Tuesday, April 23, 2013

TRIPPING.

Just looked in on Ed Driscoll's latest, yet another sprawling stream-of-semiconsciousness about how America was destroyed by the beatniks of the Frankfurt School and whatnot, and it's all too convoluted to pull apart but let me at least share with you this wonderful passage:
1968 contrasted the two American space programs: real-life NASA had to compete for attention with the Cinerama visions of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the top-grossing film of 1968, which smuggled its Nietzschian philosophy into movie theaters via space stations and talking computers, and was a magnificently photographed and scored exercise in liberal fascism.
Perfect as it seems, it's the next line that really makes it:
I don’t use the phrase lightly.
Please don't ever show him Forbidden Planet. They'll have to scrape him off the ceiling with a broom.

UPDATE. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard wins comments: "The black monolith represents the 90% Democratic African-American voting bloc." But the game ain't over! e.g. GregMc: "My god! It's full of shit!"; Spaghetti Lee: "'Lower the top marginal income tax rate, HAL.' 'I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.'"

UPDATE 2. This reminds me of the great Mad parody "201 Minutes of Space Idiocy," which reminds me of a lovely Film Comment article on Mad movie parodies you should read.