Un-human for the purposes of the narrative

THREAD: mentalblog.com: Archetypal rendering of the same figure.
FILE: mentalblog.com's bookmarks tagged with "Tony.Montana" on del.icio.us

Bearded man in derby hat amid group of Jewish boys. George Grantham Bain Collection

Tony Montana: Of course the struggle of the morality of the few against the corruption of the powered class is timeless, but it used to be a tribal struggle. What's uniquely modern is the lonesomeness; the feeling that there is nowhere to turn. Although, come to thing of it, Avraham "The Ivri" was also a "last sane man on earth."

Tzemach Atlas: The people you call �the corrupt powers-that-be�, are they a different species from the Everyman?

Tony Montana: The corrupt powers-that-be are, for the purposes of the narrative, un-human. They are either absurd buffoons (Gilliam's Brazil comes to mind) or animalistic or robotic. The everyman, as it turns out, is not only the last sane man on earth, but the last man on earth (Usually, if he finds a girl, she is also inhuman, although his heterosexual relationship with her is sometimes necessary as it is often seen as redemptive).

Tzemach Atlas: In the end of the movie Little Murders Alfred and the men from the family of his in-laws regain their sense of self by becoming killers. Does it mean that a path for redemption for the Everyman is to join "the corrupt powers-that-be"?

Tony Montana: Little Murders finishes with an apocalyptic ending. There is no redemption for the Everyman. His soul dies. Also, another variation of this is Repo Man, Shadows and Fog, and Taxi Driver where the Everyman is not redeemed but is able to escape into an alternative reality/fantasy. The Graduate, which is cut from the same atheistic hippy cloth as Little Murders, also ends with no redemption. After the victory at the church, Ben has nowhere to go, there is no safe place left on earth. They sit emotionless on the bus as if they could ride forever and will never come to any destination.

Tzemach Atlas: How does alienation affect an Everyman-Powerman?

Tony Montana: Do you mean an Everyman who is also a Powerman? The two are antithetical. The Everyman cannot be a Powerman. The Powerman is not an individual man; it is a group of men who are not men at all but a single machine.

Tzemach Atlas: Are Everyman and "the corrupt powers-that-be" the only societal groups? Is there in-between category?

Tony Montana: There is an Everyman who by definition is singular and alone. He has no Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote. (Didn't we speak about Quixote on this blog a while back? And, by the way, THIS is what makes the story uniquely modern.) Then there is the power structure that, as mentioned, is not human. They are an entity. They look human but they are not. (BTW, in the horror genre, the last sane man on earth is re-created as The Last Non-Monster on Earth, as in The Thing (Carpenter) and the zombie genre.) Then there is the third class. They are not human like the Everyman or machines/animals like the power structure. They are "dehumanized humans" who perhaps were once humans but not anymore.

Regarding this third group, the struggle of the Last Sane Man on Earth is that he is conflicted between ending his loneliness by joining the ex-humans and retaining his sanity which is already tenuous. Why hang on to a sanity that is a) anyways crumbling and barely functional, b) only brings on the acutely painful knowledge of his loneliness and c) invites persecution? The Everyman seems to be aware that by joining the zombies, he will finally have a respite. In many stories, this is an open parable of "coming of age"; to become an adult means to become de-humanized. But why bother remaining a child when there are no other children to play with?

As Neil Young sings in Sugar Mountain:
Oh, to live on sugar mountain
With the barkers and the colored balloons,
You cant be twenty on sugar mountain
Though youre thinking that youre leaving there too soon.

The world of childhood is a fantasy that spits you out from its substanceless dream-state into the substantive nightmare of adult reality. The Everyman finds out that either way he is doomed to loneliness: to be the only adult in an unfulfilling childhood world or to be the only child in a soulless adult world.

Only in Hollywood do we find redemption from such a plight, as in Deep Cover, or, lehavdil, in the Rebbe's teachings.

Every Jew is a last sane man on earth. He must realize that the whole world as he sees it is false and that "In truth, there is nothing in the world but you and G-d." (elucidated in Reshimos, 48.) The power structure is the seemingly unbreachable system of concealment and its minions. The quest is to end the loneliness by actually casting off the cosmic darkness and revealing the core of order and truth. In doing so, the Jew brings on a personal (but nonetheless objective) redemption which joins with that of others (who are also the only one in the world) to bring on a universal redemption. The de-humanized are given back their humanity and the Jew is no longer alone in the world. Indeed, the only way to complete the cosmic refinement process is to see to it that every other Last Sane Man on Earth will also reject the lures of the power system and insist on clinging to the truth.

I often think about the fact that the Rebbetzin was quoted as saying (call it apocryphal or not, it still smacks of truth), "My father had one chosid, the Rebbe. Now whom does my husband have?"

The central ill of exile is the fragmentation of reality, the disruption of unity. The quest for redemption is nothing other than quest for the end of loneliness.

Tzemach Atlas: The open Meshichism chronologically is understood in the context of the Rebbe struggling with the utter complete loneliness after the passing of his wife.

Tony Montana: The Rebbe's open messianic talk actually began in 1950 with the passing of his Rebbe. And maybe it began earlier, as he relates that since his childhood he envisioned the redemption. Indeed, it looked like more and more Jews were being sucked into the machine and that soon there would only be one Jew left.

But I don't wish to speculate as to what the Rebbe's personal motivations may have been. I'm talking about his teachings. Redemption is the complete reversal of fragmentation and isolation by way of exposing the core which binds the universe as one.

Tzemach Atlas: Alfred in the Little Murders is already inhuman; in fact only by becoming a murderer his regains his sanity. It is an inverse caricature. The Rebbe as Everyman is a contradiction because he had power and he left the dehumanized machine after his passing. You can't possibly suggest that he used other people to cheerlead for his personal redemption. One can see the collapse of the tribal as universal condition but one can also claim that the collapse of the Everyman tribe of Lubavitch is the consequence of the systematic fascistic dehumanization of every single institution in Chabad under the banner of redemption. Europe struggled with this problem. Can Everyman be a Powerman. Many though Napoleon was such a man. Germans, Nietzsche understood Hitler in those terms. But really can power coexist with humanity? If the tribal is no longer, do we have to follow a tribal script to personal redemption?