From the depths of Warner Bros archives, Ken Russell’s infamous film The Devils has been resurrected (ish) once more! Andrea and Alex take this opportunity to dive into the politics, contractions, and naughtiness present within one of the most controversial cult films ever made.
REQUIRED READING
The Devils. Dir. Ken Russell, 1971.
EXTRA CREDIT
Ars Erotica. Excerpt from Mario Vargas Llosa book on the influence of spectacle on the West.
Society of the Spectacle. Guy Debord’s treatise on performance and coercion.
Sex Education in the 1970s. A rundown of the controversial sex education film Growing Up.
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I found it odd that in your reaction to Llosa’s critique of schools taking on a subject, none of you noted that you are… “the Faculty of Horror”. There are people like John Taylor Gatto or Bryan Caplan who have a background in teaching and still rail against our education system (and even they hold onto their own versions of educational idealism), but it’s quite atypical. If I were to make an anti-education argument relevant to this subject, I might point to the increase in mental disorders in schools that iatrogenically focus more on “mental health”. With institutions that dysfunctional, one shouldn’t expect good results from them tackling anything outside of areas in which they have well-demonstrated competence. Since one of you brought up the argument that people will always explore forbidden things regardless of what gets normalized, I will point out that in the specific case of sex, rather than being temporally invariant, people are having less of it over time. Rather than thinking of education as a counterweight to the porn whose influence you decried, they could quite plausibly be doing the same thing as both get influenced by whatever dysfunctions are growing in our culture.