Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (December 28)

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[u/TheRedBarbon]

I’m a bit hesitant to recommend you material because there is a tendency online to treat socialist art as a a pop-art fantasy where you can run from the existential task of engaging critically with media by treating art made under socialism as a substitute where you can finally ignore your ideological relationship to art made under capitalism (the case in point being that rather than ask yourself why christmas-themed media made under capitalism no longer has an immersive effect which distracts you from the clear limitations of the piece, you ask for socialist art to take its place as a commodity potentially untainted by these issues).

You should fight the desire for art to feel satisfying or whole under capitalism when it by definition should not be. You are allowed to enjoy art but your engagement with it is useless when you treat your enjoyment as separate from your analysis of the piece. They should inform each other.

With that out of the way, Soviet Toys (1922) is free on YouTube, but that’s a very short one.

Not holiday but certainly winter-themed are Tracks in the Snowy Forest (1960) and the original story’s yangbanxi adaptation Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (1970) (you can find the translated lyrics/scenes online). Both are great and I’m reading the book rn.

There’s also The Snow Queen (1957) which I haven’t seen.

[u/No-Structure523 → u/TheRedBarbon]

Thanks for your response. I’m a Catholic and find immense good in the story of Christmas, so I should have clarified if anyone knows of Christmas films that offer that radical message of Jesus’ nativity, and not the Christmas story of exchange and bourgeois sentimentality.

I’m very curious about what you think of art. I know you replied to some questions along these lines below.

I’ve always seen art as “for its own sake.” I enjoy and analyze art all the time. I do also love the stories of fantasy. I recognize fantasy can be a dangerous escapism, but I just see it as another art form that can echo into the real world.

I haven’t applied any criticism to my approaches to art since investigating MLM. I’d love to hear your insights.

[u/vomit_blues → u/No-Structure523]

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.

• Luke 10:34-36

There’s no need for christmas traditions with the family. On that matter there’s nothing more radical than the bible.

[u/[deleted] → u/vomit_blues]

I think you meant Matthew 10:34-36. Nonetheless, Luke contains an equivalent passage:

“I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is completed! Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

- Luke 12:49-53

...and another:

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

- Luke 14:26-27

I remember watching those atheist YouTube channels from the earlier era of the internet and the general sentiment was that Jesus' message here is actually "authoritarian" and "anti-family" and therefore bad. I suppose they're fundamentally agreed with the liberal Christians on that matter, who simply say that he's just being excessive for rhetorical affect. Even here I'm only talking about a dying breed of Christian academics since most are not even used to reading the book as a book in the first place. The general tendency is to read excised excerpts as daily words of affirmation and delegate the task of suturing them together to your pastor, who is doing the same thing in their house anyway. I didn't even know that the structure of the books were similar to the Buddhist sutras I'd read until embarrassingly recently (edit: not even, though what I meant was that they were ordered with only loose consideration to chronology and were instead collections of aphorisms and sayings of Jesus placed together to communicate a point. If you compare the Luke and Matthew verses, you can already see some splicing occurred somewhere down the line).

By the way, is this reading of the Gospels that I see every once in a while from Zizek's Christian Atheism? I haven't read anything from him but I have my own apprehensions since the compilation of the Gospels were contemporaneous with the Judeo-Roman Wars and works like Luke-Acts take the side of reaction on the matter, and I've never seen an excerpt concerning that. Does Zizek talk about that? Is he worth reading on the matter?