Christ & Christianity:

In Scorpio Rising, Anger clearly conveys his irreverence for Christianity with the inter-cutting of Jesus doing his good deeds for the day and the bikers being bad boys (boys will be boys). ‘Blasphemous inter-cutting continues when a pious relief of Jesus’s face follows a flash-frame of bare buttocks.’ (Moonchild: the Films of Kenneth Anger (2002) The Occult: A Torch for Lucifer, Anna Powell)

I can’t pretend to know much about Christianity as a religion, however, my understanding of Jesus puts him in the position of being the rebel. Jesus certainly wasn’t squirting mustard on his nude apostles (at least not as far as we know, although it’s difficult to surmise what kind of shenanigans a guy who could turn water into wine might come up with), but he was a rebel to the extent that he went against the grain and was persecuted and eventually executed or sacrificed for his beliefs.

Jesus was a rebel living on the fringe of society; and like all subcultures Christianity gained acceptance and popularity as it became marketable.

The consumption and subsequent regurgitation, through the discourse of contemporary film and music videos, of Anger’s once marginal work has led to his being crowned the ‘Godfather of MTV’ a crown of thorns I’m not sure I’d want to rock as MTV totally sucks.

The Church really was the corporation of it’s time amassing extraordinary power and wealth in a relatively short time. The corporations of today are no different; they take what they can market from subcultures (Jazz, Blues, Hip Hop, and Punk Rock would be perfect examples although there are many examples that one could choose from) and recycle and reconfigure it to the point where one forgets the origin which is always far more interesting. The cultural roots are yanked out leaving a shell of the movement’s former self and relegating the original to the history books.

As ironic seeming as the juxtaposition of Nazi imagery (before its appropriation by Nazi Germany the swastika was a symbol of light (Lucifer) and life, since this appropriation the symbol is swathed in darkness) and Christian icons (Christians adopted Lucifer the lord of light making him the prince of darkness) appears to be, there are very strong parallels that can’t be ignored putting Christians of the past in the same genocidal category as Hitler and his cronies.

Christians sought ‘converts’ through whatever means necessary including extreme violence, threats of death and execution to those who would not allow themselves to be subjugated by this organization. They understood the power of linguistics and rhetoric using terms like ‘crusade’ ‘inquisition’ ‘heretic’ ‘barbarians’.

Although most Christians of today don’t condone overt violence against non-believers they have found more peacefully subversive ways of eradicating cultures from within thus the ‘mission through missionary’. Through these ‘missions’ the Church has successfully done away with many shamanic (the oldest ‘religion’ known to humankind) practices. And there’s no doubt in my mind that the average Christian’s feelings of superiority creates cognitive dissonance which makes the invasion (most currently Iraq) and subsequent murder of people seem somehow justifiable.

And so Anger’s choice of images hold very deep meaning for me. Far beyond being funny, which they are, the images make uncomfortably accurate comparisons of contemporary Western culture within an historical context. The images remind us of what many, throughout history, would love for us to forget; they are a reminder of what can happen when the individual stops thinking for oneself (the Patriot Act Etc).