Beatrice

I never saw Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but recently I found this post online showing one of its scenes, and explaining the amount of effort and resources it took to achieve such an astonishing level of detail for its spectacle of destruction.

Watching this clip reminded me of Susan Sontag’s essay on science fiction movies, The Imagination of Disaster. “Science fiction films are not about science,” she writes. “They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. In science fiction films disaster is rarely viewed intensively; it is always extensive. It is a matter of quantity and ingenuity. If you will, it is a question of scale.” (Against Interpretation and other essays, New York, Picador, 1961.)

This is what she terms “the aesthetics of destruction.” Many countries share these aesthetics, like Japan most famously in the films of Ishiro Honda, and more recently the remarkable Godzilla Minus One. In Japanese films these aesthetics are tied with the very real trauma of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As such they transmit a deep pain towards what is being wrecked before our eyes, a certain nostalgia for the world as it was before cataclysm struck.

This is not the case for disaster films in the USA, because there is no other country on the planet so obsessed with the idea of its own destruction. We watch film after film where the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty rolls across the streets of New York City, smashing cars and buildings in its wake. City after city is demolished in a colossal symphony of explosions, death, screams, car alarms going off, newscasters struggling to keep up with the spectacle of annihilation unfolding before their awe-struck cameras. The examples of these films are too many and too tedious to list.

The Transformers post shows that these aesthetics cost a lot of money, labor, and natural resources to play on screen. It represents an endeavor that goes beyond the nothingness Hollywood churns out year after year. This is the heart of this type of blockbuster film: to see the country, the corporate-controlled political system of the USA as materialized in its skyscrapers, its military (who could count how many tanks we’ve seen destroyed in US films), its ever-threatened suburbia, all gloriously collapse before our eyes. This is not to be mistaken with a hidden psychological desire of death; sublimated, unconscious, Freudian. It is akin to a spiritual and moral scream. These films are living bonfires of a natural human desire to see a system that has made machines out of people, machines of production whose sole purpose of existence is to further enrich those who are already rich beyond measure, be pulverized to smithereens. The ruling class of the USA defines life as a process of production and consumption, treats art at best as a hobby, at worst with extreme disdain, inventing machines meant to replace the artist (what other system could even come up with a monstrosity like ChatGPT, only one that was never interested in language as the very tissue of life, as a tool of construction, communication, and ultimately love, a system that is itself a factory of "content," a fancy word for stuffing), where science is meant for the purpose of consumerism or militarism, otherwise it is severely distrusted, even persecuted, and we’ll bear witness just to what degree with the new administration. To the great lighthouse of capitalism, life amounts to performance. This is of course not life; if anything it signifies the negation of the kind of life that is the subject of poets and philosophers, the very matter for instance of a child’s world.

The USA exported this dystopia around the world by means of relentless violence: coup d’états, bombings, assassinations. Through the fires of imperialism, it sought to convince humanity that life amounted to production and consumption, to appearance: owning a computer that could fit in your pocket, driving a powerful car, all of these “goods” that are empty of the things that make humanity fascinating, such as dreams, imagination, diversity of culture. By force or coercion through indoctrination, the fires of imperialism were just that: flames burning beauty.

The richest country on the planet could never take care of its own. It was never interested in it. Its corporations, devoid of compassion, imagination, kindness, drained and withered away the social fabric. What remains is a devotion to sheer nihilism. Progress—the central idea of the USA—has been rendered an illusion by the stark reality of wasteland in every sense: environmental as evidenced by the geological cataclysm that is climate change, moral as shown in the infuriating hypocrisy of Democrats, or spiritual, where someone like Donald Trump is literally seen as an envoy of the heavens.

Through its aesthetics of destruction, the USA dreams of its own immolation. In the 2024 election, it has acted on those dreams. Liberals blame the rise of fascism on voters. This is not entirely without basis. There are people out there who would vote for a fascist, who would actively support and campaign for a fascist, if it meant paying less taxes. Yet the extreme capitalism liberals espoused forced voters into an unimaginably bleak choice, between the Democrats, offering nothing but their bloodstained handshakes and lying smiles (see this Republican flyer in Michigan for instance), and the Republicans and their racist, misogynist, Christian nationalist project for the country. People are so indoctrinated they decry the death of democracy when there was none to begin with. Let alone that the Electoral College was built on the foundation of a slave economy and designed to protect the interests of the privileged—those who anointed Donald Trump were not the voters. They are the most powerful people in the world. They control the electoral system through voter suppression, super PACs, corporate media, and most importantly, the equivalent of twenty-first century gold: behavioral futures. In capitalism’s civil war, Silicon Valley obliterated Wall Street’s candidate.

And it is this corporate class, this plutocracy, who above anyone else, yearns for its own destruction. It is the reason why it seeks to burn the last drop of oil on Earth and extinguish the human experiment as we know it. Because life as production, life as consumption, life as performance—is not life, is not worth the time and effort. This is a consciousness that actively and relentlessly pursues its own death through the greatest concentration of power history has ever seen. It knows not what else to do, for all the money it’s made has bought it an eternity of tedium.

This is the death of the imagination. This is T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. One does not relinquish such a dismal way of thinking by “resisting,” by rejecting their values. Resisting implies a reaction to a force, and this nihilism is already ash. Living, in the real sense, in the full sense, the act of forging a self through time—that is beyond a reaction. Like a river, like a sea, a bird’s flight, a star’s motion: it embodies a force.

And when one acknowledges this force as freedom, one can only laugh at the pretense of liberty, the dangling puppet they mistook and continue to preach as the real thing.

The current global panorama is cause for despair indeed. It has been for a long time. If one lives in Gaza, it is hard to imagine how things can get any worse. If we are among the privileged, the situation is akin to standing on the ledge of hell, knowing full well we must inevitably descend.

Dante, in the most beautiful, most incredible work of art human hands have ever made, shows us exactly how to descend into hell. All it takes is a single word. One name is all that is necessary: Beatrice.

Beatrice: beauty, love, illusion, ghost, hope, yearning, salvation, transcendence all in one. Beatrice can be those we love the most. Beatrice can be an idea.

My Beatrice has a name. Her name is ANARCHY.