The Life and Death of Shauna Grant An Essay by John David Ebert “‘Transcendence’ always involves departing from the known and familiar “beings” and going out in some way beyond them.” –Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) Suicide On March 21, 1984, Colleen Applegate – known to the porn industry as “Shauna Grant” […]
On Michael Douglas as Liberace
The Celebrity Morphodynamics of Liberace: Behind the Candelabra A Review by John David Ebert According to Arnold Toynbee, in his monumental work A Study of History, pre-Civilizational societies are locked into a state of arrest because they derive their particular form of “social mimesis” from imitating the dead ancestors, which therefore orients them toward the […]
On Breaking Bad
Breaking Bad A Review by John David Ebert Walter White has a problem: the model that he has been following as the “imaginary signification” to shape his life by isn’t working. He is an affable high school chemistry teacher whose wife and in-laws do not respect him. They regard him as an amusing and powerless […]
On Star Trek Into Darkness
Star Trek Into Darkness Reviewed by John David Ebert Star Trek Into Darkness is a perfect specimen of what I have termed “post-classic cinema,” which refers to the characteristic nature of the cinema of the past decade or so, which is a type of cinema with a completely different ontological status from that of the […]
On Iron Man 3
I Iron Man 3: Reviewed by John David Ebert In ancient Mesoamerican myth,the superhero was the figure of the Aztec eagle warrior: with the jaws of the eagle wide open, the hero’s costume revealed him as a human being swallowed up into the gullet of an astral creature, for the great superhero of Mesoamerican civilization, […]
On Room 237
Room 237 Reviewed by John David Ebert Rodney Ascher’s documentary film about Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece is an amusing, if insipid, attempt to make Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining “make sense.” He calls on the wits of five exegetes — whose faces we never see — to analyze the film as though they were giving […]
On Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit
The Hobbit Reviewed by John David Ebert I saw this movie in IMAX 3D, and while watching it realized that the drive-in movie hasn’t disappeared at all, it has actually been placed inside of the movie theater auditorium and crossed with the stadium-style seating of the old dramatic theater houses. But instead of being gathered […]
On The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead Reviewed by John David Ebert As I have pointed out elsewhere, television is now the great new medium that is taking over the role once occupied by cinema, especially the role of miniaturizing ancient and long forgotten cosmologies. And so, from now on, I will be including reviews of television shows on […]
On Immortals
Immortals, Mythology and Metaphysics A Review by Benton Rooks “…Myth remains the proper language of metaphysics.” –Ananda K. Coomaraswamy There are three essential layers and functions for any mythology: social, psychological and metaphysical /spiritual. The dualistic social function varies significantly from culture to culture—myths have often been used by the media, Church and the State […]
Top 20 Films Since 1992
My Top 20 Films Since 1992 by John David Ebert After watching Quentin Tarantino’s list on You Tube and then realizing that absolutely none of his films overlap with my own list, I’ve decided, just for fun, to post that list here, with brief discussions of each film. Here they are, then, in order by […]
On Tarzan
A Glance Into the Symbolic Landscapes of Tarzan By John David Ebert Descent If Edgar Rice Burroughs, with his earlier protagonist John Carter, Warlord of Mars, had in 1912 established the pattern of the superhero who arrives on the ground from the heavens above, then with his second creation — Tarzan, Lord of the Apes […]
On James Bond
The Strangely Distorted, and Weirdly Elongated World of James Bond (Unabridged Version) By John David Ebert 1. The first James Bond novel, Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, appeared in 1953, just as the Korean War was coming to an end and the C.I.A. was planning the removal of Mossadegh from office in Iran. Within a few years, […]
On The X Files
 The X-Files and the Breakdown of Our Cultural Immune System By John David Ebert 1. By now, Mulder and Scully have become almost as famous as their literary prototypes Holmes and Watson. Indeed, in many ways, they strongly resemble this earlier pair of detectives who stand at the threshold of the birth of the forensic […]
William Irwin Thompson Comments
A Response to John Ebert’s Review of Cloverfield By William Irwin Thompson As always, John, an interesting spin on the ordinary. Yes, catastrophes are coming our way, which is why I feature them so strongly in my essay on “Catastrophist Governance and the Need for a Tricameral Legislature.” But another point is that our culture […]
On James Bond
The Tribal Cosmology of James Bond By John David Ebert The first James Bond novel, Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, appeared in 1953, just as the Korean War was coming to an end and the C.I.A. was planning the removal of Mossadegh from office in Iran. Within a few years, the U.S. government would begin sending […]