The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West

by Michael Walsh

  Both Salieri and Richard Strauss wrote operas that examine the relation of words and music, Salieri in his Prima la musica, e poi le parole (“First the music, then the words”), and Strauss in his last opera, Capriccio, in which his heroine, the Countess, must chose between two suitors: the poet Olivier and the composer Flamand. “Is there any ending that isn’t trivial?” she wonders to herself at the end, leaving us hanging. It’s a joke by Strauss: To the man who made himself the hero of his own tone poem, Ein Heldenleben, the question was never seriously in doubt. It’s a joke as well to every other composer who has ever composed an opera; the pride of place always goes to the music, a tradition maintained today in the accreditation of pop songs, which list the composer’s name first and the lyricist’s second—such as “Rodgers and Hart.” Opera can be sung in translation, which does not change its essential meaning, but Carmen cannot be tricked out with a new score and remain the same. The words put us into the dramatic situation and outline its overall progression, but the music is the heart of the work.

  What Critical Theory and political correctness seek to do is remove the music from our lives, to strip it, Soviet-style, of all secondary meaning, of all its layers, its poetry and (surprisingly, for this is one of the Unholy Left’s favorite words) nuance. Nothing means more than what we can take at face value, except empirical evidence, which must be subjected to ceaseless analysis in an attempt to change plain meaning into something unknowable. For the Left, music functions didactically, its capacity to incite and inspire channeled into the service of the state, not the human heart. Thankfully, a losing proposition.

  The Left’s pleasure palaces are all around us, in their promised utopias of social justice, egalitarianism, sexual liberation, reflexive distrust of authority, and general nihilism. What they’ve brought about instead—as all pleasure palaces must—is death, destruction, and despair.

  In 1966, Michelangelo Antonioni dropped a bombshell of a motion picture called “Blow-Up” upon an unsuspecting public. The Production Code was in hasty retreat, and Blow-Up titillated American audiences with its nude models writhing on purple paper with an anomic photographer played by David Hemmings. It was at once a documentary of Swinging London, a product of the Italian cinema at the top of its form, and an examination of the unknowability of knowledge. Coming just three years after the Kennedy assassination, it also played on the country’s darkest obsessions—is that Black Dog Man I see in the grainy blow-ups of the grassy knoll? But most of all, it expressed precisely what was about to drive the United States of America crazy: self-doubt.

  It is fitting that the screenplay was based on a short story, “Las babas del Diablo” (“The Droolings of the Devil”), for it opened the door to the daemonic that would soon flood into American movie theaters—most prominently, the quintessential alienation of Walter Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Polanski’s psycho-sexual horror show Rosemary’s Baby (1968), which made Satan one of the protagonists and the father of the eponymous baby.

  The nudity in Blow-Up of Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills attracted a good deal of critical and prurient attention, as did a brief topless scene by Vanessa Redgrave, but the central appeal of the movie lay in Hemmings’s mesmerizing performance (fittingly, in later life, he became a magician) as Thomas, the seen-it-all fashion photographer whose pointless life, illustrated by his even more pointless sex life, suddenly comes into focus when, on a whim, he snaps some shots of Redgrave and a mysterious man in Greenwich’s Maryon Park. Grainy blow-ups later reveal what might be a man with a gun. Upon a return to the park, he finds a dead body but has forgotten his camera. In a timely snapshot of the zeitgeist, Thomas stops in at a nightclub where Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and the Yardbirds are playing; infuriated by a problem with his amp, Beck smashes his guitar on stage (à la The Who’s Pete Townshend at the time), then tosses the broken guitar neck into the crowd, where Thomas scuffles for it. Out on the sidewalk, Thomas throws it away: pointless.

  The daemonic, the diabolical, even a touch of “Listzomania” (the title of an over-the-top 1975 film by Ken Russell, starring The Who’s lead singer, Roger Daltrey, in the title role)—Blow-Up had it all. But it was the haunting pantomime tennis game at the end, spontaneously played by a passing group of mimes in an open Jeep, that summed up the then-fashionable nihilistic futility of Thomas’s search for the truth. When even the dead body that he thought he’d found disappears, Thomas is reduced to retrieving an imaginary tennis ball and tossing it back onto the court as everything but the grass vanishes.

  Judged politically, Blow-Up might seem a dated piece of postwar cultural ennui. What is truth? What does it matter? Let’s get laid! But that’s not the way it plays. Hemmings’s dispassionate photographer comes fully to life only in the presence of Death, when, in developing his pictures, he realizes that he may inadvertently have witnessed and recorded a crime, set up by Redgrave’s femme fatale. The actress’s haunting, aristocratic beauty was never better used, and her moment of attempted seduction—sex in exchange for the possibly incriminating photographs—remains in the mind long after other films of the period have faded. In the final scene, Hemmings casts off the bands of illusions—what he took for reality was really just a series of futile gestures, like screwing the young models or callously discarding Beck’s broken guitar neck after fighting furiously for it. Only when—transformed by a woman—he accepts the reality of the pantomime tennis game does he finally become a recognizable human being; in short, redeemed.

  In the end, all art conforms to the same principles, whether it is created by the Left or the Right. Nearly every Disney movie ever made tracks the hero’s journey Joseph Campbell laid out, even when the hero is a heroine. The most “conservative” movie ever made is probably High Noon (1952), which was written by a blacklisted Communist, Carl Foreman, from a partial draft by another blacklistee, Ben Maddow. While some see a subtextual evocation of McCarthyism, the text is the story of brave marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) who, abandoned by the wimpy townsfolk of Hadleyville and even for a time by his pacifist Quaker wife, is forced to stand alone and face the vengeful badbellies arriving on the noon train. In the end, he’s saved by his new bride, played by Grace Kelly, who shoots one of the criminals herself and tackles the head bad guy to provide her husband a clear shot at the man who has vowed to kill him.

  Hollywood “formula” storytelling is often derided by those with no experience in filmmaking, or with little understanding of just what exactly that “formula” entails. But the ur-Narrative dwells deep within us, from Finn MacCool to Roland to Will Kane, and its stories are always the same—even when, on the surface, they aren’t. Art has its own tricks to play on the Devil.

  Illustration to Goethe’s “Erlkönig,” Moritz von Schwind, 1917. A dying child and a desperate father fleeing seductive Death.

  Satan Cast Out of the Hill of Heaven, Gustave Doré, 1866. The Paradise that has been irrevocably lost is not ours but Satan’s. No wonder those who advocate the satanic position fight for it so fiercely.

  Mephistopheles in Flight, Eugène Delacroix, 1828. The fallen angel, his wings still intact, flying impudently naked above the symbols of the Principal Enemy.

  Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: United with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels, Francisco Goya, 1799.

  The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun, William Blake, 1805. It is not for Christ to defeat Satan. Instead, that task is given to a woman, the Woman: Mary, the Mother of Christ.

  Gretchen im Kerker (Gretchen in Prison), Peter Cornelius, 1815. Sie ist gerichtet! (She is damned!) Ist gerettet! (Is saved!)

  In the Venusberg, John Collier, 1901. Wagner provides us with his own version of the Devil’s Pleasure Palace, the seductive erotic prison of the Venusberg in Tannhäuser.

  Lilith, John Collier, 1892. “She most, and in her looks sums all Delight / Such Pleasure took the Serpent to behold. . . / fawning, and licked the ground whereon she trod.”
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br />   CHAPTER TEN

  WORLD WITHOUT GOD, AMEN

  In his final book, The Fatal Conceit, the economic philosopher Friedrich Hayek wrote that “an atavistic longing after the life of the noble savage is the main source of the collectivist tradition.” While his criticism aptly applies to all leftist critics of Western social organization, Hayek’s primary target was Rousseau, the harbinger of postmodernism and the man perhaps most responsible, even more so than Marx or Gramsci or Alinsky, for the state of the modern world. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then Rousseau is Exhibit A, influencing the French Revolution, the upheavals of 1848 (in which Wagner took part) and its encore, the student “revolutions” in both Europe and America in 1968.

  That year, 1968, remains one of the most significant in modern America history; it was the year things came apart and the center could not hold. During the student riots in France in May that caused de Gaulle to dissolved the National Assembly and call for new elections (which he won), my college French teacher turned to us and said, in a remark I did not fully understand at the time, “You are all just the children of Rousseau.” To this day, given the passions of the moment, I am not sure whether he meant it as criticism or compliment.

  For the historian Paul Johnson, the Swiss-born Rousseau is “the first of the modern intellectuals, their archetype and in many ways the most influential of them all,” as he writes in his 1988 book, Intellectuals. He continues:

  Rousseau was the first to combine all the salient characteristics of the modern Promethean: the assertion of his right to reject the existing order in its entirely; confidence in his capacity to refashion it from the bottom in accordance with principles of his own devising; belief that this could be achieved by the political process; and, not least, recognition of the huge part instinct, intuition, and impulse play in human conduct. He believed he had a unique love for humanity and had been endowed with unprecedented gifts and insights to increase its felicity. An astonishing number of people, in his own day and since, have taken him at his own valuation.

  In other words, Rousseau might as well be the Second Coming of Christ. Or, failing that, the Second Coming of God himself. For what is the power to remake humanity except godlike? The more militant the atheist, it seems, the more godlike he wishes to become. His “atheism” stands revealed not as disbelief in a higher power but as an affirmative belief in himself as that higher power. It’s often remarked that atheism is simply religion by another name (as the officially atheist, now deceased Soviet Union demonstrated). Else why would atheists be so adamant and aggressive about their beliefs? Not only do they choose not to believe in God, or even a god, but they demand that their fellow citizens submit—there is that word again—to their ideology and purge all evidence of the (Christian) religion from the public square. Never mind that the Founders were Christians (even if some of them only nominally) and fully expected their faith to undergird their new country. While the First Amendment forbids Congress from establishing a national religion, there was no such proscription against the states, and both Massachusetts and Connecticut had established churches—Congregationalism—well into the nineteenth century.

  An established Church of Atheism now seems the likely fate for a country whose official motto, “In God We Trust,” was codified into law as recently as 1956; the phrase “under God” had been added to the Pledge of Allegiance only two years earlier, both events during the Eisenhower administration. As usual, leftists are employing the shields of their enemy as swords against them, waging “lawfare” against American institutions with audacity and near-total impunity. Thus, in their zeal, they demonstrate the need for some sort of faith, even it is anti-faith; there is, after all, a hierarchy in Hell.

  Rousseau, a man of the Enlightenment, is identified with the cult of the “noble savage,” but the scope of his indictment of civilization is much wider. Rejecting nascent materialism, he espoused a view of nature that took the Romantics by storm (where would nineteenth-century Germany have been without Rousseau?) and created a new version of the Fall of Man, this time brought low not by the Serpent in the Garden but by the material advancement of the Industrial Revolution. Mankind had become divorced from the state of nature and seduced by the acquisition of property, Rousseau argued. Humanity, in his view, had become competitive, preening, boastful, and vain—in short, alienated. Born a Genevan Calvinist, and later becoming a “convert of convenience” to Catholicism in Italy, Rousseau was the archetype of the modern, dissatisfied leftist, an insolent failure at just about every trade he plied, relying for sustenance upon the kindness of strangers, especially women. Finally finding his métier, he hit upon his true calling: telling others what to do via the medium of essay and autobiography, with himself as his own hero.

  As with Wagner, a cult of personality formed around the constantly querulous, paranoiac, hypochondriacal Rousseau (“one of the greatest grumblers in history,” notes Johnson). He preached truth and virtue, although he had little of either—indeed, of the latter, almost none. He regularly deposited his bastard offspring by his lifelong mistress, Thérèse Levasseur (of whom he wrote, “the sensual needs I satisfied with her were purely sexual and were nothing to do with her as an individual”), on the steps of the nearest foundling hospital—five in all—and never even bothered to give them names. Like so many after him, Rousseau was one of those liberals who loved humanity but couldn’t stand people.

  Often contradictory in his views on atheism and religion, Rousseau nevertheless was certain of one thing: that the State should be the final arbiter of the human condition, in the name of something he called the General Will. Only the State, he thought, could make postlapsarian man well again. One can practically smell the fascism coming off his pages, all in the name of compassion, of course. No wonder his more perceptive contemporaries, including Voltaire, considered him a monster.

  Many others, however, were greatly influenced by him, including most of the great monsters of the twentieth century. Without Rousseau, Marx is unthinkable; without Marx, Lenin is unthinkable; without Lenin, Stalin is unthinkable; without Stalin, Mao is unthinkable; without Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot are unthinkable. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels claimed of their Principal Enemy, the bourgeoisie: “It has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”

  And so on. The bit about “religious fervor,” as if either of them cared a whit for it, is a nice touch, although the crack about “philistine sentimentalism” rings truer to their real ethos. La Rochefoucauld defined hypocrisy as the tribute vice pays to virtue, but what if the virtue itself is counterfeit? What if it is all a sham, a satanic illusion—the mouse emerging from the comely witch’s mouth in the Walpurgisnacht scene from Faust?

  In this famous scene, Faust and Mephistopheles have magically flown to the Brocken, atop the Harz Mountains, Germany’s most haunted spot, to partake of the Witches’ Sabbath. Mephisto is feeling old, and he identifies his own weakness with the end of the world:

  MEPHISTOPHELES

  I feel the people drawn to Judgment Day

  For I scale this mountain for the last time

  Because my keg runs turbid.

  The World, too, is down to the dregs.

  Then the revelries begin. Faust tells the Young Witch about a dream he’s had, a dream of apples, as it happens: “I had the most wonderful dream / In which I saw an apple tree / Two beautiful apples gleamed thereupon / They lured me, and I climbed up.” To which the Young Witch replies: “The little apples please you very much / Because they came from Paradise. / I feel myself moved by joy / Because they grow in my Garden as well.”

  This little exchange—the sacred—is immediately followed by the profane utterings of Mephistopheles, who is dancing with the Old Witch and makes a crude remark about a “cloven tr
ee” with a hole in the middle of it: “So—es war, gefiel mir’s doch.” (“So . . . it was, I liked it though.”) To which this Old Witch lewdly counters with a challenge to Mephisto to provide something large enough to fill the hole.

  Fruit forbidden and fruit readily available—we have seen from Paradise Lost that the eating of the one led to the taking of the other. From tasting of the Tree of Knowledge to history’s first poetically interpolated recorded sex act—not exclusively, it should be noted, an act of love but an act of suddenly realized humanity, at once passionate, fearful, desperate, and defiant—was but the work of a moment. Which is to say, from Original Sin to the birth of the first child, Cain, history’s first murderer. Condemned from the start? Or free to choose? Were Eros and Thanatos inseparable from the beginning? And which came first?

  It should be here noted that there is a double sexual subtext to Milton’s recounting of what took place in the Garden during that fateful encounter: Eve’s desire for the apple is palpably sexual, but then so is the Serpent’s desire for Eve. (“She most, and in her looks sums all Delight / Such Pleasure took the Serpent to behold . . . / Fawning, and licked the ground whereon she trod.”) He gazes at her naked body in highly eroticized awe and, appealing to her vanity, tells her that she is too beautiful not to be admired by all.

  His temptation to her, remember, is to remove God from Paradise by becoming like a god herself. So, practically from Creation, the notion of a world without God was formed. And yet, as history shows, man has signally failed at replacing God. Rousseau’s life and works are proof that vice and virtue may be, when combined in the same man, not hypocrisy but evil. That Rousseau’s life, like Marx’s, was devoted entirely to self-aggrandizement masquerading as empathy for his fellow man is beyond dispute. (Rousseau conflated himself and his own needs, wants, desires, and hopes with those of all humanity, something entirely characteristic of many a leftist.) So is the fact that so many fell (and fall to this day) for his professions of benevolence.