Erg vs. The Volcano

Scene from "The Master," courtesy of director Philip Michael Thomas
and producer Keyser Sose

Erg's an idiot. This is a trivial thing but I wanted to share it, just so you can make fun of this insipid troll when he returns.

Erg loves to come into movie review threads and inform me that my aesthetic judgment is "knucklehead." He returned again to tell me so in the review of the The Master.

His primary complaint is that our aesthetic judgment is hopelessly compromised by our knucklehead need for validation of our knucklehead beliefs. But he never comprehends the irony of making this claim while also offering his own hyperpoliticized view of art. Here's erg explaining to me what The Master is about.

Did I say The Master? I meant all films. All films -- every one of them -- is about this, according to erg:

287 The director's films are pretty easy to understand unless you are terrified by the paralyzing fear that the movie might say something bad about George W. Bush. This is called the "George Lucas effect." The only cure for this malady is public suicide. But I digress.

The director of this film, like all of the other films, ridicules the knucklehead fantasies of the monad-hero-self-made-man. The director despises the right wing knucklehead. In the most directly brilliant exposé to this understanding of the director's works, he has a drunken plutocrat murdering a charlatan evangelist with a bowling pin. If only this happened every day in the Capitol Rotunda, you would learn something important.

Now at some point I began to suspect erg hadn't even seen The Master in the first place, because he kept "explaining what it meant" in such general terms. So I asked him an easy trivial question about the movie (in which city did a certain event take place), which he wouldn't answer, but he did continue insisting he'd seen the movie, and was here to explain it all for us:

299 It is a condemnation of groupthink posing as the liberation of the self (eternal life through reincarnation is the dominant trope). The particular film is a backhand slap to not only the contrived new age religions, but also a kick at any of this kind of totalizing worldview masquerading as self enlightenment (knuckleheaded politics). He did not invent this critique – Weber did when he noticed about 100 years ago the contradiction of the mass delusion of especially Protestant religion operating in the marketplace of ideas of capitalist civilization. Only, the delusion was the organizing principle of mass exploitation.

Like I said, he hates you. This movie was never intended for you. Do yourself a favor and never watch another movie that this director makes.

At this point, BumperStickerist came into the thread and began A Con. The Con was simple: BumperStickerist began pretending in comment 311 that something so absurd that only erg could believe it had been in the movie:

311 Let's go back to a basic question:

Did you, personally, see the entire movie - from opening credits through the part where the girl gets thrown into the volcano and on to the closing credits?

So: Did. You. See. This. Movie?

btw - With your own eyes and not through some 'by proxy/meta' standard.

-- BumperStickerist

Now if you've watched the trailer you will instantly realize this is not the sort of movie where a girl gets thrown into a volcano. It's ridiculous. It's so ridiculous I wasn't even going to bother trying to convince erg of this.

But then I wondered-- maybe he was this stupid after all.

Could we really make him not only believe there was a volcano in the movie but further get him to pretend to have seen the volcano in the movie? After all, since he's pretending to having seen the film, he'd naturally have to pretend to have seen everything (we claim) is in the film, right?

So I joined in the Con of trying to get erg to "explain" the girl-gets-thrown-into-the-volcano part of the film, which of course doesn't exist. For Science.

You can pick it the thread up at 311 to see how this went. If you don't have the patience for it, or can't take the suspense, I'll link this comment (erg posting as "andrew breitbart," as usual and this one, where erg finally explains to all of us knuckleheads that the volcano which wasn't in the movie symbolized in the movie, and what the director intended by the volcano sequence which doesn't exist.

I know it was a big waste of time. I know we ought to feel ashamed of ourselves for picking on a mentally-unstable, psychologically-unwell imbecile.

But I'm calling it a Big Win for Team Moron anyway.

Trollz Lulz: The Goofening: ...continues.

posted by Ace at 06:20 PM

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