I watched "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" yesterday. Horrific but I suspect clearly worth it though I am trying to puzzle out what the take away is. Apart from having nightmares afterwards - the power of the medium does not require our eyes to be taped open or that we be drugged to insure we remember the images - so Burgess was wrong in A Clockwork Orange - so how will I ever enjoy Enya again? I will always make that association.

But apart from the brutality and sexual nature of many of the scenes, we have Elizabeth as the new superhero. Notice her appearance is imitated by many young women in town. The males on the other hand tend to look like the Geek in Jurassic Park. But the moral is Geeks will inherit the earth. Is this our next evolutionary step? Is she the postmodern individual?
But what kind of government do you get when it is ruled by Geeks?

I think we all start out as fundamentalists - but through philosophy and literature we move through further stages that imitate the history of thought. So that we seem to keep moving through stages. Here is an interesting bit from Bernard Lewis "The End of Modern History in the Middle East":

"Democracies may negotiate and compromise with other democracies. For religions this is much more difficult and, for fundamentalist religions, impossible." p. 22

Following Francis Fukuyama (and others), in order to have a successful democracy you need (enough) modern individuals - those who have moved beyond the stage of fundamentalism - or tribalism! - and for an individual to reach that stage (following Harold Bloom "Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human") you have to become like Hamlet in being able to self reflect. Interesting thesis since modern democracies arose only in conjunction with the literature and culture of the modern individual.

If our school system fails to raise enough modern individuals we slip back into tribalism ourselves.

I haven't finished Steven Pinker's book "The Better Angels of our Nature" but that would seem to lead to the idea that peace and propserity goes with the success of that sort of education as well.

Initial notes on some scenes from HPSS

On watching the first few scenes of the first movie of the Harry Potter series, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” (because the original title Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone reportedly would not sell in the USA where the editors thought no one would go see a movie with the word “Philosopher” in it): we note that the special effects are ancient already even though the movie was made in 2001, Richard Harris is dead, the snake is supposed to be Nagini, Christopher Columbus with John Williams makes a much less scary movie than the later films would be, Hagrid is obviously two different actors depending on the shot, and we have a metaphorical use of a device called a “putter outer” that puts out street lights (will later also turn them on) and as we shall see works on people’s “lights” as well as gas lamps and electric lights.

Harry is underfoot literally and figuratively. The Snake does not speak Parsel tongue (snake language) neither does Harry, as they will in the second movie. (Do they speak English in the book?)

Voldemort and Harry’s wands are twins, and Gandalf and the Balrog’s swords (in the Lord of the Rings) are twins. Matt wonders if when people see Harry some of them know that he is the last phylactery of Voldemort’s soul (Diary, ring, locket, cup, diadem, Harry, Nagini, Voldemort.

A Biblical interpretation of the creation of Adam and Eve is that they had no purpose initially. When Satan gives them the fruit they now have a curiosity to know things but continue to seek a sense of purpose but they still do not have one.