Three Levels of Psychological Development – Living, Withdrawal and Dedication to Understand Life/Living

Henri Matisse, “Bathers with a Turtle” (1908)

Approaching Matisse’s painting we see a three-layered background (green, dense blue and rarefied blue) that emphasizes three-part setting of the painting. What can this combination of colors trigger in us the viewers? May be, it refers to the natural environment – the world of nature consisting of land/grass, the river/current of time and the sky/eternity? If so, then we should also add on to this landscape the living bodies of the three protagonists of the painting. Then what we’ll have here is the land, the river, the sky and the bodies into which life/living incarnates itself using Matisse’s intuition as mediation and his brush as a tool.
But, why the surrounding – the land in grass plus the dark river and the enigmatic sky, corresponds to the quantity of girls? – Three backdrops and three girls? Perhaps, because these three stages have something but not much to do with the natural scene of life we see here, and so we ought to part with the “realistic” level of perception of the work of art and proceed farther with the understanding that not only the content of the work of art can refer to reality but that its very form is not just “how” in contrast to ”what” but it addresses a reality much more complex and including than the one we see around us with our eyes.

What if the area (seemingly covered by grass) where the bathers are either preparing for a swim or drying afterwards, is not earth at all (is much more than earth)? What if it is the area of physical existence – that of the body, blood circulation, muscle tone and the senses and blind passions, the natural womb where we are living/dying/growing)? This area completely engulfs the squatting girl, envelops her; she completely belongs to it, not only physically but in her emotional and mental state. Her posture reminds us of an embryo in the mother’s womb. She sits close to earth. She is blond like a dandelion. And she is occupied with a pet turtle: life is always sharing living, mutuality (collaborative or hostile). It is an inter-psychological process. Sitting girl’s head is where her body is (according to Matisse, she is without a face and eyes – she doesn’t need them yet: her relation to life is rather visceral and tactile, she didn’t get enough internality yet to build distance from the world that having a gaze implies). And her interest in playing with the turtle is just an extension of her body, but this is not the case with the other two girls.

The second girl who is also located by Matisse on the same ground where the “existential” girl is occupied with her pet, is somehow above her (the proportion between horizontality and verticality of the space here is problematized – Matisse distorts the space to make a point about the difference between the first and the second girl who is sitting on the ground as if on a chair; it is her melancholic strain that makes her posture so “unnatural”. Matisse positions the second girl’s head not inside the “green zone” but above it, in front of the dense blue background. Why? – Probably, to emphasize that the second girl perceives life in a different way from the first one. What is the difference? Take a look at the neck of the second girl. While the first girl’s neck is as if absent – as if not needed (like her face and eyes): her interest is fixed on what is on the ground (not just inside life but on the bottom of it), the second girl’s neck is unnaturally long and tormentedly bended. This girl is as if trying to be as far as possible from the turtle and the first girl’s occupation with it, and simultaneously is not able to turn away her gaze. Why such a torment? – Perhaps, she perceives her friend‘s occupation symbolically (she grasps its connotation), and she doesn’t want to be occupied with anything like this. She doesn’t even want to look at it because looking invites identification, but on the other hand she is not able to dis-identify from the pleasure of the spectacle either. What doesn’t she want to be occupied, to look at and identify with? We have to come to the symbolic meaning of the existential girl’s playing with the turtle.

The girl’s bio-psychological growth implies getting the capability of dealing with “strange” creatures which are not identical with her body, and doing this with attention, care and love in spite of the otherness of these objects to her existence. That’s why girls are especially prone to love pets with all unconditional positivity. The girls have the capacity to love two kinds of “creatures” that are so different from them – their future babies, men and men’s reproductive organ. That’s what the second girl’s unconscious sees and feels behind the cute play with the turtle. That’s why the muscles of her neck are so strained. That’s why her gaze is so melancholic – she unconsciously cannot allow herself to enjoy a simple innocent game because of its symbolic meaning. Coming to the next level of psychological development (to the ability to accept what was forbidden before) is not an easy task – you have to overcome your own resistances to your desires. Matisse has positioned the second girl’s head on the dark blue – a melancholic, impregnated by psychological conflicts, background. Let’s call this girl melancholic in comparison with the “existential” one.

Contrary to the existential girl, the melancholic girl does have a face but only in profile: she, as if, is turning away from what she sees even when she is facing it. The fact that Matisse shows this girl to viewers in profile (while in this moment she is exactly facing the turtle) means that it s her general psychological position toward the world. She faces the world (including the turtle) in profile (while turning away from it). According to Matisse’s characterization, she is a profile girl, not a frontal-face girl.

The third girl is at the farthest distance from the spectacle of the existential girl with the rose-red pet. Physically, “realistically” she is even closer to it than the melancholic girl, and her body is as “bodily” as the bodies of the other two girls. But her maximal distance from the existential girl with the pet-turtle is provided by her upstanding posture (with all the anthropological connotations of the difference between animal and the vertical postures, Matisse utilizes here quite humorously) balanced by her overwhelming curiosity. This standing posture symbolizes an emotional and mental development. The third girl’s head is positioned before the rarefied blue – light, easy, but mysterious and not reliable, suggesting the riskiness of freedom from matter. This girl has successfully overcome a depressive reaction to her female destiny. Now it is not so much her heart but her mind that is occupied with it. She is curious toward the mystery of giving life. Her self-repression is transformed into a positive curiosity. The maturity of being able to meet life with concentration of mind is signified by the fact that she is black-haired (the metaphor of the tormenting experience of losing what is habitual and gaining what is new), while the melancholic girl’s hair is brown (and reflects the meadow-womb she only is in the process of outgrowing). Between life (the first girl), soul (the second one) and mind (the third one) the degree of freedom from biology grows and expands. The existential girl is engulfed in destiny, the melancholic girl is resisting it, and the intellectual girl is curious and wants to better understand life.

The point of the painting, it seems, is that the standing girl is not occupied with eternity, immortality, with god’s abode, destiny written in the stars. For her the most intriguing cosmic miracle is to be present here and now – life, the mystery of touch, the trembling of blood, love towards love and life. If the world could follow the evolution of the human intelligence as it is depicted by Matisse in this painting we could have less wars, less absurdities in the construction and behavior of our societies, and more reverie towards life and the universe.

Can the change in the tonality in different versions of the painting necessitate a change of or modifications in our interpretation?

Here is a question for readers/viewers: How to understand the position of “intellectual” girl’s hands?

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Rich Profit-Makers Want War Because of their Interests, But Many Poor Want War Emotionally – for Self-Realization

With $549 billion requested for basic military expenditures and another $159 billion requested for U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – the record $708 billion military spending called for by the Obama administration for fiscal 2011 will be nearly equivalent to the military spending of all other nations in the world combined. When it comes to military appropriations, the U.S. government already spends about seven times as much as China, thirteen times as much as Russia, and seventy-three times as much as Iran.
Lawrence S. Wittner, “How Much is enough? America’s Runaway Military Spending”

The rich profit-makers’ (RPMs) passions are connected with their financial interests – with their dreamed, calculated and planned profits. They need wars because they need the conquered territories (to extract the minerals, to flood with artificial products, to lock these countries into eternal debt, to repress their economic and political development toward democracy, to separate their elites from the population, to make these countries their satellites, and by this to be in charge of the world). But the poor people on or near the bottom of the social pyramid (PPBSPs) also need wars because only through fight with enemies of their country and through risking life (and/or by publicly hating enemy and sissy anti-war liberals) they can achieve feeling that they are living meaningfully: making a difference in the world, are needed and respected by the people who are higher in social status and income for protecting them from the enemies, and being courageous servicemen quite capable to overcome primitive cowardice and egoism. In other words, for PPBSPs the only way to prove that they are human beings not worse than anybody else is to be soldiers in wars – by the probable price of their life and health, and/or by being loudly and aggressively pro-war.

The poor people at the bottom of social pyramid (PPBSPs) really need wars to prove to the others and to themselves their humanity and nobility, and to be sure that they are also capable of achieving something – victory or self-sacrifice. For them wars is the way toward their value as human beings. In this sense, societies’ proclivity for wars is intimately connected with the very existence of the bottom people as potential recruits and flag-riots (jingoists), for whom other ways of self-realization are closed-up.

Let’s imagine that the bottom people disappear – that the majority of society become middle class. Then the dreams of the country’s financial elites about their domination over the world will not be realizable – together with prosperity and education to the middle class people the taste for life comes (and confidence based on self-respect). They start to take their right for self-realization through peaceful channels, without the necessity to risk their lives, for granted. Democracy means the elimination of PPBSPs – their appropriation into the community of the middle class. Middle class prosperity means the end of the unconditional domination of the socio-economic elite (rich profit-makers – RPMs): for them to agree to co-exist with the middle class (to contribute to general prosperity) means to sacrifice their profits and the chance to dominate their own country and the world. Middle class people understand that they are human in the same sense as RPMs and that they are entitled to equality and respect regardless of how much money they are able to send to politicians’ election/re-election campaigns.

So, the task of RPMs is to pauperize the middle class. And that’s exactly what they have been doing starting with Bushmerican rule from 2000 to 2008 and continuing to do after with all the ferocity of despair of being under Democratic President and Congress. Pauperization of the country is their only chance to enlarge the quantity of the bottom people and to activate their typical social behavior – that is to look for recognition and appreciation through hate towards enemies and readiness for self-sacrifice in war.

Of course, pauperization of middle class can only work together with fabrication of enemies and wars. Here came Iraq that had nothing to do with 9/11 but was focus-pocus of BCR’s (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld) uganda-propaganda, Afghanistan (readily offered to collaborate by handing Ben Ladin over to the international court eight years ago and that today doesn’t have a discernable Al Qaeda’s presence, and the future wars – with Iran and, probably, Venezuela. “According to Chalmers Johnson, a political scientist and former CIA consultant, as much as $250 billion per year is used to maintain some 865 U.S. military bases in more than forty countries… The money also goes to fund vast legions of private military contractors. A recent Pentagon report estimated that the Defense Department relies on 766,000 contractors at an annual cost of about $155 billion, and this figure does not include private intelligence organizations. A ‘Washington Post’ study, which included all categories, estimated that the Defense Department employs 1.2 million private contractors… Enormously expensive air and naval weapon systems account for a substantial portion of the Pentagon’s budget. But exactly who are these high tech, Cold War weapons to be used against? Certainly they have little value in a world threatened by terrorism… I don’t think any terrorist has ever been shot by a nuclear submarine.” (Lawrence S. Wittner, ibid)

Pauperization of everyday life in US plus war equals to multiplication of bottom/near bottom people (PPBSPs) ready to fulfill the plans of the financial elite with their passions and bodies. RPMs can prosper only if globalist wars exist and are accepted and cathected by the masses. But symmetrically, the bottom people (PPBSPs) can also exist only through wars (actual or in a preparatory phase). Paradoxically and tragically, the interests of RPMs and PPBSPs are… similar. If by destroying the middle class the financial elite and its political puddles achieve the enlargement of the bottom people for whom the only way to exist is to enlist and/or call for war, their dominant position in US and the world is guaranteed. Their modus operandi is to stabilize their dominance by de-stabilizing their country and the world’s existence. But what is for them the country and the world in comparison with the supreme importance of their profits and dominant position?

That’s how Stalin and his operatives felt and acted. They believed they have the right to their power because it is given to them by the god of Communism. For our RPM’s god is two-faced: it is profit and power. To serve this god (to be its worshippers) they need power. With this logic they will go to the end (like their predecessors – Communists and Nazis did) because the more voracious their megalomania is the more they feel themselves as believers who are modestly, with humility dedicated to the absolute, super-human, godly wisdom of profit/power.

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What It Means to Be an Intellectual Film Actor?

In august of 2010 philosophical cinema lost two film actors who made a creative investment into aesthetics of intellectual film acting.

Beside his popular success in numerous movies Bruno Cremer acted in a short film directed by Anne Marie Mieville “The Book of Mary” (combined with Godard’s “Hail Mary” – 1985). It is his work in that short film what makes us remember (and pay tribute to) him today.

In Mieville’s film the archetypal psychology of religious intuition is siphoned through everyday rituals of European democratic post-modernity. The task of Bruno Cremer was to impersonate not more-not less the God-Father according to French society of early 80s with its liberal sensibility and prosperous life style. Cremer as Mary’s father had to be (and be perceived and trusted by the viewers as) the top representative of traditional masculine authority and at the same time to be able to sublimate this authority into a modality of rationality: a model of democratic authority, somebody who doesn’t need to rely on fear to keep the world going.

In other words, Cremer played a Democratic God, a god with democratic style of ruling the universe – a combination that didn’t exist before Mieville’s film and the talent of Bruno Cremer. He played the god-gentleman, a god whose power doesn’t need to be used, god who feels his limitations and accepts them, and for whom it is challenging and interesting to win the world, not to subdue it. In Mieville and Cremer’s interpretation god feels a positive humility vis-à-vis the human child – his daughter Mary, and he became an extraordinary pedagogue, but unfortunately inside the software which, according to Godard and Mieville, is wrong and outdated.

Bruno S. was “discovered” by Werner Herzog and had major roles in his films “Every Man for Himself and God Against All (the Mystery of Kaspar Hauser)” – 1975, and “Stroszek” – 1976. He personified Herzog’s anthropological condense metaphor – human goodness trampled on and crumbled by rituals of everyday life.

In “Every Man for Himself” Bruno S. personified the human existential intelligence as such, thwarted and subdued by triviality of human collective mind and cowardly pettiness of the generic human heart. It is not easy to act exceptional quality like human intelligence (which doesn’t want to separate from living) which is in a state of retreating and illness. It is like a flawed diamond or a corrupted gold. Bruno S. acted the very “imbecility“ of human existential intelligence, which still is justifiably incompatible with the conventional retardation of a typical way of life.

In “Stroszek” Bruno S. (under Herzog’s style of “spur”-inspired directing) developed his screen personality by elaborating the narcissistically infantile features of the human existential intelligence (appeared because of the person’s happy awareness of having an intellectual gift and becoming enamored by it). By refusing to adapt to the soulless sur-survival of mechanical calculations in US, his hero, a German emigrant, is unable, in spite of his intelligence, to find the third way – a way out between the standard anti-existential survivalism and intellectual and existential collapse. His talent has an immanent arrogance that becomes the reason for his fatal despair. Bruno S. as Stroszek is simultaneously our ideal and an exclamatory warning, a role model and a monster, admirable and frightening.

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What Will Happen If the Future of Science Will Be in the Hands of Conservative Politicians?

“Members of Congress go on the House floor and ridicule the idea of funding science. They want it taken out of the latest stimulus package. In some cases they were ridiculing the fact that it was science”

Rush Holt as a typical liberal doesn’t mention from which political party the congressmen ridiculing science are from. He doesn’t want to be “not nice” – to mention somebody in a “negative” (critical) context. He wants to be “above” the “dirty” political fight. But there is nothing “dirty” about mentioning that those who ridicule science are conservatives – it is just a sad fact. We can bet that those who wanted to have the sciences taken out from the stimulus package were Republicans.

“The founders of this country thought like scientists. Many of them, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and so forth, would have called themselves natural philosophers, the equivalent of scientists in that day… Loosing that way of thinking really harms us”.

“If only we could stop beating the science out of fifth-graders. It’s interesting, in third, fourth, fifth grade, all the kids are natural scientists – they want to do science, and we somehow beat it out of them. We should let the fifth graders talk to these members of Congress who want to cut back on science…”

People with a conservative psychology are always doubtful and suspicious about science. Stalin, who armed ideas with fists and bullets, had eliminated whole segments of science, especially humanistic science, and wanted a total control over scientific thinking. Hitler suspended financing of Werner von Brown’s research (the area of missile technology for military purposes) even after use of missiles proved to be successful in war with England, and this cost him possible victory in 2WW.

“Science, I’ve always thought, is not just another subject in school. It’s how students learn to ask questions so that they can be answered empirically, which is a skill that every person should have. It takes a fair amount of work to achieve proficiency in that – to ask questions that can be answered empirically… You need that not just for material well-being, but for our political system to function…”

The quotes are taken from “Science News”, March 14, 2009, p. 32.

To learn how to formulate questions in a way that they could be answered empirically and how to understand reality and problems in empirical terms it is the way of science, and that is exactly why today’s conservatives are against farther development of and teaching scientific method – it would make it more difficult for the decision-makers to hide their superstitions, prejudices and egoistic interests from the public, then their lies will be easily understood and people will not fall for them. For example, many of our soldiers in Iraq still believe, against all the proven evidence, that Saddam was connected with 9/11. If they could have been taught in school how to think scientifically (how to ask and how to answer questions in empirical terms) they could have never identify with the pronunciations and assertions based on belief and wishful thinking instead of evidence, they could be more soberly skeptical and less emotional in their reactions to the world.

Scientific method is inseparable from democratic world view and is woe to any tyranny, be it traditional monarchy (with a mustache, shoulder straps and torture of prisoners) or monarchy of global corporations (with smiling teeth, singing banknotes and oil- and blood-spills). The fact that conservative politicians are no friends of science, says a lot about their real political agenda.

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Mixture of Super-Human Rationality of Technology and the Growing Irrationality of Human Soul

“Theology, once it is linked with irrationalism, runs the risk of becoming demonology.”
Thomas Mann, “Doctor Faustus”

What we see here is Abraham Klimt set on his way to investigate the evidence of the intervention of super-natural powers into the marriage of Rachel and Simon Donnadieu, the alleged event that stirred up people’s curiosity/imagination and became a matter of local legend. Klimt looks from the distance at the village where Rachel and Simon live. Before actually starting to move toward the place Klimt contemplatively stands observing it. Godard begins to shoot couple of seconds before Klimt starts to walk toward the village because he wants to emphasize that Klimt not only knows why he is interested in Donnadieu story but that he himself believes in the super-human interventions into human affairs. Godard uses this principle of showing people right before they start to walk toward their destination not only with Klimt but also with other characters looking for contact with the super-natural – to make their movement look exceptionally important: motivated by extra-ordinary reasons. By doing this Godard transforms, on the level of the very form, the human walk into a pilgrimage – he creates the image of walk as a pilgrimage.

This is how Godard introduces the Donnadieu couple to us – through their “cargo” photos in the garage they own. They are prosaic people without anything remarkable or exceptional about them. Being like this, it seems, is the necessary background for getting the unconscious need to glamorize themselves through belief in their exceptional – super-natural identity (humorously hinted at by the last name Godard gives them: combination of donna – [Rachel] and dieu – [Simon]). That’s how some people who are stuck in the misery of their internal world come to religious belief – with an unconscious hope to become “somebody” in other people’s and their own eyes. The rumors about God’s intervention into Donnadieus’ marriage started by Rachel herself who confessed to the pastor that she starts to feels in her husband some kind of super-human presence. Looking at the photo of Rachel and Simon we see that somebody is reflected on its surface – it is Abraham Klimt looking at the picture while visiting the place after the events in question have become an enigmatic past. Why Godard shows us Klimt reflected in the picture? Because it makes Klimt as if part of the picture (a third person in the photo) – Godard makes a point that people who are interested in the super-natural events while believing in them are part of the reality of those events. We cannot separate the reality from the story-telling about reality. For this reason Godard didn’t clear with a “super-natural” objectivity what’s really happened between Rachel and Simon – the reality of god’s presence or absence can be identified only by belief, and Godard’s task in the film is the analysis of the growing proclivity of human beings in the West at the end of 20th (and beginning of 21st) century to believe in super-human powers.

This shot of Rachel is part of the footage that shows her on her way to share her feelings about her husband’s Godly nature with the local pastor – suddenly Rachel just stops in the middle of the road giving herself to the caress of the warmth of sun-light, like some people enjoy doing it in early spring when the weather starts to improve after the winter season. In Rachel’s case, however, this séance of intimacy with the sun continues for a bit longer. In other shots assembled with this one we see better how the sun penetrates Rachel’s hair, how her hair is ablaze by the sunlight, how languorously she lets the sun to molest her. Godard here shows Rachel’s psychological condition at a time when her feelings about her husband possessing super-natural energies have intensified. The reason Godard in this shot makes her appear out of focus is, it seems, to emphasize that in the very moment of being caressed by the touches of the sun she completely loses the perception of human world around her – her feelings already belong to another world (to the power of the pagan Gods).

In this and the following shot (of Rachel with her husband) Godard shows her emotional alienation from intimacy with Simon (preceding her growing compensatory sensitivity toward the supernatural powers outside him), and his suffering because of her disappointment in him and their love. She looks away from him as if waiting for somebody else.

Finally she completely turns away from him and, like a sun flower, turns her face toward the ancient pagan sun. Rachel is in a psychological conflict between being a pious wife, loyal to her husband and a woman yearning for “romantic” love. It will take her some time to unconsciously create a compromise between these two positions – the possible logical chain in her unconscious is – love between my husband and me has died – if only he could love me as the sun is capable of loving – I like to be loved by the sun – I feel the sun’s presence in my husband.

In shots like this one Godard shows the power of technological super-machines to create the superstitious reactions – in a several seconds the boy will make a strange gesture with his left hand, as if trying to protect himself against the coming train. In another shot we see how the passing ship puts the onlookers into a kind of trance.

That’s how Simon looks as Zeus (or how Zeus incarnated into Simon looks). Facial features belong to Simon, but a disgusting – despotic expression without a trace of modesty belongs to our epoch with its globalist expansions and dreams about financial self-enrichment and conquest of the world by economic and military means.

Zeus triumphs over Simon’s wife (or Simon triumphs over his own wife with his a new Zeus power that Rachel happily, although not without hesitations, feels in him).

Max, one of Zeus‘s entourage, after the power of god has locked Rachel into the focus of godly desire, prevents the camera taking any pictures of the woman chosen by god (or may be, Max is just a foreigner with Middle-Eastern appearance and with an aggressive manner, who jokingly covers the camera‘s view to prevent observing a woman attending herself). In “Woe” Godard often shuffles mythological and realistic perceptions of events (which can be also mythological, only belong to other myths).

Zeus pulls Rachel, who has lost her consciousness in front of his majestic irresistibility, into bed (or Simon dressed in Zeus’ robe pulls Rachel, who has lost her consciousness in front of the super-natural energies inside her husband, into their marital bed).

Zeus, after being super-naturally satisfied (by Rachel), walks in the ocean, ready to leave her in eternal yearning for the God’s return.

In historical periods when socio-economic situation becomes volatile and unreliable (and people don’t know what to think and what to hope for and then jump from one extreme to another to restore their belief in life) the need for contact with super-natural powers are activated in the population. People start to look for signs of the existence of such powers, some start to imagine it, some unconsciously imitate it and even impersonate it (without being aware of what they are doing). They look for supernatural powers in order to be under its protection and even somehow to “assemble” themselves to its energy and might.

According to Godard’s film, the epoch at the end of 20th century (and today we can add – the beginning of 21st century) is especially vulnerable to become a reservoir of people’s desperate unconscious need for the appearance of pagan gods. This situation is helped by a historically unprecedented development of technology, which people who feel lost in the chaos of the historical process leading us ahead to nobody knows where, tend to worship. The might of technology is felt by us as a mysterious presence of the super-natural energies.

Technological machines (passing ships which people like to watch as if in trance – Godard doesn’t show trance but its essence, when some supernatural power makes people freeze as if without any reason, trains with their aura of might, cars, boats, talking pin-ball automats), in combination with giant business enterprises and international corporations with their impersonal and de-nationalized employees, are perceived by our unconscious as a kind of incarnations of power which are too strong and too bizarre to be natural. The power of this impersonal super-“organisms” stimulates in people the superstitious feelings. We unconsciously perceive too big powers as super-natural. And by admiring it we perceive ourselves as being a part of the super-human reality.

While modern science creates technological giants and today’s imagination – financial super-dreams, people’s unconscious is quite archaic: without scientific education and power of the self people are not capable to balance the shock of mechanization of life, the growing contrast between the fragility of human body and technological power and between our ontological smallness and globalist grandeur. Men became prone to self-aggrandize (to Zeusize themselves, to use Godard’s images). Women, bastardized by the prose of living contrasted with the glory of technology and financial opportunities opened by the global economy, like to aggrandize their husbands, and their love and feelings in relation to them. When an ordinary person, like the main character of the film, Simon, begins to flirt with international business opportunities his wife Rachelle feels that he is changing – not only that he is becoming more alienated from her but she starts to feel that he actually has powers that were absent before.

Seductive technological pretensions of our culture, the personal anxiety for not being on the level of financial opportunities and then being left behind, and our existentially spiritual underdevelopment make us frightened and riskily adventurous, and dangerous to ourselves and to the world. When cheap superstitions are mixed with megalomaniacal pretensions the human world becomes dangerously misbalanced. It is this extreme and absurd world Godard demonstrates to us in “Woe”.

Numerous pagan cults including the fanatic orientation on money power, degradation of Christian beliefs into traditional worship of god’s glory and power, the weakening of human empathy and general humility and farther infantilization of human emotions – create a gap between how our culture perceives itself and real motivations of individuals and groups apocalyptically wide. Misery is another side of glory; confusion is another side of success, feeling of existential dead end is the background of glorious myths, like the presence of globalist ambition is the shining façade of losing our humanity, compassion and interest in each other.

Godard doesn’t create any ambiguity about how the myth of Zeus (who comes during Simon’s business trip to sexually use his wife) begins – it is based on the vision/ narration of a girl-student we saw fascinated earlier with enigmatic pieces of text suggesting the intensity of super-natural emanation. She shares the vision of meeting between Zeus and his two “strategic advisors” with Abraham Klimt (the enthusiastic investigator of spiritual mysteries).

The humanistic education today is so impregnated with self-aggrandizement that nominally educated people (like a professor of German Literature whom Godard intentionally makes to look like Rachel) are no less susceptible to superstitious feelings than the member of the parish, Rachel. Both are victims of the general trend in today’s Western culture to mix de-humanization with spirituality.

Godard includes global economy into factors destabilizing human identity by ripping off human beings out of their land and making them to behave in countries they came into only to make money in an indifferent and even disrespectful and violent ways. It is in this context that Godard in “Woe” predicts the terrorism in 21st century. “Foreigners” come to the West as Zeus’ entourage while Simon-Zeus is a westerner who goes to the East for a good business deal and returns even more Zeusized. “Where is this Rachelle?” – We hear Zeus is asking with made mechanical and monstrous voice of Gerard Depardieu (who plays Simon).

Zeus’ “assistant” Max “collaborates” with Godard’s camera (providing a close-up shot in a right moment) in creating one of the most symbolically charged images of the film – when he pulls up the dress of a young girl while bending her down and exposing her youthful backside in a decorative underwear like a sun disk embellished by the cloud. By doing this Max laughs at mortals by showing them “their, earthy sun, the sun of the human flesh” (the sun they are really obsessed with) and how different it is in its shameful triviality from the sun-God’s visage. This close-up is obscene and sublime at the same time – we recognize its obscenity purely mentally (peripherally) but are really caught by its sudden sublimity – the magic whiteness of the girl’s rear side and her fine underwear seems responsible for this effect when naturalness benevolently combines with artificiality, and nature with civilization.

The film is a unique study of modern sensibility and regressive changes in Western culture – Godard transforms the cinematographic medium into a tool of scientific research of human psyche and cultural trends. After the film is over it is difficult not to keep repeating the authoritarian intonations of pin-ball machine’s commanding voice belonging to our civilization today: “Quit talking and start chalking!”, “Quit talking and start chalking!”, “Quit talking and start chalking!”.

Regardless of our conscious beliefs we are creatures who are unconsciously (really) superstitious, credulous and conformist, and the energies of our prejudices and loyalty to them are mindlessly projected (by us) into the socio-cultural environment and chaotically move there around influencing our life and the world.

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