pretty quickly. What, if anything, was he actually attempting to do and be?
Here's the trailer for “Director’s Cut”:
The trailer is representative of the film but not very explanatory. Overall it’s a ruthless takedown of moviemaking conventions, exposing screenwriter tricks, fake physics in special effects, stunt casting, and the huge, apparently always ugly egos of the directors who produce unnecessary Director’s Cuts of their own work. Is it ever funny? Yes. Is it clever? Yes, but imagine the clever dialogue of an Oscar Wilde play shouted at you in extreme quasi-3D closeup until the endlessly repeated punchlines have been hammered as flat as a Ming vase sat on by an elephant. I had to give up about a third of the way through.
But I did learn something about the question of what Penn Jillette is trying to do and be. He makes specific reference to the incredibly long tracking shot Orson Welles produced in his masterpiece “Touch of Evil” and proceeded to show off a very long tracking shot of his own. Which was funny to be sure, but it also enabled me to realize that Penn Jillette has some serious Orson Welles issues.
I had noticed some suoerficial parallels between the two men. Welles was also an extremely accomplished magician, and there are probably many of his fans who thought he had devoted himself entirely to this “hobby” as a kind of harmless time killer in the later stages of his life. In his real metier, he was the most significant innovator in the history of the medium, and I had no doubt that Penn Jillette regarded himself as a landmark innovator in his own field. They were both tall men and even bore a certain facial and corporeal resemblance to one another. In fact, as I explored the Internet looking for photos of both men I realized that Jillette might actually have imagined himself turning into Orson Welles.
By the time he made Director’s Cut, Jillette had actually become a kind of cartoon version of himself and, by implication, Welles as well.
The Atheist List is a unique addition in terms of standard Wiki format.
That’s how seriously Penn Jillette takes this aspect of his identity.
The list is interesting for several reasons. You don’t normally see such lists compiled. Why? They’re not very impressive when viewed in any kind of educated context. Yes, there are some famous names: Diderot, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Camus, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins. Also some names famous mostly because they agree loudly Dawkins on the indisputable truth of atheism and Darwinian Evolution: Dennett, Dawkins, and Harris. At least two of the listed luminaries should have asterisks attached. I have always believed that Nietzsche was the most misunderstood of all philosophers. As I writer, I saw that he was more writer than strict philosopher, and I suspected him of having a sense of humor and a penchant for reverse psychology. “God is Dead” is an oxymoron, a falsehood by definition. The “Ubermensch” (aka Superman) is a fiction meant to be laughed at as an indictment of 19th century academic hubris. Not an accident that he was committed and confined for life. In my opinion. Also in my opinion, Christopher Hitchens wrote about his impending death with a palpable regret that he had been unable to believe in God. Which seems less certain than it might in the world of Penn Jillette.
A name not included on the list? Orson Welles. Notwithstanding the fact that Wiki writers managed to push Welles into the atheist camp on the basis of what in these days might be considered a “mean tweet.”
For me, this is actually consistent with the cultural behaviors of Episcopalians in the time he was raised. Maybe he inclined toward disbelief, but there is doubt on that score Wikipedia fails to report. I recall seeing him asked about the difference between atheists and agnostics in a television interview. He replied that agnosticism was the only sensible position, because who can know for sure?, but atheism could be admired for its defiant heroism in the face of so much reasonable doubt. It takes courage to be an atheist, he said. (Yes, I’ve paraphrased him, but I’ll stand by the tenor of what his actual words were communicating.) Why do I believe the makers of the Wiki list were right to omit Welles’s name from it?
Because here’s the actual Wiki entry in full concerning Orson Welles:
This is a life staggering in the immensity of its accomplishments. Orson Welles was a Titan. No other filmmaker is as important and guaranteed of immortality as he is. He is, in fact, more important than the sum total of all the atheists on the Wiki list, but Karl Marx, who is immortal for having done more to prove the folly is substituting the Ubermensch fiction for God in the governance of human affairs.
Atheism is the newest major philosophy in terms of its following of any recorded history. It would have been an impossible notion without the rise and proliferation of Christianity before it. The contributions of atheists to our life affirming cultural are pitiful, nearly nonexistent, in comparison to all the great minds who lived and created civilization before them.
The comparison in terms of accomplishment is so one-sided that it validates the act of comparing Penn Jillette to Orson Welles. One pipsqueak joker possessed of a modicum of talent, one irrepressible creative force that never ever stopped creating new works of art throughout his long life.
Atheists are the pipsqueaks on the scene. No need to get rid of them. They extinct themselves by attracting followers so self-obsessed they cannot bear the burden of bringing the next generation of inheritors into the world.
Here’s the club Penn Jillette really belongs in.
The ones who say nothing that can’t be quantified in a laboratory exists. The ones who GRIN.
Glad I did the work to write this post. Hope you are too.
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