Many thanks to Infinite Thought for linking to Fredric Jameson's (1974) article about Zardoz. Jameson's initial "literary" analysis of Zardoz, as a variation on the Enlightenment critique of religious mystification, might be supplemented by the suggestion that, less a "fable" as Jameson would have it, Boorman's film is a critique of religion which nonetheless takes the form of a religious foundation myth (c.f. Freud's Moses and Monotheism). Sean Connery's Zed first receives his awakening from the pages of a book (albeit Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz and not the holy books and religious scriptures of the Abrahamic religions) handed to him by God-the-Father ("I bred you. I led you."), this then leads him to kill this God-the-Father figure, before, ultimately, leading his people ("the chosen ones") to the promised land of the Vortex, a place of Edenic rural serenity, with the final assault of the 'brutals' against the Vortex dwellers a kind of return of the repressed on the part of this particular Utopia's own structural outside.
Tuesday 31 March 2009
"Is God in showbusiness too?"
Many thanks to Infinite Thought for linking to Fredric Jameson's (1974) article about Zardoz. Jameson's initial "literary" analysis of Zardoz, as a variation on the Enlightenment critique of religious mystification, might be supplemented by the suggestion that, less a "fable" as Jameson would have it, Boorman's film is a critique of religion which nonetheless takes the form of a religious foundation myth (c.f. Freud's Moses and Monotheism). Sean Connery's Zed first receives his awakening from the pages of a book (albeit Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz and not the holy books and religious scriptures of the Abrahamic religions) handed to him by God-the-Father ("I bred you. I led you."), this then leads him to kill this God-the-Father figure, before, ultimately, leading his people ("the chosen ones") to the promised land of the Vortex, a place of Edenic rural serenity, with the final assault of the 'brutals' against the Vortex dwellers a kind of return of the repressed on the part of this particular Utopia's own structural outside.
