Just like I do! But instead of mocking the wacky beliefs of his correspondents, Dreher likes to praise them and agree with them. I guess he gets better letter-writers than I do.
But no! This guy is nuts. He senses omens of cultural armageddon in the Academy Awards. He is apparently very concerned that the Best Picture award went to a movie that was all about…bestiality. It’s not just cats and dogs living together, it’s human women copulating with fish! That’s all that movie was about!
Full confession: I very much liked The Shape of Water, although I would actually have favored Get Out winning the big award. It’s a nice, gentle story of love triumphing against adversity in a fantastic context. I guess that makes me a sexual prevert and degenerate now.
They haven’t seen the movie, but these two are aghast at what they think is the plot.
He’s talking about The Shape Of Water, a movie in which the female protagonist falls in love with a humanoid amphibian, and has sex with it (“cod coitus,” according to Sonny Bunch). The reader continues:
Even more astounding is that no one seemed to care: the critics, the media and now the Academy all applauded at director Guillermo Del Toro’s “boldness”. The Best Screenplay and Best Foreign Film winners — respectively about a pederastic love story and a trans woman fighting prejudice — look almost tame in comparison, though they’re symptomatic too.
But the movie is so much more! The villain, the excellent Michael Shannon, is a deeply conservative, materialist man who is also a kneejerk Christian — see? Dreher’s ilk have a prominent role in the movie. One of the protagonists is a gay man. The heroine is a disabled poor woman with a mysterious past, who also seems to have gills. The “humanoid amphibian” has supernatural powers, and is actually a kind of god, worshipped in his native land.
There’s so much they could have hated if only they’d seen the movie.
But gosh, they must suffer greatly at the movies if the idea of a trans woman fighting prejudice repulses them. They see everything as an attack.
I agree with the things you say most of the time, but something I think you miss is how the turmoil we’re witnessing is basically a transfer of power from “regular” people to the freaks. Everything previously deemed inferior, abnormal, marginal, obscene is now not only normalized but embraced, even glorified. In his book The Antichrist, Nietzsche denounced Christianity as a perversion of all good and healthy values. He called for a total revolution in values, to overturn Christian morality and replace it with its opposite. That’s what we’re seeing now, at a very deep level.
This wouldn’t matter that much if our new lords weren’t so full of rancor and determined to get their revenge on those who humiliated them, hence the attacks on the various “privileges” that systematically target the representatives of the old order: patriarchy, masculinity, heterosexuality, “whiteness” and — yes — Christianity. As a member of a minority group, this shouldn’t worry me so much, as many aspects of said “old order” were not worth preserving or friendly to me. But I’m telling you, what is coming threatens to be much worse because it’s revenge, not justice.
The Shape of Water is not a revenge story. It’s a love story about people finding happiness outside of conventionality. If you want to see a movie about rancor and revenge and people who attack those who are different, the remake of Death Wish is playing right now. I’m sure torture-porn is more in keeping with Christian values.
Dreher ends with an apocalyptic warning:
Listen to me, conservative Christian readers:
- there are no politicians on earth capable of turning this tide of decadence; the power of culture is far too strong;
- you cannot expect your children to be salt and light to a culture that gives its highest honor to a movie celebrating bestiality as an act of liberation, and a “love letter to love”;
- soon, people who believe the things you do will be regarded as perverted and dangerous to the common good; are you ready for that?
You had better be ready for that. The handwriting is on the wall, and the cracks are widening in the foundations.
Again, if we’re going to prognosticate on the future of our nation based on movies, The Shape of Water gives me far more hope than Death Wish. I’d rather see a love letter to love than a celebration of bloody violent murder.
Actually when I saw it I was struck by the fact that she had subtle ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’-ishness: a foundling near the water with symmetrical ‘scars’ on her neck who took to water …um… like a fish.
I figured it was less bestiality and more extreme sexual dimorphism.
Wasn’t Rod proclaiming a while back that he and his ilk needed to retreat away from the sinful world to their own little compounds of purity in the woods or something? Would he please just go already!
“soon (fundamentalist Christians) will be regarded as perverted and dangerous to the common good…”
Already there. The more we hear from you, the more we correctly feel that.
I haven’t seen shape of water yet, but from all the reviews it sounds like my experience of it will be a conflict between “it’s bad because aquatic ape theory” and “its bad because animal abuse and lack of consent”.
=8/-DX
Christians by and large believe that everything is getting worse and will continue to get worse and worse until Gawd has to step in. Or at least that’s at the core of Christian theology as I understand it, and I was raised in the Anglican church.
So you would expect them to sit back smugly and say “told you so”, but instead they seem to have decided to get actively involved in making things worse and worse. Nice people.
They seem to be like the politicians who rail against government, then try their best to get into government so they can make government ever more awful.
Dreher’s apocalyptic warning carries a strong message: the only way to defeat the liberals who are destroying our God-blessed country is to kill every one of them. In righteous love, of course.
Haven’t Xians been believing that everything is getting worse at least since St Augustine of Hippo* wrote De civitate Dei contra paganos?
_______________________________
* Hipponensis not Hippopotamus!
If only things were changing as much as the wackos think they are.
I’m beginning to believe (OK, actually I figured this out about 30 years ago) that conservatism is simply an expression of profound insecurity.
richardelguru: “Haven’t Xians been believing that everything is getting worse at least since St Augustine of Hippo* wrote De civitate Dei contra paganos?”
Certainly the “Catholic” tradition has, but the reformation spawned a bunch of sects that might or might not believe that. As I said I was raised Anglican and a big point was made about them being “catholic” when I was young. But who knows what the many current sects uniformly agree upon – I gave up trying decades ago.
These people are *really* going to freak out when they find out about this children’s story called Beauty and the Beast. It has “beast” right in the title!
Full Disclosure: The Shape of Water is my favorite film of all time. It is perfection to me. I also *strongly* relate to Giles, like he’s basically me in 20 years. I can’t tell you how happy I am that a queer(ish) film won Best Picture two years in a row.
While I strongly, strongly favored The Shape of Water I would have been completely OK with Get Out winning. I like it a lot, actually would have given the guy who plays Chris best actor over Oldman, and its screenplay win was very much deserved. But I don’t think it’s better than The Shape of Water because some of the film’s creepiness is diminished on repeat viewings. Specifically the film does use jump scares (like 4) and while they are 1) effective (for once) 2) connected to the plot (for once) and 3) minimal they are still jump scares which always lose something on repeat viewers. Peele deserved his directorial nomination but this issue is Get Out in the the middle of the pack for me in direction.
These folks should really watch The Shape of Water. It has a ton of biblical references! And Strickland is actually treated with a little bit of sympathy, at least far more then Captain Videl (Pan’s Labyrinth) or Jacinto (Devil’s Backbone). Sadly I must agree with them on Call Me By You Name (aka Chickenhawk the movie). I literally have no idea why the liberal intelligentsia has embraced that garbage or why any self-respect GB man would embrace. It’s perverse straight washing wish fulfillment.
Hmm, it’s almost like a sense of self-awareness if peeking through. Like they get that what they’re experiencing right now- to the extent it’s actually occurring, and not simply their paranoia fever dreams- is the natural and deserved backlash against their ignorance-born arrogance and hate that has dominated for so long. However, as is their usual inclination, they see the backlash as the problem, not the cause for the backlash.
given that decadence is a personal value judgment on the change it is true that culture in so far as it can be seen as something separate from people, is stronger than anyone person,
. In the name of defense what is being advocated is division of humanity into good and evil.
divide and concur?
uncle frogy
Dreher’s schtick is to publish “readers'” letters that sound suspiciously like Dreher himself. See Roy Edroso’s excellent blog for a record of this history. I think some of his readers have driven cabs for Tom Friedman.
That part about Nietzsche outright contradicts itself. Nietzsche blamed Christianity (along with liberal democracy) for a ‘slave revolt’ in ethics. The values of the past, such as strength, domination, and supremacy would be replaced with the values of modern liberalism, which to Nietzsche resembled a kind of secularized Christianity. But then we get to this part:
“He called for a total revolution in values, to overturn Christian morality and replace it with its opposite. That’s what we’re seeing now, at a very deep level.”
Say what? What we’re seeing now would be the opposite of Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values, and is just a continuation of the Christian ‘slave ethic’ in the form of liberalism and social justice.
Of course they would see that as an attack — she’s fighting prejudice, and they identify with the prejudice!
Wait till next year, when Black Panther: (1) cleans up on nominations and awards; or (2) is shut out; or (3) gets a few technical nominations and not much else; or (4) … It doesn’t matter, the kerfuffle will be huge however it turns out. [I am currently in the pro-clean-up category but I reserve the right to see something even better.]
This is a beautiful example of acknowledging a habit of actually doing harm to people routinely, then getting mad about those people somehow holding it against them. No shit this happened. Maybe without the deliberate campaigns of marginalization and humiliation you wouldn’t be in a position to fear revenge, asshole. As is, the winds are shifting and these motherfuckers should just be happy that we’re more merciful than they are.
“Now”?
So the “freaks” are the ones full of rancor.
Right…
This happened many decades ago.
It was an obvious no brainer.
The three main sacraments of fundie xianity are hate, lies, and hypocrisy. The two minor sacraments are ignorance and greed.
Together they make up the Five Pillars of Fundie Xianity.
PS Dreher knows this.
The real message of his ravings is the usual fundie one.
Dreher: Help, send me more money!!!
The all powerful xian sky monster god always needs more money.
That was my thought.
The Shape of Water looks like a variation on the Walt Disney animated film, Beauty and the Beast. Based on a centuries old French fairy tale.
To be fair, these people freak out about everything. Harry Potter books, horoscopes, yoga, tarot cards, comic books, and the last millennia’s findings of science.
In their creepy, dysfunctional world, the demons aren’t stirring, they own the day and the night.
“I don’t feel like buying pizza from a company owned by somebody who compares me to a pedophile.”
“IT’S THE NIETZSCHEAN ANTICHRIST REVOLUTION! THEY WANT TO MAKE US SLAVES TO THE GAY AGENDA!”
#2:
Yes, he wrote an entire book about it, The Benedict Option, described in the provided NPR link as “A Call For Christians To Withdraw From Modern Life.”
It is really awful how Christians are always being persecuted so much. In fact, the more power they gain the greater their persecution. They can’t even *reliably* see themselves as they are in a good mirror. Self imposed brain death does that to people.
Full confession: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri would have been my pick for Best Picture. I liked Shape of Water, but I do not think it can match Pan’s Labyrinth.