Statistically Speaking of Course, it’s Still The Safest Way to Travel.
Gentlemen, This Man Needs Help.
The first step toward curing any psychological problem is to acknowledge it. When you can put a name and form to it, when you can say what you are lonely for, you’re halfway free. Being conscious is your greatest ally. If you are able to admit to yourself how much you wish to fail, this is the beginning of a cure.
Loneliness for What Is Not Yet
As we will see in the next chapter, Dante describes the lowest level of Hell as the most difficult place of all. It is one hundred percent FROZEN, entirely cold. Loneliness is always cold. It’s inhuman. The worst Hell is the frozen place of unrelatedness, disconnectedness. Hell ice is worse than hellfire.
The second kind of loneliness is the longing for what is possible but has not yet been realized. An alive, vigorous, functioning human being has a vivid intuition of what he is capable of. His intuition leaps forward, and he imagines what is possible. He fantasizes a perfect woman or a love affair that will touch him to the core. He feels lonely for what is not. He thinks that he sees out there what will assuage his loneliness. But that can only happen in here. When our value and sense of meaning are always outside ourselves—there is someone, something, some place, or some condition that will cure our problem, “just as soon as...”— we are stuck in an insoluble problem.
My next book should be entitled Just As Soon As...because “ just as soon as” psychology dominates almost everyone.
• Just as soon as I get married
• Just as soon as I get divorced
• Just as soon as I have more money,
• Just as soon as the cancer treatment is over.
“Just as soon as” is an intermediate stage where you sense what matters to you, but you externalize it and don’t yet claim it as your own. Your felt need might be a new task, a new psychic capacity, or a new insight, but it is too soon to realize that it is your own gold.
To sense this value, even if you cannot yet own it, is a start.
The first kind of loneliness—for what once was— drives us backward and downward. The second kind— for what is not yet—drives us forward and upward. At least this is a progressive loneliness. It drives us to accomplishments.
But both of these kinds of loneliness DRIVE us.
Excerpt from: "Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection" by Arnie Kotler.
Suddenly: The light changes in the Fortress. The giant head of Jor-El materializes on the opposite wall.
JOR-EL
The virtuous spirit has no need for thanks or approval...
LUTHOR
What the...
EVE takes a step back, frightened. LUTHOR looks up at the image with increasing pleasure.
JOR-EL
... only the certain conviction that what has been done is right...
LUTHOR
It's his old man! The kid looks like him! Are you his old man?
EVE
Ask him where the bathroom is.
JOR-EL
... Develop such conviction in yourself...
LUTHOR
Are you here?
JOR-EL
... the human heart on your planet is still subject to small jealousies...
LUTHOR
(catching on)
Aahh, he's not here! He speaks from the past! Cute, very cute...
JOR-EL
... lies, and monstrous deceptions.
LUTHOR yanks the crystal out.
LUTHOR
So much for moral rearmament.
“But there was one fix we couldn’t seem to wrap our collective imagination around: The Marriage.
The Clark-Lois-Superman triangle—
• Clark loves Lois.
• Lois loves Superman.
• Superman loves Clark.
as Elliot S! Maggin put it in his intelligent, charming Superman novel Miracle Monday — seemed intrinsic to the appeal of the stories.”
“Sometimes, when you put your gold onto another person, he also puts his gold onto you.
It gets complicated when the exchange of gold goes both ways.
One of the contaminations of levels that we make— we’re scarcely able to think otherwise—is that the exchange of gold means marriage.
Marriage is good, and gold is good.
They may go together nicely.
But they’re not synonymous. It can be a problem when we mix these things up.
We think, “I’ve fallen in love, I must take her to bed.”
Maybe you will, but that’s not synonymous with falling in love.
In our culture, mutual projection is regarded as the prerequisite for marriage.
We take for granted that we will marry the person we are in love with.
But being in love is not enough to guarantee a successful marriage.
When you fall in love, you feel overwhelmed with excitement.
You’ve projected your gold, your deepest inner value, onto the other person.
You’ve given it to her to incubate for a while, until you are ready to take it back. And if the feeling is mutual, she has given her gold to you.
For the relationship to succeed, somewhere along the way each of you has to take your gold back.
Unfortunately, that’s usually accompanied by disillusionment.
“You’re not the knight I thought you were.”
“You’re not a princess when you wake up in the morning.”
The gold comes clattering down by way of disappointment.
If we could only understand that we put our gold in someone’s lap for a period of time—until we get stronger—and someday it will come to an end.
We aren’t wise in this respect, and it’s one of the most painful issues in our culture.
Five years later, when the relationship isn’t working, we don’t understand that it’s time for us to withdraw our projection and actually relate to the other person —our partner, our spouse.
True marriage can only be based on human love, which is different from romantic love, being in love, or in-loveness. Romanticism is unique to the West, and is a relatively new occurrence, only since the twelfth century. Romantic love is not a basis for marriage. Our human life, our marriage, is fed by the capacity to love human to human. When we’re in love, we put our gold—our expectations—on the other person, and this obliterates her. There is no relatedness.
Loving is a human faculty. We love someone for who that person is. We appreciate and feel a kinship and a closeness. Romantic love, on the other hand, is a kind of divine love. We deify the other person. We ask that person, without knowing it, to be the incarnation of God for us. Being in love is a deep religious experience, for many people the only religious experience they’ll ever have, the last chance God has to catch them.
One reason we hesitate to carry our own gold is that it is dangerously close to God.
Our gold has Godlike characteristics, and it is difficult to bear the weight of it.
I traded my birthright for a life submission in a World that's ruled by your enemies.
Every preference of a small good to a great, or a partial good to a total good, involves the loss for the small or partial good for which the sacrifice was made.
Apparently The World is made that way.
If Esau really got the pottage in return for his birthright, then Esau was a lucky exception.
You can't get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first.
From which it would follow that the question, “What things are first?” is of concern not only to philosophers but to everyone.
To preserve civilization has been the great aim; the collapse of civilization, the great bugbear.
Peace, a high standard of life, hygiene, transport, science and amusement - all these, which are what we usually mean by civilization, have been our ends.
Perhaps it can't be preserved that way.
Perhaps civilization will never be safe until we care for somethingelsemore than we care for it.
What is the first thing?
The only reply I can offer here is thatif we do not know,
then the first, and only practical thing, is to set about finding out.
CS Lewis, God in the Dock
And I began to realise a little bit about how this stuff works.
So beyond that, I decided: “I won’t just use it to get laid, because it seems a pretty low-grade kind of way of dealing with magic.”
But man, it WORKS, Believe me!
[AFTER Kal-El and Lois sleep together in the Fortress of Solitude, Kal-El addresses the image of his father, Jor-El]
Jor-El:
The people of your planet are well pleased with you, Kal-El. You have served them faithfully and they are grateful for it.
And yet you have returned to reason with me once again.
My son, I have tried to anticipate your ever question.
This is one I'd... hoped you would not ask.
Kal-El:
My attatchments, um, the feelings which I have developed for a certain human being have deeply affected me, Father.
Jor-El:
You cannot serve humanity by investing your time and emotion in one human being at the expense of the rest.
The concepts are mutally exclusive.
Kal-El:
And if I no longer wish to serve humanity...
Jor-El:
Is this how you repay their gratitude?
By abandoning the weak, the defenceless, the needy for the sake of you selfish pursuits?
Kal-El:
Selfish!? After all I've done for them?
Will there ever come a time when I've served enough?
At least they get a chance for happiness.
I only ask as much, no more.
Jor-El:
Yours is a higher happiness.
The fulfillment of your mission, as inspiration you must have felt.
You must have felt that happiness within you.
My son, surely you cannot deny that feeling.
Kal-El:
No, I cannot... any more than I can deny the other, which is stronger in me, Father.
So much stronger.
[TODAY.]
Is there no way then, Father? Must I finally be denied the one thing in life which I truly desire?
Jor-El:
If you will not be Kal-El, if you will live as one of them, love their kind as one of them, then it follows that you must become one of them.
This crystal chamber has in it the harnessed rays of the red sun of Krypton.
Once exposed to them all your great powers on Earth will disappear... forever.
Once this is done, there's no going back.
You will feel like an ordinary man and you can be harmed like an ordinary man.
Think, Kal-El, I beg you.
Kal-El:
Father... I love her.
[Yeah, Today....]
Jor-El:
Think, Kal-El.
[Kal-El steps into the chamber]
Father? If you can hear me, I failed.
I failed you, I failed myself, and... and all humanity.
I traded my birthright for a life submission in a world that's ruled by your enemies.
There's nobody left to help them now... the people of the world... not since I... !!!FATHER!!!
Jor-El:
Listen carefully, my son, for we shall never speak again.
If you hear me now then you have made use of the only means left in you:
The crystal source through which our communications began.
The circle is now complete.
You have made a dreadful mistake, Kal-El. You did this of your own free will in spite of all I could say to dissuade you.
Clark Kent:
I, uh...
Jor-El:
Now, you have returned to me for one last chance to redeem yourself.
This too finally I have anticipated, my son.
Clark Kent:
Father, no...
Jor-El:
Look at me, Kal-El.
Once before when you were small, I died while giving you a chance for life.
And now, even though it will exhaust the final energy left within me-
Look at me, Kal-El.
The Kryptonian prophecy will be at once fulfilled.
The son becomes the father, the father becomes the son.
Farewell forever, Kal-El.
Remember me, My Son.
“Mark Millar, Tom Peyer, Mark Waid, and I had approached DC in 1999 with the idea of relaunching Superman for a new generation in a series to be entitled Superman Now or Superman 2000, depending on which version of the story synopsis you read.
We’d spent many enjoyable hours in conversation, working out how to restore our beloved Superman to his preeminent place as the world’s first and best superhero.
Following the lead of the Lois and Clark TV show, the comic-book Superman had, at long last, put a ring on his long-suffering girlfriend’s finger and carried her across the threshold to holy matrimony after six decades of dodging the issue—although it was Clark Kent whom Lois married in public, while Superman had to conceal his wedding band every time he switched from his sober suit and tie.
This newly domesticated Superman was a somehow diminished figure, all but sleepwalking through a sequence of increasingly contrived “event” story lines, which tried in vain to hit the heights of “The Death of Superman” seven years previously.
Superman Now was to be a reaction against this often overemotional and ineffectual Man of Steel, reuniting him with his mythic potential, his archetypal purpose, but there was one fix we couldn’t seem to wrap our collective imagination around: the marriage.
The Clark-Lois-Superman triangle—“Clark loves Lois. Lois loves Superman. Superman loves Clark,” as Elliot S. Maggin put it in his intelligent, charming Superman novel Miracle Monday—seemed intrinsic to the appeal of the stories, but none of us wanted to simply undo the relationship using sorcery, or “memory wipes,” or any other of the hundreds of cheap and unlikely magic-wand plot devices we could have dredged up from the bottom of the barrel.”
“The exuberance of blood –the erect spirit – of Edwardian times had been drained.
“Though in theory there were enough men for most women to marry, that was cold arithmetical nonsense for the hundreds of thousands who had lost The Only One They Ever Loved, and who were still wearing black and would never wed.
The current author is old enough, just, to remember great-aunts who did not marry ‘because of the War’ and lived single lives – albeit quite cheerful ones – focused on fruit cake and friendship.
THE IMPORTANT DISCUSSIONS WE AVOID
Just one of the negatives of portraying life as this endless zero-sum game, between different groups vying for oppressed status, is that it robs us of time and energy for the conversations and thinking that we do need to do.
For example, why is it, after all these decades, that feminists and others have been unable to more fully address the role of Motherhood in Feminism?
As the feminist author Camille Paglia has been typically honest enough to admit, motherhood remains one of the big unresolved questions for feminists.
And that isn’t a small subject to miss or gloss over.
As Paglia herself has written,
‘Feminist ideology has never dealt honestly with the role of The Mother in Human Life.
Its portrayal of history as male oppression and female victimage is a gross distortion of the facts.’
If asked to name her three great heroes of twentieth-century womanhood, Paglia says that she would select Amelia Earhart, Katharine Hepburn and Germaine Greer : three women who Paglia says ‘would symbolize the new twentieth-century woman’.
Yet as she points out, ‘All these women were childless.
Here is one of the great dilemmas facing women at the end of the century.
Second-wave feminist rhetoric placed blame for the female condition entirely on men, or specifically on “patriarchy” . . .
The exclusive focus of feminism was on an external social mechanism that had to be smashed or reformed.
It failed to take into account women’s intricate connection with nature – that is, with procreation.’
Or why, ‘in this era of the career woman, there has been a denigration, or devaluing of the role of motherhood.’
The ongoing dishonesty about this leads to presumption being piled on dishonesty, and ugly, misanthropic notions of the purpose of women becoming embedded in the culture. In January 2019 CNBC ran a piece flagged with the heading, ‘You can save half a million dollars if you don’t have kids’.
As the piece went on: ‘Your friends may tell you having kids made them happier. They’re probably lying.’
It then referenced all the outweighing problems of ‘extra responsibilities, housework and, of course, the costs’.
Or here is how The Economist recently chose to write about what it called ‘the roots of the gender pay gap’, a gap which the magazine claimed has its roots in childhood.
One of the main factors which is responsible for women on average earning less than men during the course of their working life is the fact that women are the ones who bear children. As The Economist put it,
‘Having children lowers women’s lifetime earnings, an outcome known as the “child penalty”.’
It is hard to imagine who could read that phrase, let alone write it, without a shudder.
If it is assumed that the primary purpose in Life is to make as much money as possible, then it is indeed possible that having a child will constitute a ‘penalty’ for a woman and thereby prevent her from having a larger sum of money in her bank account when she dies.
On the other hand, if she chooses to pay that ‘penalty’ she might be fortunate enough to engage in the most important and fulfilling role that a human being can have. There is in that Economist viewpoint something which is widely shared and which has been spreading for decades. On the one hand women have–largely– been relieved of the need to have children if they do not want them, the better to pursue other forms of meaning and purpose in their lives.
But it is not hard for this reorientation of purpose to make it look as though that original, defining human purpose is no purpose at all.
The American agrarian writer Wendell Berry put his finger on this almost 40 years ago when there were already, as he put it, ‘bad times for motherhood’.
The whole concept of motherhood had come to be viewed in a negative way: ‘A kind of biological drudgery, some say, using up women who could do better things.’
But then Berry hit on the central truth:
“We all have to be used up by something.
And though I will never be a mother, I am glad to be used up by motherhood and what it leads to, just as–most of the time–I gladly belong to my wife, my children, and several head of cattle, sheep, and horses.
What better way to be used up?”
Is this not a better way to think about motherhood and life?
In a spirit of love and forgiveness rather than the endless register of resentment and greed?
“Superhero stories were written to be universal and inclusive, but often they’ve been aimed, it must be said, at boys and young men. Perhaps that’s why a mainstream myth has developed in which comic-book superheroines are all big-breasted Playboy girls with impossibly nipped waists and legs like jointed stilts in six-inch heels. But while it’s true that superhero costumes allow artists to draw what is effectively the nude figure in motion, there have in fact been more female superhero body types than male.
The first superheroine, you may be surprised to learn, was not a voluptuous cutie in thigh boots but a raw-faced middle-aged housewife called Ma Hunkel, who wore a blanket cape and a pan on her head in her debut appearance, All-American no. 20, 1940. A harridan with the build of a brick shithouse she was the first “real-world” superhero—with no powers, a DIY outfit, and a strictly local beat—and the first parody of the superhero genre all in one. Ma Hunkel, aka the Red Tornado, was a Lower East Side lampoon of Siegel and Shuster’s lofty idealism.
The mainstream has forgotten Ma Hunkel, although, like all the rest, she’s still a part of the DC universe and now has a granddaughter named Maxine Hunkel, a talkative, realistically proportioned, and likeable teenage girl who also challenges the superbimbo stereotype. But, of course, the comic-book industry in the throes of the war machine did churn out its fair share of pinup bombshells and no-nonsense dames with names like Spitfire and Miss Victory, or the strangely comforting Pat Parker, War Nurse.
With no particular ax to grind against the Axis forces, Pat Parker was driven only by her desire to dress up like a showgirl and take to the battlefields of Western Europe on life-threatening missions of mercy.
She was prepared to take on entire tank divisions with a refugee quivering under each arm. What made her tank-battling activities especially brave was the fact that this war nurse had no special powers and wore a costume so insubstantial, there could be nothing secret about her lunch, let alone her identity. But, absurd as she may seem, she did her best to exemplify the can-do, Rosie the Riveter spirit of those women who were “manning” the home front.
And then there was the most famous superheroine of them all. Wonder Woman was the creation of William Moulton Marston, the man who, not incidentally, invented the controversial polygraph test apparatus, or lie detector, that is still in use today.
Marston was a professor at Columbia and Tufts universities, and Radcliffe College —and a good one, according to accounts of the time— and the author of several respected works of popular psychology. Like other forward thinkers, Marston saw in comics the potential to convey complex ideas in the form of exciting and violent symbolic dramas. He described the great educational potential of the comics in an article titled “Don’t Laugh at the Comics,” which appeared in the popular women’s magazine Family Circle in 1940 and led to his getting hired as an educational consultant at DC-National.
Marston coupled his ideas with an unorthodox lifestyle: his wife, Elizabeth, was also a psychologist, and is credited with having suggested a superheroine character.
Both were enthusiastic proponents of a progressive attitude toward sex and relationships. They shared a mutual lover, a student of Marston’s named Olive Byrne, said to be the physical model for the original Harry Peter drawings of Wonder Woman. Together, Marston and Peter (with indispensable input from Elizabeth and Olive) developed a fantasy world of staggering richness.
For sheer invention, for relentless dedication to the core concept, the Wonder Woman strip far surpassed its competitors. But unlike traditional pinups, the girls of Wonder Woman were athletic and forceful.
They wore tiaras and togas while they engaged in violent gladiatorial contests on the backs of giant, genetically engineered monster kangaroos.
Wonder Woman was traditionally sexy—there were pinup shots—but in most panels, she yomped and stomped like some martial arts majorette, outracing automobiles for fun.
1941’s “Introducing Wonder Woman” began when an air force plane crashed on an uncharted island inhabited exclusively by beautiful scantily clad women capable of carrying the full-grown air force pilot “as if he were a child.”
The man, Captain Steve Trevor of US Army Intelligence, was the first to ever set foot on Paradise Island, and within moments, the queen’s daughter, Princess Diana, had fallen in love.
A two-page illustrated-text section revealed the history of the Amazons since their slavery at the hands of Hercules. Encouraged by their patron goddess Aphrodite, they liberated themselves and set sail for a magical island where they could establish a new civilization of women, far from the cruelty, greed, and violence that typified “Man’s World.”
On Paradise Island, the immortal women set about fashioning their fabulous alternative to patriarchal, heliocentric society.
In this first issue, Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, consulted apparitions of Aphrodite and Athena, who clarified that Trevor had been sent deliberately by the gods.
It was time, apparently, for the Amazons to emerge from seclusion and join the worldwide struggle against Axis tyranny.
Trevor had to be sent home to complete his mission against the enemy—but he was not to return alone.
“YOU MUST SEND WITH HIM THE STRONGEST OF YOUR WONDER WOMEN!—FOR AMERICA, THE LAST CITADEL OF DEMOCRACY, AND OF EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN, NEEDS YOUR HELP!”
A contest was declared to identify the most appropriate candidate.
Tests included outrunning a deer and culminated in the favorite sport of these immortal ladettes: bullets and bracelets. A kind of Russian roulette, the game saw the final contenders facing one another with loaded revolvers (where the staunchly antiwar Amazons managed to get hold of working firearms remains a mystery). Bullets were fired at the opponent, who was obliged to deflect them with her bracelets in order to win the game. The loser took a flesh wound to the shoulder.
In the end one champion remained: a masked brunette, revealed in a not entirely unexpected twist to be Princess Diana herself.
“AND SO DIANA, THE WONDER WOMAN, GIVING UP HER HERITAGE AND HER RIGHT TO ETERNAL LIFE, LEAVES PARADISE ISLAND TO TAKE THE MAN SHE LOVES BACK TO AMERICA—THE LAND SHE LEARNS TO LOVE AND PROTECT, AND ADOPTS AS HER OWN!”
However, within this world—and supplying it with depth and enticing richness—lurked barely hidden libidinal elements.
To begin with, it has to be said that these Amazons were drawn to be sexy.
Whereas Siegel rendered Superman in dynamic futurist lines and Bob Kane gave Batman the look of a Prague potato print, Peter brought a flowing, scrolling quality to his drawings of superwomen in action and at play. Everything was curved and calligraphic. The lips of his women were modishly bee stung and glossy, as if to suggest that Hollywood-style glamour makeup never went out of vogue among the warrior women and philosopher princesses of Paradise Island.
However, as you may expect in a society of immortal women cut off from the rest of the world since classical antiquity, the diversions of the Amazons turned out to be somewhat specialized, to say the least.
As the strips developed, Marston’s prose swooned over detailed accounts of Amazonian chase and capture rituals in which some girls were “eaten” by others.
Moreover thousands of years of sophisticated living without men had bled the phallic thrust out of sexuality, leaving the peculiar, ritualistic eroticism of leash and lock.
Marston and Peter built slavery and shackles into “Meet Wonder Woman,” and as the strip progressed, the bondage elements became more overt, increasing sales.
For instance, chief among Wonder Woman’s weapons of peace was a magic lasso, which compelled anyone bound in its coils to tell the absolute truth and only the truth—shades of Marston’s polygraph.
Moreover, it wasn’t long before she was breathlessly demonstrating the joys of submission to “loving authority”: A Nazi villain’s slave girls were released in one story, with no idea what to do with their lives out of captivity.
Wonder Woman’s solution was to allow them to continue to express their nature as born slaves by relocating to Paradise Island, where they could enjoy bondage under the loving gaze of a kind mistress instead of the crop-cracking Hitler-loving Paula von Gunther.
The flipside of the Amazons’ essentially benign and formalized endorsement of healthy S/M was the dungeon world of sadistic bondage, humiliation, and mind control that existed in the world beyond Paradise Island.
These were crystallized in the form of Doctor Poison, a twisted dwarf in a rubber coat. Wielding a dripping syringe, Poison hated women and loved to humiliate them. In a surprising twist, “he” was revealed to be a mentally ill woman acting out of her frustrations.
The women of Paradise Island embodied an enticing blend of the politically right-on and the libidinous. As such, they were exemplars of a newfangled twentieth-century creed that was the same old bohemian “free love” with a new lexicon culled from psychoanalytical theory and the pink and squeezy world of dreams and desire.
Theirs was a kind of radical Second Wave separatist feminism where men were forbidden and things could only get better as a result.
Indeed, in Marston’s feminine paradise, happiness and security were in far greater supply than elsewhere in the superworld.
In looking at other superhero comics he had noted, “it seemed from a psychological angle that the comics’ worst offence was their blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to the child as the breath of life.”
And so, while Batman was a brooding orphan, and the destruction of Superman’s Krypton had robbed him of his birth parents, the magnificent scientists Jor-El and Lara, Wonder Woman could ride her invisible plane down the rainbow runway to Paradise Island and check in with Mom any time she wanted.
Queen Hippolyta even had a magic mirror that allowed her to observe her daughter at any location on Earth.
It was closed-circuit television by any other name, but in late 1941, Hippolyta’s magic mirror could only be a product of imaginary feminist superscience.
There were some similarities with Wonder Woman’s male predecessors. Like Superman, in his way, Wonder Woman fearlessly championed alternative culture and a powerful vision of outsider politics. And, like Batman, she was thoroughly the progressive sort of aristocrat.
She preached peace in a time of war, although she was as eager as any other superhero to tackle her fair share of Nazis.
Unlike the essentially solitary Batman and Superman, Wonder Woman had a huge cast of friends. Her allies, the Holliday Girls of Beta Lamda, were a rambunctious group of sorority sisters fronted by the immense, freckled redhead Etta Candy.
As the gorgeous Wonder Woman’s inevitable fat pal, Etta’s positive energy and physicality added an earthiness and humor that complemented Diana’s cool grace and perfect poise.
When Marston died of cancer in 1947, the erotic charge left the Wonder Woman strip, and sales declined, never to recover. Without the originality and energy that Marston’s obsessions brought to the stories, Wonder Woman was an exotic bloom starved of rare nutrients.
Once the lush, pervy undercurrents were purged, the character foundered. The island of Themiscyra was scraped clean of any hint of impropriety, and all girl-chasing rituals ceased, along with reader commitment to the character.
It wasn’t long before Wonder Woman was coming across as an odd maiden aunt—a disturbing cross between the Virgin Mary and Mary Tyler Moore; but Elizabeth and Olive, her inspirations, continued to live together.
The unconventional, liberated Elizabeth was one hundred years old when she died in 1993, the true Wonder Woman of this story.”
[After Kal-El and Lois sleep together in the Fortress of Solitude, Kal-El addresses the image of his father, Jor-El]
Jor-El:
The people of Your Planet are well pleased with you, Kal-El.
You have served them faithfully and they are grateful for it.
And yet you have returned to reason with me once again.
My son, I have tried to anticipate your ever question. This is one I'd... hoped you would not ask.
Kal-El:
My attatchments, um, the feelings which I have developed for a certain human being have deeply affected me, Father.
Jor-El:
You CANNOT serve humanity by investing your time and emotion in one human being at the expence of the rest.
The concepts are mutally exclusive.
Kal-El:
And if I no longer wish to serve humanity...
Jor-El:
Is this how you repay their gratitude? By abandoning the weak, the defenceless, the needy for the sake of you selfish pursuits?
Kal-El:
Selfish!? After all I've done for them?
Will there ever come a time when I've served enough? At least they get a chance for happiness. I only ask as much, no more.
Jor-El:
Yours is a higher happiness.
The fulfillment of your mission, as inspiration you must have felt.
You must have felt that happiness within you.
My Son, surely you cannot deny that feeling.
Kal-El:
No, I cannot... any more than I can deny the other, which is stronger in me, Father.
[ Yeah, Now... ]
So much stronger.
Is there no way then, Father?
Must I finally be denied the one thing in life which I truly desire?
[ YES. ]
Jor-El:
If you will not be Kal-El, if you will live as one of them, love their kind as one of them, then it follows that you must become one of them.
This crystal chamber has in it the harnessed rays of The Red Sun of Krypton.
Once exposed to them all your great powers on Earth will disappear... forever.
Once this is done, there's no going back.
You will feel like an ordinary man
and you can be harmed like an ordinary man.
Think, Kal-El, I beg you.
Kal-El:
[with Defiance]
Father... I love her.
Jor-El:
Think, Kal-El.
Think.
[He Doesn’t - Kal-El steps into the chamber]
Father? If you can hear me, I failed. I failed you, I failed myself, and... and all humanity. I traded my birthright for a life submission in a world that's ruled by your enemies. There's nobody left to help them now... the people of the world... not since I...
FATHER!!
Jor-El:
Listen carefully, my son,
for we shall never speak again.
If you hear me now then you have made use of the only means left in you:
The crystal source through which our communications begun.
The circle is now complete.
You have made a dreadful mistake, Kal-El.
You did this of your own free will in spite of all I could say to dissuade you.
Clark Kent:
I, uh...
Jor-El:
Now, you have returned to me for one last chance to redeem yourself.
This too finally I have anticipated, my son.
Clark Kent: Father, no...
Jor-El:
Look at me, Kal-El. Once before when you were small, I died while giving you a chance for life. And now, even though it will exhaust the final energy left within me-
Look at me, Kal-El.
The Kryptonian prophecy will be at once fulfilled.
The son becomes the father, the father becomes the son.
Jor-El: Listen carefully, my son, for we shall never speak again. If you hear me now then you have made use of the only means left in you: The crystal source through which our communications begun.
The circle is now complete.
You have made a dreadful mistake, Kal-El. You did this of your own free will in spite of all I could say to dissuade you.
Clark Kent: I, uh...
Jor-El: Now, you have returned to me for one last chance to redeem yourself. This too finally I have anticipated, My Son.
Clark Kent: Father, no...
Jor-El: Look at me, Kal-El. Once before when you were small, I died while giving you a chance for life. And now, even though it will exhaust the final energy left within me- Look at me, Kal-El.
The Kryptonian prophecy will be at once fulfilled.
The Son becomes the Father, the Father becomes the Son.
The Old Man Must Die - and The New Man will Discover, to His Inexpressible Joy, That He Has Never Existed.
"But ultimately, we all know that Darth Vader’s morepowerful than he is.
He’s The Ultimate Father Who is All Powerful.
THE SON BECOMES THE FATHER, AND THE FATHER THE SON.
DO WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW; LOVE IS THE LAW - LOVE UNDER WILL. AS ABOVE, SO BELOW
It's Christmas in Heaven,
There's Great Films on TV!
'The Sound of Music', Twice an Hour,
and 'Jaws' I, II and III.
GEORGE LUCAS:
It’s essentially The Same in a Different Kind of Way.
Darth Vader was a — A Composite Man. I mean, he was… Half-Machine, Half-Man.
And that’s where he lost a lot of his Humanity is that he — you know, he has mechanical legs. You know — and he has mechanical arms possibly and he’s hooked up to a breathing machine. So there’s not much, actually, Human left in him. This one is all Human. And I wanted him to be like An Alien, but I wanted him to be Human enough that we could identify with — with him. Because he’s not a — a — a sort of a monster we can’t identify with. He’s…
BILL MOYERS:
He’s us.
GEORGE LUCAS:
…he’s — yeah. He’s The Evil within us.
BILL MOYERS:
I’ve had psychotherapists tell me that they use “Star Wars” sometimes to deal with the problems of their child patients. And they’ve said that the most popular character among the children is
Darth Vader.
GEORGE LUCAS:
Well, Children Love Power because Children are The Powerless. And so their fantasies all centre on having Power. And who’s more Powerful than Darth Vader, you know? And, some, you know, will be attracted to Luke Skywalker because he’s The Good Guy But ultimately, we all know that Darth Vader’s morePowerful than he is.
And as time goes on, you discover that He is more powerful because he’s the — He’s The Ultimate Father Who is All Powerful.
BILL MOYERS: This is where I disagree somewhat with our friend Joseph Campbell who said that : " The Young Man has to slay His Father before he can become an adult himself. " It seems to me, and I think you’re right on here, that—
The Young Man has to identify — has to recognize and acknowledge that Heis His Father and is notHis Father. "TO BE OR NOT TO BE?"
GEORGE LUCAS: You know, Joe used to talk about the — the basic issues that — that — that create the Mystery of Life. Of, you know, birth and death, and I like to always add, you know, your relationship with your parents.
BILL MOYERS:
Do you know yet what is going to be the transforming of Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader?
GEORGE LUCAS:
Yeah.
BILL MOYERS:
You already know that?
GEORGE LUCAS:
Yeah, I know what that is. And it’s — it’s — it’s sprinkled throughout this episode. ANAKIN SKYWALKER DOESN'T HAVE A FATHER - AT ALL. AND HE MAY ONLY HAVE A BIRTH-MOTHER, BEFORE ESSENTIALLY BEING ORPAHNED IN EPISODE I (a fact which becomes concrete during the course of Episode II) - IF HIS CONCEPTION WAS THE RESULT OF A 'VERGENCE IN THE FORCE', IT'S PERFECTLY POSSIBLE THAT SHIMI SKYWALKER IS JUST A VESSEL OR A LIVING FORCE-ARK ACTING AS A SURROGATE FOR SOMETHING ELSE, PERHAPS THE FORCE ITSELF, FROM AMONGST THE PANTHEON OF THE INVISIBLE. I mean, it’s — it’s all of the — the groundwork’s been laid in this episode. And the — the film is ultimately about the Dark Side and the light side, and those sides are designed around Compassion and Greed. GREED IS GOOD. Gekko
Well, I appreciate the opportunity you're giving me Mr. Cromwell as the single largest shareholder in Teldar Paper, to speak.
Well, ladies and gentlemen we're not here to indulge in fantasy but in political and economic reality.
America, America has become a second-rate power.
Its trade deficit and its fiscal deficit are at nightmare proportions. Now, in the days of the free market when our country was a top industrial power, there was accountability to the stockholder.
The Carnegies, the Mellons, the men that built this great industrial empire, made sure of it because it was their money at stake. Today, management has no stake in the company!
All together, these men sitting up here own less than three percent of the company.
And where does Mr. Cromwell put his million-dollar salary?
Not in Teldar stock; he owns less than one percent. You own The company. That's right, You, The Stockholder.
And you are all being royally screwed over by these, these bureaucrats, with their luncheons, their hunting and fishing trips, their corporate jets and golden parachutes. Cromwell:
This is an outrage! You're out of line Gekko! Gekko:
Teldar Paper, Mr. Cromwell, Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year.
Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can't figure it out.
One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I'll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these Vice-Presidents.
The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest.
Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated.
In the last seven deals that I've been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars.
Thank you. I am not a Destroyer of Companies. I am a Liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that Greed, for lack of a better word, is Good. Greed is right, Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; Greed for Life, for Money, for Love, Knowledge has marked the upward surge of Mankind.
And Greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much. CHO-JE:
We can but point a finger along the way.
A Man must go inside and face His fears and hopes, his Hates and his loves, and watch them wither away.
Then he will find his True Self, which is No Self.
He will see his True Mind, which is No Mind.
SARAH:
And that's what meditation's all about?
CHO-JE: Yes! The Old Man must die, and The New Man will discover, to his inexpressible joy, that he has never existed. SARAH:
Well, good luck, mate. MIKE:
I think I'm going to need it. SARAH: But if you do start ferreting about in your subconscious, aren't you going to turn up all sorts of nasties? I mean, complexes, phobias and what have you? CHO-JE: Of course, The Demons and The Divinities. But in our way, the Vajrayana Way, we use the powers to help us. If we will excuse me, it's time for the meditation class. MIKE: But couldn't that be dangerous? If these, these powers were used wrongly. CHO-JE: It could be so, yes. By evil men in their ignorance and craving, it could indeed be most dangerous.
MIKE:
I see.
CHO-JE:
Such a thing could never happen here.
****
SARAH:
I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Doctor.
DOCTOR:
What have you got to be sorry about? You did very well. You should be proud of yourself.
SARAH:
To let that creature take me over like that. I mean, I actually volunteered.
K'ANPO:
We are all apt to surrender ourselves to domination. Even the strongest of us.
DOCTOR: Do you mean me?
K'ANPO: Not all spiders sit on the back.
SARAH: Oh, I don't understand. You're not saying they've taken over the Doctor, are you? DOCTOR:
Oh no, Sarah, no. No, he's talking about my Greed.
SARAH:
Greed? You?
DOCTOR:
Yes, my Greed for knowledge, for information. He's saying that all this is basically my fault. If I hadn't taken the crystal in the first place.
I know who you are now...!
K'ANPO: You were always a little slow on the uptake, my boy.
DOCTOR: It's been a long, long time.
SARAH: You know each other?
DOCTOR:
Oh, yes.
Yes, he was my teacher. My, my guru, if you like.
In another time, another place.
K'ANPO:
Another life.
SARAH:
Oh, no. Don't tell me you're a Time Lord too?
K'ANPO:
I am. But the discipline they serve was not for me.
DOCTOR:
No. Nor for me.
K'ANPO:
I wouldn't have chosen your alternative. To borrow a TARDIS was a little naughty, to say the least.
DOCTOR:
Yes, well, I had to get away. I hadn't your power.
K'ANPO: Indeed. I regenerated and came to Earth, to Tibet.
SARAH:
Regenerated?
DOCTOR:
Yes. Yes, when a Time Lord's body wears out, he regenerates, becomes new.
K'ANPO:
That is why we can live such a long time.
SARAH:
I see. Well, what about Cho-Je?
Is he a Time Lord, too?
K'ANPO: In a sense. In another sense, he doesn't exist.
SARAH:
You've lost me.
DOCTOR:
....Me too, I'm afraid.
K'ANPO:
Cho-Je is a projection of my own self. "And we all have those two sides of us and that we have to make sure that those two sides of us are in balance.
BILL MOYERS:
I think it’s going to be very hard for the audience to accept that this innocent cherub almost of a — of a boy, who’s playing Anakin Skywalker, can ever be capable of the things that we know happen later on. And I’m sure you’ll take care of that but, you know, I look at Hitler and wonder what did he look like at eight years old, or Stalin …
GEORGE LUCAS:
Mm-hmm …
BILL MOYERS:
… or …
GEORGE LUCAS:
Well, there are lots of — There’s a lot of people like that. I mean, you just —
You see them all the time
and you — that’s what I wonder : I wonder,
How can those people possibly exist? How could they live with themselves? How could they — You know, what is it in The Human Brain that gives us the capacity to be as Evil as Human Beings have been in The Past and are right now.
BILL MOYERS:
Well, you’ve been probing that for a good while now.
GEORGE LUCAS:
Yeah.
BILL MOYERS:
Twenty-five years. Have you come to any conclusions?
GEORGE LUCAS:
I haven’t.
The Son : Father... if You can hear Me... I failed... I've failed You, I've failed Myself... and all humanity. I've traded my birthright... for a life of submission in a world ruled by Your enemies... There's nobody left to help them now... the people of the world... since I... FATHER!
Father!!
Farther!!
Father!!
Farther!!
Father, into Your hands I commend My spirit,
Father, into Your hands -
Why have You forsaken Me?
In Your eyes, forsaken Me?
In Your thoughts, forsaken Me?
In Your heart forsaken, Me, oh -
Trust in My Self-Righteous Suicide.
I cry,
When angels deserve to die in My Self-Righteous Suicide
I cry,
When angels deserve to die. [as The Son starts to walk away from the crystal console, the remaining crystal starts to glow, he puts it into the crystal console, The Father appears] The Father: Listen carefully my son... for we shall never speak again... if you hear Me now... then You have used the only means left to You... the crystal source in which our communications begun...
The Circle is now Complete.
When I left You, I was but The Learner, now I am The Master.
"Our Rob, or Ross."
The Father:
. You have made a dreadful mistake Kal-El... You Did This of Your Own Free Will... In spite of all I could say to dissuade You... The Son : I... uh... The Father : Now you return to Me for one last chance to redeem Yourself... This, too, I have finally anticipated, My Son... Look at Me, Kal-El... Once before when You were small, I died while giving you a chance for life, and even now though it will exhaust the final energy left within Me The Son : [broken on the verge of tears, turns his head] Father... no... The Father: Look at me Kal-El... The Kryptonian Prophecy will at last be fulfilled... The Son Becomes The Father... The Father Becomes The Son... Farewell forever, Kal-El... Remember Me, My Son... [ Jor-El disappears and reappears next to Kal-El in full form, he places his hand on his shoulder] The Father : My Son... [ The Son is Reborn as God ] " The Young Man has to slay his father before he can become an adult himself. " It seems to me, and I think you’re right on here, that the — that The Young Man has to identify — has to recognize and acknowledge that Heis His Father and is notHis Father. "TO BE OR NOT TO BE?"
The Initiate : No, That's not True. That's Impossible. I Don't Believe it. The Master : This, is why You Fail.
Rimmer Sr:
Arnold, I'm not your father.
Rimmer:
But that's impossible!
It's not true!
Rimmer Sr:
Look inside yourself and you will know I speak the truth.
Your father wasn't me, it's Dungo, our gardener.
Rimmer:
But he's a babbling imbecile!
Lister:
A billion-piece jigsaw suddenly falls into beautiful place....
Blind Drunk Lister (Video Recording) : You're turned out to be a terrible disappointment to me, David. From now on, if you are to continue to live under My Roof, You are going to have to learn to abide by My Rules. It's time for Tough Love - time for a taste of Daddy Discipline. Hungover Lister : This is so unfair! I hate you!! Lister: I remember when my dad died, y'know. I was only six. I got loads of presents off everyone like it was Christmas. I remember wishing a couple more people would die so I could complete my Lego set. My grandma tried to explain, you know. She said he'd gone away and he wasn't coming back. So, I wanted to know where, like, you know. She said he was very happy and he'd gone to the same place as my goldfish. So I thought they'd flushed him down the bog. I thought he was just round the U bend, you know. I used to stuff food down, you know, and magazines and that for him to read. They took me to a child psychologist in the end because they found me with my head down the bowl reading him the football results. Cat: Yeoooowwww!!! My stomach has been pumped and now I'm hungry. Hey, there you are! Hey man, I'm so hungry, I just have to eat!! Lister: Shhhhh!!! Rimmer's dad's just died. Cat: Well, I'd prefer a chicken.... Lister: You never said much about him. You must have been pretty close. Rimmer: Close? Lister: Sorry, very close. Rimmer: Close...? I hated him! Lister: Eh..?! Rimmer: I detested his fat, stupid guts, the pop-eyed, balding git! Lister: Why are you so completely blown away about him dying then? Rimmer: Oh, it doesn't mean to say I didn't respect him, didn't look up to him. It was only natural, he was my father. Lister: There's nothing natural about your family, Rimmer. [ Yeah, takes one to know one... ] All Criticism is Autobiography.
Dig Yourself. "For a long time, you'll think that you were abandoned, but you weren't, man. You were put here to create a paradox, an unbreakable circle. With us going 'round and 'round in time, the human race can never become extinct. We're like... a kind of holding pattern. I'll see ya, son.
Kryten : "Mum"... I never had a Mum...
Holly : [ Her Tiara Askew ] I never had a Mum, neither...
[everyone is drunk] Rimmer: Well, I'd have thought it was obvious. Two people, unable to contain their desires, had an illicit liaison. A liaison, that an unforgiving society would not accept. And you were the fruit of their forbidden passion. You're forbidden passion fruit. Lister: What are you saying, Rimmer? Rimmer: I'm saying that there is a very real possibility that your parents were brother and sister. Lister: Hey. I'm baring my Innermost, here! Rimmer: How many toes have you got? Lister: Ten. Cat: Yeah, on both feet! Lister: Altogether! Kryten: They're not webbed or anything are they? Lister: Look, they weren't related, all right? [Kryten falls off his chair] [ It is the day before Father's Day, and so, by long tradition, Lister needs to get blind drunk before making himself a card, so he can have Kryten hand-deliver it to him the following year. ] Rimmer: And what are you doing today that makes you so "busy"? Lister: I'm getting drunk! Rimmer: That's your day? Lister: Not just any old drunk. I'm talking traffic-cone hugging, pavement licking kershnickered. That's my day, cheers!
Rimmer Sr.: I just wanted to say... Rimmer: Yes...? Rimmer Sr: I just wanted to say... Rimmer: What? Rimmer Sr: You're a total smeghead! Rimmer: What?! This isn't my fantasy! Cat: No. It's mine! [ Robs Rimmer's Havana cigar out of his hand and scarpers. ]
