David Lynch: Wisteria (Unrecorded Night) in the works, An Analysis of Blue Velvet

Rumors are swirling around a new David Lynch project in the works, and at Netflix. As observed in industry trade Production Weekly, an untitled David Lynch project with the working title “Wisteria” is set to begin production in May 2021. The publication notes longtime Lynch collaborator Sabrina S. Sutherland as a producer, and that the project will film at Calvert Studios in LA. Lynch’s last feature film project was his 2006 “Inland Empire.” From there he returned to the beloved world of “Twin Peaks” for the Showtime limited series “The Return.” The filmmaker has yet to announce any new feature films or television projects since “Twin Peaks: The Return” wrapped its run in September 2017. “Twin Peaks” star Kyle MacLachlan told IndieWire earlier this year he’d be open to reprising his role of Cooper, but had only this to tease about a return: “That is in the mind of David Lynch, where it will stay hidden.” Kyle MacLachlan, who starred in Twin Peaks, recently hinted that he’s set to be involved in Wisteria (listed on Imdb as Unrecorded Night), the reported new project from his frequent collaborator David Lynch. Source: indiewire.com

Blue Velvet (1986) is the quintessential David Lynch film, filled with quirky humor and shocking violence. It features one of the most terrifying villains in all of film: Frank Booth, brilliantly portrayed by Dennis Hopper. Blue Velvet is a “mystery” story. Sometimes it is described as neo noir. But it is a much darker shade of noir. Jeffrey’s initiation into the mysteries is a descent into the underworld: both a literal, criminal underworld as well as the “deep river” of the unconscious, including obsessive and sadomasochistic sexuality. But Lynch also hints that the unconscious is not merely human, but a portal through which essentially demonic powers enter our world. Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) conquers and controls these forces, returning to the sunlit world not only as a man but as a guardian of the social and the family order. In his journey, he has encountered the libidinal, criminal, and demonic forces that can tear society apart, and he has learned about the artifices of civilization that keep chaos at bay. Blue Velvet is about the great mysteries of life.

-Jeffrey: I’m seeing something that was always hidden. I’m involved in a mystery. And it’s all secret. -Sandy: You like mysteries that much? -Jeffrey: Yeah. You’re a mystery. I like you. Very much.

Jeffrey Beaumont has been called home from college to visit his stricken father and help run the family hardware store. On the way home from the hospital, Jeffrey discovers a severed human ear in a field. It has greenish splotches of decay on it, and it is crawling with bugs. Bugs, again, are associated with evil. As Jeffrey walks the neighborhood, we cut to a closeup of the ear in the morgue. There is a loud humming as we enter the ear, then everything fades to black. This too is a descent into mystery, into the underworld. Cut to Jeffrey knocking at the door of the Williams house. Jeffrey wants to know more about the ear, but Detective Williams can’t tell him, and asks him not to disclose anything he already knows, until the case is concluded. Detective Williams is stern but warm, a surrogate for Jeffrey’s stricken father. He tells Jeffrey that he understands his curiosity. It is what got him into police work in the first place. “It must be great,” Jeffrey volunteers. “It’s horrible too,” he replies. 

But Jeffrey seems undaunted. When Jeffrey leaves the Williams house, he hears a voice: “Are you the one that found the ear?” He looks into the darkness. Detective Williams’ daughter Sandy (Laura Dern) emerges from the night, a pink-clad blonde vision of loveliness. She is coy and mysterious, teasing Jeffrey with her knowledge of the case. As they walk together, she tells him that she overheard her father talking. The ear may somehow be connected to the case of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a singer who lives nearby. Sandy leads Jeffrey to Dorothy’s apartment building. With a slightly comic/ominous music cue, the camera pans up to the sign: Lincoln St. 

When we arrive, we see that Dorothy lives in the Deep River Apartments, a nomen that may also be an omen of Jeffrey getting in way over his head. (Naomi Watts's character Betty Elms, in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, hails from Deep River, Ontario.) Dorothy’s apartment is pure Lynch: retro, slightly dingy, with dusky pink walls and carpets, dark red draperies (shades of Twin Peaks), lavender sofas, magenta cushions, and putrid green accents in the form of pots with spiky “mother in law’s tongue” plants. The warm colors have a womblike feel, but the overall effect is seedy, not maternal. 

That evening, Jeffrey takes Sandy to dinner at The Slow Club to watch Dorothy Vallens sing. She doesn’t have much of a voice, but she still makes a captivating spectacle, with her huge retro microphone and blue-lit band against dark red draperies, more foreshadowing of Twin Peaks. Then Jeffrey and Sandy return to Dorothy’s apartment. When Sandy says goodbye, she tells him, “I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert.” Jeffrey sneaks inside. When Dorothy comes home suddenly, Jeffrey hides in the closet. Peering through the slats, he watches her undress. Dorothy hears a rustling in her closet and confronts Jeffrey with a knife, jabbing him in the cheek when he does not answer one of her questions. She thinks he is a voyeur. But instead of calling the police, she orders him to undress.

Enter Frank Booth, a middle-aged man in a leather jacket and rockabilly shirt, seething with unfocused rage. Frank and Dorothy then role-play a sexual scenario not unlike the one that has just transpired with Jeffrey, although this time Frank is in control. Frank’s constant talk of fucking, as well as merely pantomiming the act with Dorothy, suggest he is impotent. The song “In Dreams” is also about unrequited love for someone who can be possessed only in dreams, itself very close to sexual impotence or a latent homosexuality.

Frank has a fetishistic attachment to Dorothy's blue velvet bathrobe. She stuffs it in his mouth, he stuffs it in her mouth, and he even carries around a piece of it that he has cut from the hem, perhaps with the scissors he uses to threaten her. When it is all over, he blows out the candle. “Now it’s dark,” he repeats. As Jeffrey later says, “Frank is a very sick and dangerous man.” A drug dealer, he has kidnapped Dorothy’s husband Don and their small boy, Donny, holding them hostage to force Dorothy into sexual bondage. It is Don’s ear that Jeffrey found, cut off as a threat to Dorothy, perhaps with the same scissors with which he menaced her. Frank has removed Dorothy’s real baby and daddy so he can have “mommy” all to himself.

After Dorothy is taken to the hospital, Jeffrey goes to her apartment and finds evidence of Frank’s fury. Dorothy’s husband Don is dead, his brains blown out, Frank’s strip of blue velvet stuffed in his mouth. The yellow man is standing in the middle of the room in shock, a huge hole blown in the side of his head, brain matter visible. Over the yellow man’s police radio, Jeffrey hears that the raid on Frank’s apartment has commenced. Jeffrey sees Frank approaching the apartment. He rushes back inside, calls for help on the police radio, grabs the yellow man’s gun, and hides in the closet. Frank, who has heard the call on his police radio, bursts into the apartment. Yanking his swatch of blue velvet from Don’s mouth and draping it over the silencer of his pistol, then huffing his mysterious fumes, he searches for Jeffrey in the bedrooms, calling out “Here pretty,” like he is summoning a dog. Returning to the living room, he silences the TV and topples the yellow man with bullets, then realizes Jeffrey is in the closet. 

Huffing more fumes, he ecstatically closes in for the kill, but Jeffrey sees him coming through the slats and shoots him in the head. The voyeur has become an actor. The slow-motion headshot is accompanied by a terrifying simian shrieking. The bulbs in the floor lamp then surge with electricity and burn out, as if Frank’s life force is fleeing through the wiring. In the visual code established in Eraserhead this signifies the presence of the supernatural, especially the demonic. Frank is somehow both more and less than human. 

There is a strong spiritual element to Blue Velvet, as with all of Lynch’s work. Although Lynch himself is a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, the spiritual imagery of his movies tends to be Western, primarily Christian but also Gnostic. Like Eraserhead, Blue Velvet treats sex as a potential form of bondage to subhuman powers, both animal and demonic. But Blue Velvet is far less nihilistic than Eraserhead. The demonic forces are balanced out by angelic ones, represented by robins and light from above, as opposed to electric light, which for Lynch has demonic connotations.

The night after his first terrifying encounter with Frank, Jeffrey tells Sandy what he has seen. Sandy picks him up in her car, an odd role reversal putting her in the driver’s seat. She parks near a church with colorful stained-glass windows, brightly lit from inside. Organ music plays in the background. Jeffrey prefaces the story of Frank and Dorothy with the words, “It’s a strange world,” which becomes something of a Leitmotif in the film. After telling Sandy who Frank is and what he has done, Jeffrey asks “Why are there people like Frank? Why is there so much trouble in this world?” His face is anguished and childlike, for he is just discovering the darkness of the adult world. Jeffrey’s question is not merely psychological. Given the backdrop of church and organ music, it is also theological. It is the problem of evil: If God is perfect in his power and goodness, why are there people like Frank? What is there so much trouble in this world?

Sandy says she doesn’t know the answer. But she does in a way. For she tells Jeffrey of the dream she had the night they met: "In the dream, there was our world, and the world was dark, because there weren’t any robins. And the robins represented love. And for the longest time, there was just this darkness. And all of a sudden, thousands of robins were set free, and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love. And it seemed like that love would be the only thing that would make any difference. And it did. So I guess it means, there is trouble till the robins come." As Sandy speaks of the blinding light of love, one realizes the organ music is not coming from the church. It is part of the score, underscoring the essentially religious nature of her dream. Love, light from above, and robins are the forces that will beat back hate, darkness, and bugs. Evil is only temporary, until the robins come. 

After Jeffrey’s first encounter with Frank and Dorothy, we see him on the sidewalk. He emerges from darkness. Then he freezes as a light comes from above. Is this the light of judgment? Then we see distorted images of Jeffrey’s father in the hospital, then Frank raving, then the guttering candle, then Dorothy saying “Hit me.” We then see Frank punch at the camera. Is he hitting Dorothy or Jeffrey at this point? Jeffrey then awakens from a nightmare. After Jeffrey kills Frank, Sandy, her father, and a legion of police and paramedics arrive on the scene. Even though Jeffrey has rescued himself, we only really breathe again when we see the flashing lights and guardians of order. 

In the middle of the bustling crime scene, Jeffrey and Sandy embrace and kiss, bathed in white light from above. There is trouble till the robins come. Near the beginning of the story, we were drawn into the mystery by entering the dead ear to ominous industrial noise. Now we are at the end of the story, the mystery solved, emerging from a pink and living ear to Julee Cruise’s ethereal “Mysteries of Love” (yet another foreshadowing of Twin Peaks).

As the camera pulls back, we see that the ear belongs to Jeffrey, sleeping in the sunshine. He opens his eyes and sees a robin perched in a tree. Sandy calls out, “Jeffrey, lunch is ready.” Mr. Beaumont is out of the hospital, up on his feet, working on something in the yard with Detective Williams. Jeffrey’s mother and Mrs. Williams are chatting together in the living room. The families have come together. It is a sign that Jeffrey and Sandy have a serious relationship. Perhaps marriage is in the future. Aunt Barbara and Sandy are preparing lunch in the kitchen when the robin appears on the windowsill with a bug squirming in its beak. 

The forces of good have quelled the forces of evil. “Maybe the robins are here,” says Jeffrey. “I don’t see how they could do that. I could never eat a bug” volunteers aunt Barbara, before stuffing something that looks vaguely bug-like in her mouth. Aunt Barbara is a robin without even knowing it. “It’s a strange world, isn’t it?” observes casually Sandy. Then we see the yellow tulips, the friendly fireman, and the red roses. But before we return to the blue sky, we see Dorothy Vallens and her little boy in a park. She picks him up and holds him, smiling, although her face then takes on a sad and haunted look. It is the happiest ending possible after such a hellish journey.

What is the political philosophy of Blue Velvet? I read Lynch as fundamentally conservative. The typical sneering Leftist take on Lynch’s opening is that the idyllic surface of Lumberton is fake and kitschy, whereas the truth about Lumberton is the bloody struggle of vermin in the dark. But Lynch’s own view is far more nuanced. Lynch knows that civilization is artificial, a construct, a triumph over nature. But Lynch is not a Leftist liberal because he does not think that nature is good. Thus he does not conclude that the conventions that constrain nature are bad. Lynch thinks that nature is profoundly dangerous, especially sex and sadism, which for him have a supernatural, demonic quality. Lynch does not believe in the “natural goodness” of man. He believes in the natural—and supernatural—badness of man. 

Which means that human nature needs to be constrained by human conventions. Frank Booth is Lynch’s portrait of what you get when the breakdown of social repressions liberates nature. The French Revolution ended with the Terror. The Sixties ethic of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll didn’t lead us back to the Garden of Eden. It gave us the Tate-LaBianca murders, the Weathermen, and Frank Booth. Frank is not just a sex maniac. He is a drug dealer. Frank uses alcohol and also his mysterious gas to break down his inhibitions and release his sadism. Moreover, Frank always has his Roy Orbison soundtrack tape handy. In Dreams seems to give briefly him a solace.

Finally, to channel F. Roger Devlin for a moment, Dorothy Vallens can also be seen as an example of the havoc created by female narcissism, masochism, and hypergamy when social conventions break down. Many viewers note that the robin at the end is clearly fake, some sort of puppet. It might simply have been the best effect that Lynch could create with the available budget. But it could very well have been intentional. The bugs represent hate and evil whereas the robins represent love and goodness. The bugs are darkness; the robins are light. If the bugs represent nature, then the robins have to represent something other than nature. In Sandy’s dream, they clearly have a supernatural aspect. But another opposite of nature is convention, in which case it makes sense to have an obviously artificial robin. The robin represents the conventions that hold the savagery of nature in check, including the guardians of public order: the police, firemen, paramedics, even the crossing guards. These conventions also include moral principles, manners, and even Aunt Barbara’s prejudices. 

Blue Velvet is mostly about identity. Jeffrey has allowed himself to take on the thrilling persona of a capable private investigator, one of the all time great protagonists of American Cinema. That makes Blue Velvet a sort of neo-noir, but that’s the closest it comes to easy categorization. About halfway through the movie, Jeffrey summarizes what might be the defining quality that drives every noir hero, from holly Martins in The Third Man to Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. He says "I'm seeing something that was always hidden. I'm involved. I'm in the middle of a mystery. And it's all secret." Sandy asks Jeffrey, "And you like mysteries that much?" Without hesitation, he responds, "Yeah." As David Lynch said, “The mystery was the magical ingredient of Twin Peaks. The more unknowable the mystery, the more beautiful it is.” Lynch has remained tight-lipped about his artistic intentions.

“I don’t ever explain it. Because it’s not a word thing. It would reduce it, make it smaller. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language – it’s not going to translate. It’s going to lose.” Lynch really popularized surrealist filmmaking in a unique way: by pushing past the political and the fable and making it character based first. And that’s maybe the true genius of Lynch: though he deals in nightmare imagery, he's one of the most compassionate filmmakers of all time. Films on Lynch's intellectual level usually lack a certain human element, a certain empathy for the human condition, probably as a side effect of chasing a very lofty form of high art. Lynch is able to achieve that level of art and still retain the human element, which is almost unique in the entire history of film.

Although Blue Velvet was Lynch’s fourth feature film, it was really the first where he had both creative control and an adequate budget. (Well, maybe not for the robin.) The Elephant Man (1980) and Dune (1984) gave Lynch adequate funding but no creative control. Eraserhead (1977) was entirely Lynch’s baby, but he created it over a period of years on a shoestring budget. It is a measure of Lynch’s genius that the very first time he had the financial and creative freedom to fully realize his vision, he created what is arguably one of his greatest films, alongside Mulholland Dr. Certainly Blue Velvet is his most Lynchian. Sources: unz.com and faroutmagazine.co.uk

Movie Review: "Dinner in America"

English writer Osbert Sitwell, author of The Man Who Lost Himself and member of the Ghost Club, wrote: "For most of the well-to-do in the town, dinner was a shibboleth, its hour dividing mankind." Adding a thematically related quote by Ronald Reagan, "All great change in America begins at the dinner table."

Since premiering at Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2020, Dinner in America—written and directed by Adam Rehmeier (Jonas)—has received consistent critical acclaim. This treasured indie film is now available on Arrow UK. Theatrically, Dinner in America will be next released in Japan, in September 2021. One of the film's co-producers was Ben Stiller via Red Hour Productions.

Due to the fact that Rehmeier wanted to be faithful to his vision of the early '90s punk scene (which he personally experienced while coming of age in Lincoln, Nebraska), his project took almost a decade to crystallize thoroughly. And his attention to detail has greatly paid off, so it was well worth the wait. 

Hopefully, Dinner in America gets proper distribution and online streaming soon, because many potential spectators might benefit of its uplifting message and playful sense of humor—wrapped in vibrant cinematography by Jean-Philippe Bernier—to counteract these murky post-COVID crisis days. 

Kyle Gallner (Dear White People)—who recently won the Dublin Film Critics Special Jury Prize—plays punk renegade Simon/John Q, delivering a tour de force performance that won't leave most viewers indifferent, for better or worse. 

Opposite to Gallner is Emily Skeggs (The Miseducation of Cameron Post), a young actress who proves to be the film's truly lasting pulse. Her talent is a hidden gem, giving to her character Patty a pure off-beat light contrasting to Simon's grittiness. Skegg's portrayal emanates genuine love for certain type of misfit, in particular of nerdy-looking girls from suburbia.

In the first scene, we are treated to some gruesome medical experiments that Simon undergoes courtesy of Nutritional Tech (Naltech), a government sponsored company that only compensates him with a fraction of the money they had promised. When one of the doctors asks him: "10 being the strongest of the scale, how is the nausea?", an unfazed Simon responds: "I would say 11."

Simon leaves the medical center with an oversexed patient named Beth (Hannah Marks), who invites him to a Sunday dinner at her home. At the moment Simon succumbs to the advances of Betty (Beth's mom)—played by a seductive Lea Thompson (Back to the Future)—family chaos ensues in the aftermath. 

The "meet-cute" between Simon and Patty happens at the PetZone's back alley, when Patty is taking a break from the drudgery of her job. Suddenly she learns Simon is fleeing from some policemen, eager to catch him at the behest of Beth's family, who have offered a reward on his arrest and capture. 

Rehmeier skilfully subverts the 'toerag' stereotype that afflicts the antagonistic and sexist punk culture, by displaying each stage of flirting between the insolent and brooding Simon and the sweetly awkward Patty. Gallner offers subtle hints that Simon is strangely amused—yet shocked—by Patty when she dances to his band Psy Ops' hardcore tunes in her kiddy bedroom. 

After witnessing how their bond is strengthened—through several revenge pranks on a couple of despicable jocks, and shortly after that by forcing Patty's former employer to pay her last check—we start to suspect Simon will eventually let her know the real conflicted guy behind his punk mask. Slowly Patty manages to make Simon relatable and eventually redeemable—which in turn makes her the film's wacky heroine—especially during her rendition of the iconic song Watermelon.

A momentous dinner scene involves Simon's bourgeois family, who are terribly dismissive of Simon and Patty's creative music goals.  Whereas Patty's parents are quite lovable and naïve, Simon's seem to lack the most basic empathy skills.  In this specific scene, Rehmeier highlights how hypocritical and tendentious is Simon's sister Renae, who despises her rebellious brother and belittles Patty condescendingly. 

Rehmeier's criticism is sharp and accurate throughout, unveiling the ritualized conventionalisms of the typical middle-class family from the American MidWest. It looks as if their entire lives are a mere attempt to flaunt their social status and their fake façades, while actively hating those who are capable of finding their own way.

Simon resists the temptation of going mainstream by refusing to be the opening act of faux-punk band The Alliance. Simon is a quintessential rebel in the mold of Marlon Brando's cop-hating biker Johnny Strabler (The Wild One). Unfortunately, Patty doesn't have many similar female counterparts, since her atypical screen persona is such an original creation to date. 

Rehmeier explained: "At its heart, the film is an underdog love story about two very different characters, each marginalized misfits in their own right. They find each other through music." I think his film conveys a peculiar mixture of abrasiveness ("Fuck China Hut, Fuck America") and tenderness ("You need to take it down a notch") that deftly reflects the duality of these characters.

Rehmeier's Dinner in America brings to mind widely assorted influences of indie classics like Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse, Jared Hess's Napoleon Dynamite, Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World, Michael Lehmann's Heathers, Allan Moyle's Pump Up the Volume, Darren Stein's Jawbreaker, Bobcat Goldthwait's God Bless America, Jefery Levy's S.F.W., Jason Reitman's Juno, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's American Splendor, Sam Mendes's American Beauty, and David Lynch's Blue Velvet, among others. 

"In a crisis a man learnt what was real to him and what was unreal; that he became himself, choosing what he really needed." —Alec Waugh (author of The Loom of Youth and Wheels within Wheels: A Story of the Girls)

Article published previously as Movie Review: "Dinner in America" on Blogcritics.

HEPI Sex Study, Generation X, Dinner in America

Sex and Relationships among students in the UK: Study conducted by Nick Hillman (HEPI's Director), April 2021: The Higher Education Policy Institute study shows increasing levels of sexlessness with 43% of undergraduate student reporting never having had sex. The sexually active statistics report 640,000 sexually active female students and 350,000 sexually active male students in the UK.

• Undergraduate students enter higher education with a range of prior experiences: 43% ‘had never had sex with anyone’, one-quarter (25%) had not ‘intimately kissed anyone’ and 18% were ‘in a long-distance relationship’.

• Sex is not a high priority for most new students – 58% say making friends was more important to them than finding sexual partners. Only 16% of students say ‘When first going to university, I was excited about having sex’.

• Just one-in-ten students (10%) expected to have sex during their welcome week and a similar proportion (9%) did so.

• Students’ experiences: 41% say they have had sex during their time as a student, 32% say they are ‘currently in a relationship’ and 11% say they are ‘voluntarily abstaining from sex’.

• Among those students who have had sex during their time in higher education, the majority (52%) have had just one sexual partner and a further one-quarter (26%) have had between two and three.

• A higher proportion of women (47%) than men (34%) say they have had sex during their time as a student. These men are less likely to claim they have only had one sexual partner. Source: www.hepi.ac.uk

They may call GenX "The Forgotten Generation," but they will never forget their music. They didn't need no damn blue ribbons. No one knew where they were after school until dark. There were no "parent pick-up lines..." They tried to solve their own conflicts. They made their own "technology." They hated being told what to do, but they never needed it anyway because bootstrapping was their thing. And they questioned the status quo. And most of all, they made some amazing music. Generation X is also considered the most romantically adventurous of all recent generations, having had 13.1 sexual partners so far in their lifetime. On average Baby Boomers have had 10.7 sexual partners so far in their lifetime. On average Millennials have had 11.6 sexual partners so far in their lifetime. On average Generation Z have had 5.6 sexual partners so far in their lifetime. Source: bodyandsoul.com.au

Snarling in a bomber jacket and powering down pavements like a man possessed, 90s punk Simon (Kyle Gallner, outrageously good) is seldom an ideal house or dinner guest. He’s a Rebel Without a Cause amplified to a ridiculous extreme. Ejected from a paid drug-research study, Simon hooks up with Beth (Hannah Marks), a fellow reject who invites him over for dinner, an occasion which implodes once Beth’s mom (Lea Thompson) gets frisky with the guest. Simon finds himself at the table of a second, entirely neurotic middle-class Michigan family. He arrives at this meal, reluctantly, at the behest of Patty (Emily Skeggs), a poignantly awkward 20 year old, who attracts ridicule both at home and at work. (Until, of course, she is fired.) By a mad coincidence, albeit one that sits snugly within this angular outsider romcom, Patty is an obsessive fan of Simon’s secret alter ego, John Q, the masked frontman of punk group Psy Ops. Source: Irishtimes.com

-Amber Wilkinson: It comes through in your film (Dinner in America), which feels quite singular. There's a very strong sense of personality that comes across. It's quite funny in that even though it's a very punk-spirited film, it's also a very romantic movie. I'm wondering if you are a romantic at heart.

-Adam Rehmeier: I found that out through the process that I'm actually a romantic guy at heart. This film broke me at several points, I edited it linearly and when I got to the arcade sequence, when Patty jumped on him and pulled him down, I just broke down. I just sobbed, it was the most beautiful thing. And so I had my own kind of awakening in the process of making the film. Source: www.eyeforfilm.co.uk

Kyle Gallner found the role of Simon to be a challenging one. “I thought Simon was a really interesting challenge, because you have this guy who at the beginning of the movie is almost actively trying to be disliked, he’s so aggressive and so abrasive. And by the end of it, you realize he’s a good guy, he’s just pushing back against all the bullshit in his life very actively. And when he finds Patty, they just kind of balance each other out.” Rehmeier wanted to cast Gallner after seeing a photo of him from Sundance 2015 that Rehmeier says just captured Simon in a single photo. “It was the same reaction that when I’d seen A Rebel Without a Cause, like how James Dean is able to balance pushing things and like a bad boy kind of thing, but like sensitive and vulnerable too. This image of Kyle had it in spades.” 

Kyle Gallner says he and Emily Skeggs are “kindred spirits” and credits Rehmeier for allowing the two to spend time together for two weeks before the film started shooting. One of the film’s high points is a sweet song, titled The Watermelon Song, which is arranged and played by Simon and sung by Patty in the film’s most emotional scene. Rehmeier recorded the song with Skeggs, playing the instruments himself and Skeggs singing and describes being “shocked” by Gallner’s emotional performance in the scene while shooting. Simon spends most of the film very reserved, aggressive and almost unlikable and his raw, emotional response to Patty singing is a tender moment in a film that otherwise projects such high, punk-rock energy. “I knew this is the first time you see Simon crack. That reaction was intentional, where you see that love growing, not just for her, but for the music. He sees something special in her and it’s special for him, he loves everything that’s happening. As gnarly as Simon is, there’s an authenticity in that, he loves his music and it felt like a very important moment for him and for them in their relationship.” Source: filmhounds.co.uk 

Director Adam Rehmeier said: “Dinner in America is my love letter to the early 90s punk scene in Lincoln, Nebraska that served as the backdrop for my formative years. I grew up playing in bands and spent the better part of two decades 4-tracking in a series of basements, apartments, and lockouts. The DIY ethic instilled through those experiences has informed my creative process and approach to filmmaking. At its heart, the film is an underdog love story about two very different characters, each marginalized misfits in their own right: Patty, a socially awkward, sheltered 20-year-old escaping her banal existence through punk music; Simon, a snarling anarchist and seemingly toxic punk seeking refuge from the law. When these two cross paths, their radically different personalities make them an unlikely duo. They are thrust together, at first by circumstance and necessity, but in short order they begin to inspire one another. An organic intimacy unfolds, eventually revealing a connection of which neither is initially aware they share. They find each other through music.” Source: www.thehollywoodnews.com

Dinner in America: punk-rock dramedy

Adam Rehmeier: "Dinner in America is salty and abrasive on the outside, but inside it’s sweet. It subversively frames something ugly, but underneath it all, these two characters exemplify the good in people, as twisted as that can be at times, especially with Simon."

A troubled punk singer and his biggest fan get into a series of scrapes in indie dramedy "Dinner in America". Adam Rehmeier’s rebel yell of a movie is as if Valley Girl was accidentally shunted into a teleportation machine alongside Sid & Nancy and the whole soupy stew beamed into the 90s. It’s about an angry punk singer with a pyromania fetish and a lonely and nerdy young woman with ADHD who is his biggest fan. Kyle Gallner plays John Q Public (real name: Simon), the lead singer of a band called Psy Ops who performs anonymously in a balaclava; off-stage, he has a vocal-fry badass voice, like Ray Liotta in GoodFellas. Simon is experiencing furious musical differences with the rest of the band and is making money through selling weed and taking part in big pharma medical experiments. Emily Skeggs is excellent as quirky, dreamy Patty, who takes indistinct Polaroids of herself masturbating to his music and sends them to him via the mailbox address on the band’s flyers. Dinner in America is a hyper aggressive comedy that deep down has a huge heart that will break down the walls built up by the characters. Twenty years ago, Sam Mendes’s American Beauty and Todd Solondz’s Happiness were at opposite ends of the spectrum of difficult weirdness for this kind of material, Solondz setting a gold standard for strangeness, dysfunction and discomfort. Rehmeier is at the American Beauty end of things. His film has its own truculent charm. Source: theguardian.com

Instant cult classic Dinner In America delivers darkly hilarious punk rock romcom thrills: As fate has it, Patty is Simon’s number one fan, though she doesn’t know it. He doesn’t know it either, not at first. The film's first 15 minutes may be a bumpy ride for some audiences as it focuses entirely on Simon and his zero-tolerance attitude to life: definitely an 'acquired taste' in character terms. However, this less-than-palatable introduction is critical to the film's success – and those who stick with Dinner In America will be rewarded by nuanced pitch-perfect performances from Gallner and Skeggs, whose tangible off-the-wall chemistry make this instant cult classic work. Patty's self-confidence grows as she witnesses Simon's brash bulldozing of school bullies, sexual harassers, amusingly passive aggressive parents/siblings and other everyday obstacles, helping her to realise that it's possible to stand up for yourself (and, indeed, re-invent yourself) while going against the grain. Source: irishnews.com

When we first meet Simon, he comes off as an irredeemable douchebag, and his quips and misadventures feel distinctly mean-spirited. Patty, meanwhile, can initially be read as a loose assemblage of Napoleon Dynamite-isms, or worse, an ableist stereotype (while it’s never stated outright, it’s generally implied that Patty has an unspecified learning disability or spectrum diagnosis). Indeed, the first act is strong medicine, and I can imagine more timid viewers bailing rather than opting to hang with these characters. As Patty, Skeggs is a ray of sunshine, a genuinely good person with just enough wry savvy that her ultimate romance doesn’t feel like a total mismatch. Gallner, meanwhile, carries himself with such snotty charisma that you find yourself liking him in spite of yourself. 

What’s more, despite their opposing acting styles, the two actors have fantastic chemistry, deftly bouncing off each other through scene after scene of witty repartee. Dinner in America is so raucous and hyperactive that, by the time its characters finally fall for each other, you don’t realize how hard you’re rooting for them. On the surface, this is not a subtle movie, but the transition from punk rock anarchy to swooning romanticism is real enough and felt enough that it sneaks up on you. By the end of the film, Patty has allowed Simon to drop some of his fuck-you defenses, and Simon has encouraged Patty to grow into her confidence and creative talents. Gallner is stunning in the role, crafting the image of a rebellious enfant terrible with a heart of gold. At the same time, Skeggs’s assertive eccentricity lends itself incredulously well to a film where everybody is trying to out weird each other. It’s a bit of a stretch to say this is some kind of subversive manic pixie dream girl narrative, yet there’s a strong sense of parity and mutual delirium between the two leads that makes their malady infectious.

Love and punk rock may seem like strange bedfellows, but they’re far from mutually exclusive. By the end of the film, these are the same smartasses you’ve come to love; they’ve just opened up their hearts a little bit more. It’s something of a cliche to refer to a film as a “romantic comedy for people who hate romantic comedies,” but in this case the description holds water. We’ll probably never hear Hugh Grant say “Take off that cat-shit-covered apron and I might be able to get hard,” and we’ll probably never see Julia Roberts furiously masturbate while blasting a dubbed cassette of hardcore b-sides, but as the movie unfolds, the emotions it evokes are the same. I had an honest-to-god lump in my throat as Patty crooned “Fuck ‘em all but us” over Simon’s sludgy guitar, and if that means I’ve gone soft in my old age, I don’t care. Dinner in America has a big, gushy heart beating under its crust-punk exterior, and it’s one of the most pleasant surprises of the year. Source: bostonhassle.com

Those who identified with the girl geeks of Ghost World and Welcome to the Dollhouse may also find something to love in Emily Skeggs’s Patty, a wide-eyed suburban nerd whose life is turned upside down by the arrival of Simon (Kyle Gallner), a punk rock runaway. A throwback to the brightly coloured offbeat teen movies of the 90s and a rude riposte to that era’s more mainstream offerings (She’s All That’s sexist makeover scene is subverted), this sweet (odd) romcom is buoyed up by the chemistry between its leads. Once Simon meets Patty his world begins to change as he finally meets his match. As Simon starts to mellow, the tone also morphs and becomes something beautifully quirky and uniquely original. 

It’s almost a punk Bonnie and Clyde. Dinner in America is an assault to the senses that really captures the attitude of punk-rock whilst at the same time crafting a quirky tale of love and self-empowerment. A joyously dark-hearted journey through suburban America that taps into the magic of films like Heathers, injects them with the spirit of punk rock and creates an instant hit that has the potential to shape a generation. Rehmeier doesn’t make explicit exactly what it is about America that Simon wishes to defy, but by the time he breaks bread with the William Sonoma family, viewers will get the idea. Suffice to say that young men like Simon grow up soaking in choiceless dissatisfaction, and they come of age renouncing their choicelessness. Partly it’s a class thing. Dinner in America doesn’t really cast America’s heartland in the most positive light. The film maintains traces of affection for the Mid-West regions mostly through the empathy felt for Simon and Patty, two loners in need of companionship who slowly become better people by being with each other. 

Grant that “better” involves, among other things, a truly gnarly revenge prank on the two asshole jocks who make a hobby of sexually harassing Patty, and causing a scene at the local pet store where she used to work in an effort at securing her final paycheck from her stingy boss. “Better” is a relative term, and given the suffocating atmosphere of their hometown, where individuality is choked out of people and replaced by droning normalcy, the strong desire to revolt feels like a moral imperative. Rehmeier litters Dinner in America with hideous examples of what “normalcy” looks like, from the asshole jocks to the racist football dad. By the time the movie ends, Simon and Patty look like heroes in spite of their abrasive rudeness and reckless actions. Source: www.pastemagazine.com

The Prankster and the Conspiracy: Kerry Thornley, JFK, LHO, Adam Curtis

Adam Curtis (February, 2021): "Individualism is born out of mass democracy. It’s a natural consequence of it. But at some point, individualism began to eat away at mass democracy, it began to strangle the very thing that had produced it, because it gets rid of collective power. What we’re waiting for is a politician who comes along with a really powerful story. The idea you could imagine something different has gone off the agenda. There are no politicians who think in that broader concept." Source: time.com

 

Aaron Good: For some reason, Adam Curtis decided to weigh in on the JFK assassination in his documentary Can't Get You Out of My Head. Though there have been a lot of good books written about the JFK assassination, from the looks of it, Curtis apparently did not read any of them. If he had done so, there would have been many angles that he could have taken to discuss the case, even if he could not cover the assassination in a comprehensive manner. He could have read David Talbot’s Brothers and then discussed how RFK came to believe that his brother had been killed as the result of a right-wing plot involving elements of the CIA, the Cuban exile community, and organized crime. The audience might have also appreciated learning about how RFK was assassinated before he could attain the presidency and reinvestigate Dallas—something he explicitly said he would do. Curtis often seems suspicious of power—especially technocratic power—but he seems even more suspicious of those who are suspicious of power.

For whatever reason, Curtis focuses on the figure of Kerry Thornley. So, what does Thornley do for Curtis? He largely serves to allow Curtis to be dismissive of “conspiracy theories,” even as he is superficially ambivalent about actual conspiracies elsewhere in the film. The Kerry Thornley arc in CGYOMYH begins with Curtis telling us how Thornley and his friend Greg Hill went to a bowling alley where they disagreed about whether the universe was orderly or chaotic. They eventually came to the conclusion that the world was chaotic, but that individuals could use their minds to create some semblance of order. But then something strange happened. Thornley joined the Marines, where he met a young defiant man named Lee Harvey Oswald. He decided he would write a novel about Oswald. While Thornley was writing this novel, Oswald defected to the Soviet Union. As a right-wing Ayn Rand devotee, Thornley detested Kennedy. He did not mourn when JFK died. But the fact that the figure he cast in his novel was the president’s alleged assassin was, according to Thornley, “very weird.”

Curtis states that around this time, Thornley got his Oswald novel published under the title, The Idle Warriors. This is an error; the novel did not get published until 1991—in the wake of Oliver Stone’s JFK. As Curtis would have it, Thornley ran into trouble because of the novel and the fact that—like Oswald before the assassination—Thornley was living in New Orleans in 1967. Thornley, Curtis tells us, believed that people in power used conspiracy theories to control people by making them believe that the world was run by hidden forces. This served to make individuals feel “weak and powerless.” Curtis does not bother to point out that Thornley is essentially positing a conspiracy theory to explain conspiracy theories. Curtis blithely asserts: 'Despite all the patterns, Jim Garrison could produce no evidence of a hidden conspiracy.' Curtis does not mention that Garrison had convinced the jury at the Clay Shaw trial that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy. That was accomplished through one exhibit and two key witnesses. The witnesses were Dr. John Nichols for the prosecution and the second was Kennedy's pathologist Dr. Pierre Finck. The exhibit was the Zapruder film, which Nichols’ used to convincingly demonstrate a shot came from the front. This showed, at the least, that Lee Oswald was not the only assassin firing at Kennedy, which would mean JFK was killed by a conspiracy. So it’s convenient for Curtis to leave it out.

Garrison also discovered that Oswald had been in New Orleans as an ostensibly pro-Castro activist, but had been working out of the office of Guy Banister—a hard-right, ex-FBI man who ran the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean, was a member of the fascist “Minutemen” organization, and had been involved in anti-Castro CIA operations like the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose. Given that Oswald’s New Orleans activities only served to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the obvious inference would be that Oswald was a pawn in some kind of counterintelligence operation. The Zapruder film was so definitive that when it was finally shown on network television in the 1970’s, public support for the Warren Commission fell to all-time lows. Years later it was revealed that Clay Shaw lied on the stand numerous times. He was also getting considerable support from the CIA during the trial. There is no excuse for Curtis’ failure to mention that the last official word on the JFK case—the HSCA investigation—concluded that the assassination was the result of a “probable conspiracy.” He then also fails to disclose to the audience that the chief counsel of the HSCA eventually signed on to a petition which stated that the culprits were elements of the US national security state.

Upon returning to Thornley and Discordianism, CGYOMH details how the group decided to use Playboy magazine to launch “Operation Mindfuck.” They kicked off the operation by submitting a fake letter positing that all the political assassinations in the US were the work of “the [Bavarian] Illuminati.” Any explanation of Operation Mindfuck is by definition a conspiracy theory. To acknowledge this truism would entail something that Curtis does not want to admit or explain: that any conspiracy theory—like any no-conspiracy theory—should be judged on its respective merits. One of many dispiriting aspects of CGYOMH is that Thornley and Operation Mindfuck are actually interesting subjects whose reexamination could offer fresh insights. The work of the illustrious and iconoclastic Florida State professor Lance DeHaven-Smith is instructive in this regard. By the end of the year 2000, DeHaven-Smith had already enjoyed an accomplished career as a scholar of public administration and defined SCADs (state crimes against democracy) as “concerted actions or inactions by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and undermine popular sovereignty.”

In 2013, Lance deHaven-Smith published Conspiracy Theory in America. There he detailed the ways in which powerful actors and institutions have aided and abetted SCADs by stigmatizing those who posit conspiratorial explanations of politically significant events: "Most Americans will be shocked to learn that the conspiracy-theory label was popularized as a pejorative term by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a propaganda program initiated in 1967, infusing the conspiracy theory label with powerfully negative associations. This program was directed at criticisms of the Warren Commission’s report. The propaganda campaign called on media corporations and journalists to criticize “conspiracy theorists” and raise questions about their motives and judgements." Does not the Discordians’ Operation Mindfuck plot dovetail perfectly with the Agency’s goal of stigmatizing conspiracy theorizing around suspicious political events? As we will see, this becomes all the more apparent when one looks at the overwhelming amount of evidence that Kerry Thornley was an intelligence asset involved in creating the legend that made Oswald a suitable designated culprit in the JFK assassination.

Nixon could not get the CIA to cooperate with him in a number of key areas, including the president’s attempts to obtain all the CIA files which might explain the JFK assassination and the Bay of Pigs operation. Nixon eventually fired Dick Helms, the director of the CIA, and ordered his successor, the outsider James Schlesinger, to compile all information about CIA crimes. He took these actions, in part, because he believed that the CIA was somehow involved in the Watergate scandal. There were good reasons for his suspicions. Two key Watergate figures—James McCord and E. Howard Hunt—were “former” CIA officers, were politically to Nixon’s right, and were so operationally incompetent that many suspect that they intentionally bungled their crimes as part of an operation to damage or gain control over the president. It is important to note that these leaks about Nixon, and about Nixon’s adversaries like the CIA, were part of what can be described as an Establishment civil war. To say that Nixon was merely paranoid about his liberal enemies is to greatly distort this history. Furthermore, such an explanation cannot explain how the ouster of Nixon led to the US lurching far to the right politically. Both major parties became more conservative. 

The liberalism of the Kennedys was excised from the political power structure. The Republicans became a Reaganite party and the Democrats adopted positions that had previously been associated with Rockefeller Republicanism, cultural politics notwithstanding. Years after launching Operation Mindfuck, Thornley says he saw E. Howard Hunt’s photo after his Watergate arrest. He now recognized Hunt from his New Orleans days, when he also knew Oswald. Thornley also recalled how he had known Guy Bannister and Clay Shaw, suspects in Jim Garrison’s investigation. Suddenly, says Thornley, “I could not explain all these weird coincidences.” While the Operation Mindfuck hoax/operation promulgated an Illuminati meta-conspiracy theory, these bogus theories were getting mixed up with real world intrigues like CIA mind control and other scandals. Says Curtis, “The line between the reality of political corruption and a dream world of conspiracy theories started to get blurred in America.” Kerry Thornley, Curtis suggests, became swept up in this paranoid thinking. Thornley came to believe that the CIA had somehow manipulated him into setting up Operation Mindfuck, but he didn’t know how. Says Curtis, “Thornley had retreated into a dream world of conspiracy.”

There are more key facts and events that Curtis omits from his tale. The Thornley and Hill move to New Orleans in February 1961 has never been adequately explained. Right at the time of their arrival, preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion were ramping up. Ultra-rightists and Garrison suspects like David Ferrie and Guy Bannister were involved in these operations, conducted at locales such as the Belle Chase naval air station and Banister’s 544 Camp Street office. Upon arriving in New Orleans, Thornley began associating with these hard-right, CIA connected circles. In the mid-1970’s, when the HSCA investigation was about to begin, Thornley admitted that, in fact, he had known all of these characters. Furthermore, when his book on Oswald, The Idle Warriors, finally got published in 1991, Thornley admitted in the book’s introduction that he showed the manuscript to Guy Banister back in 1961. It is hard to take seriously any non-conspiratorial explanation of these events. Thornley decided to write a novel based on a not-especially-interesting marine who defected to the Soviet Union. Then Thornley whimsically decided to show up in New Orleans, where he happens to meet Guy Banister—one of the figures involved in creating the FDC. So, he shows Banister the novel he has written about Oswald, the same guy that Bannister’s FDC associates are impersonating. And apparently Adam Curtis doesn’t bat an eyelash.

Jim Garrison had at least eight witnesses who had seen Thornley and Oswald together during that summer (New Orleans, 1963). Two of these witnesses stated that Thornley had told them that Oswald was, in fact, not a communist. Garrison had a witness who said that she, “her husband, and a number of people who live in that neighborhood saw Thornley at the Oswald residence a number of times—in fact they saw him there so much they did not know which was the husband, Oswald or Thornley.” In that 1963 summer in New Orleans, Oswald was famously arrested while passing out Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) leaflets. Carlos Bringuier and Ed Butler were both involved with Oswald in an infamous radio debate. This followed Oswald’s arrest after a confrontation with Bringuier, during his strange FPCC leafleting spectacle. This seems to have been the objective that Oswald believed he was furthering—some sort of psychological operation for propaganda purposes. In summary, Thornley, Bringuier, and Butler were all instrumental in creating the evolving Oswald legend. Thornley first did so by depicting Oswald in The Idle Warriors as a communist malcontent in the Marines. Then he furthered Oswald’s legendary persona through his and his associates’ activities in New Orleans. 

All of this is not to say that Garrison was beyond reproach. He should not have been so trusting with the volunteers he allowed to work on the case. He should have indicted Ferrie sooner, lest his main suspect succumb to a deadly brain aneurysm whilst sitting on the couch looking at two typed, unsigned suicide letters. Furthermore, given all the things that have come out about Kerry Thornley, Garrison arguably should have sought to prosecute him rather than Clay Shaw. One reason to argue that Garrison should have gone after Thornley for conspiracy comes from Thornley himself. Said Kerry Thornley, “Garrison, you should have gone after me for conspiracy to commit murder.” Admittedly, Thornley was positing a contrived hoax, but even this JFK disinformation is of a piece with his prior roles in Oswald’s framing and in the cover-up after the fact. For Curtis to omit so many crucial facts about the JFK assassination, about Kerry Thornley, and about Garrison’s case is useful to his cause. It allows him to ignore the history-making interventions of the deep state and the extent to which these interventions have helped bring about the political nadir that America is experiencing. Curtis’ obscurantism allows him to downplay American state criminality as merely “political corruption”: He omits, distorts, and cherry picks facts to present his interminable exploration of our current dystopia. Source: kennedysandking.com

Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy's America in Black & White, America on Fire, Hierarchy in the Forest

Growing up in a large Irish Catholic family, Bobby was a loner with an instinctive sympathy for people who were having a hard time. He was the most devout of nine children and possessed a moralistic streak, but his questioning spirit helped guard against the rigidity that might have accompanied that attribute. Murray Kempton once commented that the one thing Franklin Roosevelt could have learned from Joseph Kennedy “was how to be a father.” Joe was often away from home—in Hollywood, London, and Palm Beach—and he sent his kids to boarding school, but he cultivated an affectionate and close relationship with them all the same. Bobby was “the gentlest and shyest” of the Kennedy boys and “the least articulate orally.” A childhood nurse remembered him as “the most thoughtful and considerate of all the children.”

Attorney General Robert Kennedy, in his office at two o’clock in the morning on May 22, 1961. He is on the phone with his deputy Byron White in Montgomery, Alabama, after a raging mob attacked the First Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. and other supporters of the Freedom Riders had gathered. RFK advised: “Half a million American soldiers with 700,000 Vietnamese allies, with total command of the air, total command of the sea, backed by huge resources and the most modern weapons are unable to secure even a single city from the attacks of an enemy whose total strength is 250,000.” The time had come to take a new look at the war in Vietnam, “not by cursing the past but using it to illuminate the future.” Furthermore, it was not in the national interest to wage a war so destructive and cruel that “our best and closest friends ask, more in sorrow than in anger, what has happened to America.” In their responses to Watts and successive summers of uprisings and civil disturbances, Johnson and Kennedy could not have been further apart. Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War divided the country and sapped resources for anti-poverty programs at a time of urgent need. 

Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King emerged as leading critics of cutbacks to poverty programs and as increasingly vocal opponents of the war. King and Kennedy were also closely aligned in their concerns about urban conditions and the oppression of Black youth. Early in 1966, King moved into a Chicago tenement and joined community groups in organizing a campaign to end housing discrimination. For their part, Kennedy and his aides met with residents, community leaders, and activists in the impoverished Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant and, drawing on what they learned from the community, established a major redevelopment project. The goal was to bring government, foundation, and private funds to bear on shortages of decent housing, jobs, recreational facilities, and education—all under the direction of a community board. The Bedford Stuyvesant Redevelopment Corporation marked a shift toward community control of urban revitalization, and the project remained a major focus of Kennedy’s until the end of his life. “As implemented and augmented by opportunistic Congresses,” writes biographer John Farrell, “governors like Nelson Rockefeller, and Nixon’s successors, notably Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton—the ‘war’ on drugs and the battle for ‘law and order’ would metastasize, yielding punitive measures like mandatory sentences, no-knock raids and other relaxations of defendants’ rights.” Starting in the late 1960s, America’s prison population skyrocketed, with a move to mass incarceration that disproportionately impacted Black Americans. 

As historian Elizabeth Hinton pointed out in her study of the transition from the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, “African Americans born after 1965 and lacking a high school diploma are more likely to eventually go to prison than not.” Ending inequality would require nothing less than overcoming “the scarred heritage of centuries of oppression” manifested throughout America life, most notably in white attitudes and beliefs. Kennedy warned that “it would be a national disaster to permit resentment and fear to drive increasing numbers of white and black Americans into opposing camps of distrust and enmity.” There was but one choice, he said: “to face our difficulties and strive to overcome them, or turn away, bringing repression, increasing human pain, and civil strife.” —Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy’s America in Black and White (2021) by Patricia Sullivan

No social world ever went from an egalitarian community to an elite-dominated, state-structured society in one fell swoop. It’s a gradual movement towards inequality. The pathway to inequality leads through unequal, but still small-scale and stateless, communities, in which incipient elites lived with and among their neighbours, and without control of coercive state institutions. As such, they were vulnerable, and as Christopher Boehm notes in Hierarchy in the Forest (1999). Today, the top one per cent of incomes in the United States accounts for one fifth of US earnings. The top one per cent of fortunes holds two-fifths of the total wealth. Just one rich family, the six heirs of the brothers Sam and James Walton, founders of Walmart, are worth more than the bottom 40 per cent of the American population combined ($115 billion in 2012). Bottom line: egalitarian, cooperative human communities are possible. Widespread sharing and consensus decision-making aren’t contrary to ‘human nature’. Indeed, for most of human history we lived in such societies. But such societies are not inherently stable. These social practices depend on active defence. That active defence failed, given the social technologies available, as societies increased in scale and economic complexity. Source: aeon.co