Darwin Goes to the Movies!?!
Jurassic Hollywood Replaces Postmodern Hollywood: Progress!

Introduction

Since I never anticipated that Human Sin or Social Sin would be so completely accepted by academic elites, I was even more amazed when I discovered that over twenty-five Hollywood films had been made to support my models. As I am writing in March 2021, there are four such films in the theaters: Wonder Woman 1984 (2020), Raya and the Last Dragon (2021), Monster Hunter (2020), and News of the World (2021). This degree of support—or better, this realm of support in popular culture—goes to an entirely different level than university press books, no matter how canonical. Human Sin or Social Sin now appears to set the basic parameters of education and popular culture at present and for the future. This support from Hollywood appears to have been going on for some time, since the earliest such film I’ve seen in Suicide Squad, from 2016. Since then, there have been at least five films per year influenced by my book and several of the A-list, a very significant number.

A general technique of the twenty-five films that I’ve watched is to take a basic idea from Human Sin or Social Sin (or just Human Sin for short) and enlarge it to the scale of an archetype. This is done by using an idea as a basic plot device and as a recurring motif. A clear trend is for each film to take only one or two ideas and use them to organize the plot. A few films, like Frozen II (2019), Avengers: Endgame (2019), Batman v Superman (2016), and Tom and Jerry (2021), just take a few ideas and inject them into an otherwise normal plot.

When taken together, the films are a kind of “genesis cycle” of the new liberal arts curriculum and popular culture based on evolutionary theory and evolutionary psychology. When these films are combined with the new scholarship, what we have is the near-complete triumph of the Enlightenment.

This quick revolution or “adaptation” in Hollywood may not be a coincidence. This fast and near-complete conversion, at least among most of the elites, maybe a kind of penance for how Hollywood, as I show in Human Sin, in the past century has gone with the “learned ideals” and market demand and has systematically undermined or “deconstructed” the various Western traditions.

To put a better spin on it, since Human Sin has clear models for film history (four people have said that my film analysis represents my best writing), it was easy for Hollywood to pivot and retooled with the modern evolutionary methods and subject-centered ethics (a.k.a the Seven Deadly Sin). As this change in outlook becomes public, these trends in the film will become more explicit and easy to understand. While the new films to date are clear in their use of Human Sin, that use is nonetheless subtle—at least until it is explained—which is the goal of this web document.

Of the new films, the one that best describes the foundation of the new curriculum is Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) because it deals with gender and, by extension, the desire for resources and reproduction and its many side effects. This is clear by just making a basic comparison with the first Wonder Woman (2017) film, which was also directed by Patty Jenkins. The first film is traditional in that the plot has Wonder Woman, or Diana, battle against the standard social evils, such as “nationalist war,” sexism, and Racism. So all basic characteristics of individuals are assimilated into the standard group types that were taught in the traditional, now-defunct school curriculum.

The second film, Wonder Woman 1984 (2020), only portrays individuals in need of the traditional “consciousness” of the moral weakness (the Seven Deadly Sins) of human nature—variously situated. In essence, Diana is in a battle against individual human hubris or overreach. For instance, while in the first film Diana fights to help the category “children,” in the second film, she “overcomes herself” and saves actual children. A central change is that groups are seen as expressions of individual actions and characteristics. So the opening scene portrays images of gluttony, hubris, avarice, and “Max Lord,” offering individuals the temptation of quick riches or “fool’s gold.” In the first film, Diana says that she can speak “hundreds of languages,” an example of hubris or pride, while in the second, she hesitantly acknowledges her ability to read Latin.

Max Lord’s Wish to Have More Without Limits is his primary driver, as it is in popular culture’s music videos, or, in blue states, universal love or “No Borders!” In Human Sin, I quote Walter Burkert when he says that the Greek Gods represent “wishes fulfilled.”

The film is dominated by themes of the male display of power and the female display of feminine curves in tight outfits. These plot devices illustrate the following quote from Human Sin:

“Men and women have adapted to different roles in reproduction, so men show off their material and mental resources, while women show off their bodies and faces with tight clothes and makeup. Fourteen-year-old women have maximum mate value and more consistent skin tone, so cosmetics make women look younger.” (p. 25)

Wonder Woman 1984 opens with Max Lord pitching his fake oil investments, and Barbara Minerva undergoing a transformation from mousy scientist to “killer party babe” as she enters a party in her new tight dress, as a male voice says over the sound system, with bated breath, “Ooh, ah, ooh, ah, ooh, ah!”

Sex and gender are foundational to the “mass in motion” model of evolutionary theory. Human Sin shows how these desires are ritualized and weaponized to attack or “deconstruct” traditional notions of the “uptight” fine arts. There is a scene in Wonder Woman 1984 that perfectly portrays this. Diana’s boyfriend died during World War I, and now, in 1984, has been brought back to life. As she shows him the sublime “wonders” of a modern city, we hear the Mozart operatic aria “Voi Che Sapete” from The Marriage of Figaro, which describes an adolescent boy’s first tortured stirrings of love. (I make my love of opera very clear in Human Sin.) While the aria plays in the background, Diana shows her boyfriend the “over-the-top” examples of hyperemotional expression in pop culture, such as break dancing, “outsized” modern sculpture, and a group of rowdy punk rockers with two-foot-high Mohawks.

While I have seen the film ten times, I still can’t see an obvious tie-in with George Orwell’s novel 1984, except for the fact that this “sublime” status of pop culture is self-policed with high rigor. As Mark Bauerlein described this self-policing in The State of the American Mind (2015), “Have fun, or else.” Paradoxical, but true. A parallel that might help here is from the Woody Allen film A Rainy Day in New York (2020), in which the name of the student newspaper, The Argus, is also a creature from the Greek myth that has many eyes and constantly and intrusively watches everyone.

Although this film was released recently, in December 2020, it can be viewed as foundational to the new film culture since sexuality, sexual display, sexual competition, and reproduction are the “engines” of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. Other films, such as Monster Hunter (2020) and Kong: Skull Island (2017), illustrate narrower aspects of human evolution, biodiversity, and the state of nature (also known as the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness, or EEA). As described earlier, these films take basic aspects of evolution and use the plot to magnify them to the status of archetypes.

The film Cruella (2021), from Disney, is very, very special. If my early goal was to periodize contemporary culture, then Cruella and all that it represents can be seen as the culmination of that goal. This is the first A-list film to portray my modeling of the intersections of ethical, social, and aesthetic history. While Woody Allen, with all due respect, does the same in his film Rainy Day in New York, Disney’s Cruella cost $200 million and gives my models Homeric proportions.

Cruella, like much of Human Sin or Social Sin, is driven by the contrast between, on the one hand, clean and beautiful culture and, on the other, dirty, disgusting nature and the filthy “grubby” body. The conflict and tension are portrayed and symbolized with the utmost subtlety and sublimity.

The film takes place in London in the 1970s and contrasts the “uptight” English aristocracy and their ornately decorated homes with the earthy and “vile” working classes. Two scenes, one toward the beginning and the other toward the end, get right to the point of the film and is effective frames of reference throughout.

The character Cruella, played by Emma Stone, works as a cleaning lady in Liberty, a high-end department store. She is an aspiring fashion designer who views her job as the first step in the direction of a career. But she gets drunk on the job, trashes a window display of a dress, and falls asleep. As she wakes up, we see a crumpled piece of newspaper on the floor with the headline “Roman Empire.” At the end of the scene, she gets onto a bus that has a sign on its back that also reads “Roman Empire.” 

Both the beautifully designed window display and the efficient engineering of the bus represent the ordered constructs of civilization that have been disordered by the “Cruella” or “Cain” aspect of human nature. Cruella’s hair is black on one side of her head and white on the other, which symbolizes the good and evil of human nature.

All of Part, One of Human Sin or Social Sin, is structured by the tension between clean, beautiful, and “good” civilization and dirty, chaotic, dangerous, and “evil” nature. Or white versus black. In the book, I cite Simon Schama, who said that the Romans and Germans were inversions of each other.

After Cruella trashes the window display, her supervisor calls her a “vandal,” the name of the German tribe that sacked Rome. So, this historical reference makes clear the contrast between chaotic nature and the beautiful order of culture and civilization.

Toward the end of the film, there is a scene similar to the window scene that uses a contemporary symbol to illustrate the same contrast. Cruella and her gang have caused pandemonium at an elegant party, and one of her male gang members has the name “Cruella” written on the back of his leather jacket, but the last letter is written with a capital A and a circle around it, which is the sign for anarchism.

The window display scene toward the beginning and the anarchistic symbol at the end is effective bookends for the symbolic rebellion of evil against order and beauty that structures the entire plot.

But there is a fly in the ointment. The person who symbolizes order and beauty is the Baroness, played by Emma Thompson. But she abuses her power to the point of murder and represents the traditional image of the oppressive—read “evil”—an upper class that Cruella rebels against.

Another popular trope that is evoked here is that Cruella is the radical younger generation who rebels against the wicked older generation. The motto during the 1960s was, “You can’t trust anyone over 30.” We see this rebellion acted out by Cruella.

So, the film portrays competing images of evil: the traditional “Cain” image of naturally fallen human nature represented by the rebellion of Cruella and the modern idea of the wicked upper class. By a surprise plot twist at the end, the film tries to use the Baroness to get viewers to recognize the legitimacy of the “Cain” understanding of human nature: when Cruella discovers that she is the daughter of the Baroness, she delivers a Shakespearean soliloquy in which she describes how she has inherited her evil from her mother.

Thus, the image of the evil upper class is used here as a syncretic device to replant the idea of evil as actually inborn in human nature—in both Cruella and the Baroness. Cruella then fully embraces her evil and takes over the role of the Baroness, who goes to prison for her crimes at the end of the film.

Therefore, all future “Cruellas,” in any class, will now be understood to have a biological problem—like Cain—and not a “class problem.” Toward the beginning of my writing career, I wrote, “Cain killed Abel because Cain was a man, and not because he was ‘poor.’” A revolution, indeed.

An interesting side note is that I read Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear, as a student, and that experience played a large role in making me aware of the native destructiveness in human nature. That awareness no doubt played a role in my openness to the female sexualization of male violence. Cruella’s soliloquy may be based on Edmund’s soliloquy in King Lear, “Nature, thou art my goddess,” in which Edmund describes his destructiveness as inborn (like Cruella’s). 

Aquaman (2018) is a poetic treatment of the problems of placing race in the context of both Western history and nature. The basic point is that the tradition of radically dividing Heaven from Earth, with its blue sky and white sun, tends to generate a preference for people with light eyes and hair—the angel aesthetic. This in turn tends to create the perception that mating between light-complected and dark-complected people is somehow genetically “bad,” resulting in the concept of “half-breeds.”

This perception grew into a genocidal mania among some of the Nazis. Since 1950, this mania has swung to the opposite extreme and is being used to deny the entire concept of biological race.

Aquaman is a parable about avoiding extremes that are not well-grounded in peer-reviewed science. (In Human Sin, I cite a study from the 1930s, which found that 25% of Germans had brown eyes and hair.) Value-laden perceptions of other people can have other sources that don’t reflect functional genetic science, such as the sky. Put bluntly, humans have to resist the impulse to turn the race into a beauty contest. When some members of a group, such as the aqua people in the film, inaccurately defend the group, a form of injustice against certain parties can result in the entire group being delegitimized and dethroned.

Rhythm Section (2018) is about the transformations of Western identity in the twentieth century. This film reminded me of an Englishwoman who recently said, “Everything the Arabs say is right, while everything the English say is wrong.”

I was very active in the committee Against Racism during the 1970s, but the persecution culture that emerged by the 1980s was not what we were fighting for.

Ghost in the Shell (2017), which is about biodiversity, supports newer ideas regarding the servitude and sovereignty of Western populations.

The Irishman (2019), by Martin Scorsese, is about how men are naturally inclined toward hostility.

Unhinged (2020) portrays how the middle classes have ethics that allow for unmediated self-expression, which inclines them toward hostility.

Mercy (2017) is an example of the new “fact-based” film genre that tries to portray the past as it actually was and not as the “uptight nightmare” it is often assumed to have been.

It (2017) and It: Chapter Two (2019), which are adaptations of Steven King’s novel It, describe how monsters are an elaboration of the adaptive human fear of dirt and contagion and how teamwork helps groups to survive. The films also portray bodily abnormalities as aspects of social alienation and suggest that the impulse to attack and demean is innate to human nature. The fear of threat from old conflicts is based on memories, both adaptive and historical.

Both films deal with the basics of how the conflict between purity and pollution creates a sense of fear and salvation and how teamwork is necessary to defeat the primordial threat of pollution. A theme in the second film is that “all creatures adhere to the behavior of their form.” This is consistent with my new philosophy of Object-Oriented Ontology, which I started to develop at age 26. The films describe how people’s preference for natural human forms makes them feel threatened by significant deviations. The last scene underscores the pollution theme when someone says that “it’s a bad idea to clean yourself in dirty water.”

 Ad Astra (2019) beautifully portrays my analysis of the two aspects of the destructive effects of men’s heroic ethics. First, there is how men’s natural role is to be “pirates,” creating the hell of nature wherever they go. Second, more importantly, the film focuses on my model for how the heroic impulse pathologically drives modernism. This is shown by the parallels between Colonel Pruitt, played by Donald Sutherland, and the Commander, played by Tommy Lee Jones. The Commander represents the “over the top” suicidal heroic impulse that can take down others when it gets out of control. The Commander is raw, masculine energy.

This heroic energy is symbolized as active today by the character of Colonel Pruitt and by the actor himself, Donald Sutherland, in the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Both characters have powerful roles in my models for history in general and film in particular.

The name Pruitt is also the character played by Montgomery Clift in From Here to Eternity (1953), which is also a military film. In this film, I show that Pruitt is a Christ-type who “suffers for the sins of society”—in this case, the military—and so he battles against “wicked society.” Thus, the arena of heroic conflict is directed toward our own military or society, or population—a point that I make in many different contexts.

Another film that has this internalized conflict is Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), starring Donald Sutherland, who also plays the Pruitt character in Ad Astra. Like Montgomery Clift, Sutherland is also a “hero against an oppressive society.” Both characters are good examples of how the heroic is being directed against our own institutions, history, and populations.

Therefore, Donald Sutherland in Ad Astra is a pivotal device between the Pruitt character in From Here to Eternity and the Matthew character in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, showing how this pathological heroic is actively undermining us today.

In Ad Astra, the presence and early departure of Sutherland are symbolic of the need to stop our own pathological suicidal heroic today. This is underscored by Sutherland/Pruitt’s relationship with the “out of control” heroic of the space Commander. This matrix of emotions, which structures most of Human Sin or Social Sin, is contrasted with our “real enemies,” the wild nature of humans and animals. Ad Astra does a nice job of showing how our perspectives on nature today are idealized or sanitized, blinding us to the “baboon within.” The film illustrates Shakespeare’s quote, “The problem is in our souls, and not in the stars.” A hard lesson, indeed.

The Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli is a pillar of the film and opera world, whose last production before he died was of Il Trovatore (2020), filmed at the Roman amphitheater in Verona and available on Blu-Ray. The production nods toward Human Sin or Social Sin when the “evil” Duke, dressed in black and white, is juxtaposed with a serpent.

A similar affirmative gesture is made in David McVicor’s Faust (2021) at the Royal Opera, also available on Blu-Ray. The production throws the themes of race and sexual violence into high relief.

What follows are short descriptions of the many films that have a narrower focus on psychology and group life in the context of the new evolutionary theory.

The next three films to be discussed—Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), Monster Hunter (2020), and Kong: Skull Island (2017)—all have important things in common and so should be seen as a group:

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): This is a not-too-subtle critique of the follies of environmentalism in the context of my “false paradise” model for nature and human nature.

Monster Hunter (2020): This film also draws on my “false paradise” model for nature and human nature but extends the plot to a sustained examination of the difficult conditions of Ice Age Europe, which I describe in Human Sin. A fascinating theme is an idea, taken from my discussion of Homer, of being lost and desperately wanting to go home to a safe place. This tension, raised to the level of an almost constant state of desperation, is a basic idea or schema in the film.

Kong: Skull Island (2019): While many films treat group selection for the evolution of altruism, this film has a graphic portrayal of this historic psychology: as the group is being chased by a huge reptile, a man falls back, straps explosives to himself, and exposes himself to be eaten.

Fascinating themes are how the body, power, and civic coherence are fundamental to the construction of god and divinity. In important ways, the intersections of these ideas are fundamental to Human Sin.

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021): This is part of Disney’s ongoing series of “inclusive stories,” as described by the star of the film, this one set in southeast Asia. While Disney’s use of my ideas was tentative in Frozen II, it is robust in Raya. The film uses the standard feminist model by portraying the heroine, Raya, as a young princess turned warrior who “saves the realm,” complete with swordplay against a “wicked princess” from the “Fang” group of hostile neighbors. Outside of that, the plot is basically structured by evolutionary psychology.

Before getting into the details of the plot, I want to show how the movie is a basic response to an idea I sent out in an email regarding the nature of the social divisions that arose in the West in the last three centuries. What I described is how, first, the French revolution and then Marxist theory took the idea of formal conflict between nations and turned it into a conflict between groups inside a nation. Before 1750, nations were unified around a monarch, church, and history and viewed their neighbors as enemies. Consider, for instance, the age-old conflict between the French and English. After the rise of the Enlightenment, suddenly, different groups within a nation were seen as “evil” in one form or another. Karl Marx gave us the definitive formula for the image of “evil” upper classes. By the twentieth century, gender and race conflict were also introduced, or “evil whites,” which created the present culture war we are embroiled in.

Raya and the Last Dragon can be seen as an examination of the psychology necessary to reunite the West. The film is about conflict and resolution within a group projected onto a mythic land, and so it is safe and far away, but still recognizably us and our history.

Some other basics of my work that the film draws from are the dragon as a civic unifier and leader. In most places and times, the dragon has been seen as a threat, but in Asia and England, the dragon has been seen as a symbol of the Government and national identity. So the power of the “snake” is deployed to this constructive end and not seen as a personal threat, as with the Devil.

In the film, because of “original sin,” all but one of the dragons die, which fragments the people into five different hostile groups. When the surviving dragon is introduced, she describes herself as a textbook example of what is known in evolutionary psychology as “the free-rider problem.” The dragon starts to babble about how she was the weakest dragon of the group and had managed to get by on the efforts of the stronger dragons. From an evolutionary perspective, solving the free-rider problem is fundamental to a group’s reducing tension and increasing teamwork and collective strength.

I describe in the book how Taylor Swift and her fans use the fingers of their two hands to make the heart sing, and the people in Raya use this sign as a ritual form of both prayers and salute to superiors. Other elements of evolutionary psychology in the film are dependent rank, ritual submission, gift-giving, appeasement, nice skin, competence-based hierarchy, and the “intelligence, resilience, and altruism” of the people inside the “Fang” group.

The theme of biodiversity is shown by how the basic shape of the face of the dragon is retained when it turns into a human girl. Throughout the film, human nature is portrayed as innately greedy, violent, and untrustworthy. At one point, a utopian vision of unity is imagined as opposed to the real world of civic incentives.

While Wonder Woman 1984 can be seen as a highly detailed examination of the problems of male and female sexual display in their civic contexts, Raya and the Last Dragon can be seen as a civic fantasy or myth of how a group falls apart and how the weaknesses of human nature must be overcome to recreate the civic unity and coherence lost in the West during the last three centuries.

Woody Allen, in his new film A Rainy Day in New York, comes out as addicted to Human Sin or Social Sin!

What’s happening when a book on evolutionary theory gets made into an Art Movie? I had that bizarre experience when I watched Woody Allen’s new film, A Rainy Day in New York (2019). Most of it is obvious, like the baroque furniture, but some subtleties are the two pictures on the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; they refer to the passage where I say that it's surprising to compare whites in 1790 with 1930. And the last scene when a man looks at the clock and then at Selene Gomez. And the Hispanic movie star wearing a mask refers to my discussion of Rudolph Valentino, and he says to the girl, “Look at you!” The contrast of nature/culture throughout.

I have a chapter on film analysis, and four people have said that it represents my best writing. Woody Allen may be hoping to help start a Renaissance in film history. His support is robust. This and Wonder Woman 1984 are the only films that lend support to the ideas on the fine arts in Human Sin.

Ford and Ferrari (2019): This story describes the effort of the Ford Motor Company in 1960 to build a car that could compete with Ferrari in a competitive race. It often examines, or reexamines, in a sympathetic manner, notions of how groups function in the context of corporate service and structures. There appear to be themes of competition as degrees of male violence.

JoJo Rabbit (2019): This film provides powerful examples from the Holocaust of how humans, in this case, National Socialists, can function almost entirely in the conflict created inside the mind between peace and a threat from an innate image in the brain of the serpent or “demon”—in this case, personified by the Jews. At one point, a Jewish girl says to a Hitler Youth that his fear is “in your mind.”

Ready Player One (2018): This film, directed by Steven Spielberg, gives a strong critique of the solipsism that defines a large part of our social ethic. The film is also a good example of the “have fun or else” ethic, complete with a surveillance state. It presents themes of the universality of beauty, the importance of women’s skin, biodiversity, and sexual dimorphism. It also points to the priority of real human contact over virtual contact and its pathologies. The film highlights our dysfunctional distribution of energy, as opposed to our interpersonal integrity, which is necessary to survive and thrive.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019): This film symbolizes, through the main character, a basic decision I had to make in terms of how I was to use my work in modeling the future trends of relations in the EU—and, by extension, in the rest of the West.

Irresistible (2021): To an extent, this can be seen as an updated and more sophisticated version of Tom Wolfe’s satirical essay, “Radical Chic” (1975; 2009). As Leonard Bernstein, portrayed by Tom Wolfe, finds his party of friends to be enchanting, the film portrays how the fundraising party of Democrats in New York finds its “rustic farmer” from Wisconsin to be “irresistible.”

The basic point of the film is to make light of how, if a group of regular people wants serious money from Washington, they have to fabricate their own participation in the redemption culture. (The way I’ve described it lately is, “It’s okay to be white, but you have to explicitly reject “whiteness” to “clear the air” of possible suspicion and redeem yourself.) This matrix of emotion and ethics is made explicit when the Democrat organizer is dismissed for trying to motivate people with “shame.” Human Sin shows how redemption drives most aspects of modernism, and this idea is included in my poster abstract, “From Virtue to Politics.” (This abstract is available on both my website and in an appendix of Human Sin.)

Suicide Squad (2016): This film was released a year before Wonder Woman 1984 went into production, but I think the two films have several important similarities. They are both morality tales in which individuals struggle with their “inner demons.” The members of the “Suicide Squad” are what could be called supercriminals or criminals with superpowers but without any of the historical references that traditional bad guys, like Cat Woman, have. In Wonder Woman 1984, Barbara Minerva turns into Cheetah, and Max Lord has associations with any number of genteel bad guys, such as Professor Moriarty, that a superhero might have to battle against. As the Suicide Squad reforms at the end, so do Max Lord and Minerva. The central point of both films is that human nature itself is the culprit, and not “Society,” as in films that I describe in Human Sin, such as Ghost in the Machine and Alien.

Suicide Squad draws a parallel between the rise of feminism and the rise of black civil rights, which is also described in Human Sin. The film uses my idea of the coalition that women and blacks had during the 1970s in their battle against “wicked society.” Feminists at that time used to say things like, “Women are like blacks,” to help make their oppression clear and their affinity with blacks natural. Like Marxists, feminists had a strong outreach to blacks, which can also be seen in the film when the Enchantress enters into a coalition with a black man—her “brother,” as she describes him.

Also, during the 1970s, it was sometimes said that both women and ethnic people were “more natural,” which appears to be an element in Suicide Squad. Cara Delevingne, the actress who plays the part of the Enchantress, described her character as “a feral being.” This unity, via religion, is seen when the Enchantress holds the unconscious black man in her arms, just as Mary holds the body of Jesus in the “Pieta.” In Berkeley, it is common to see bumper stickers with a feminist theme, such as “The Goddess.”

Suicide Squad is about bad guys’ moral reflections on their lives, and the Enchantress is returning to normal or reentering cultural symbols in reunion with her boyfriend. There is a similar scene involving “bad girl” Harley Quinn, played by Margo Robbie. In a flashback, she is shown during her normal period as beautifully dressed and having a husband and two babies. This before-and-after change is the fundamental point of the film, just as it is for Human Sin or Social Sin.

Birds of Prey: Harley Quinn (2020): An overall theme of this film is good ol’ “crime and punishment,” in one form or another. It shows the dangers of a life of crime and how criminal communities function by their own tribal rules. These rules include informal rank and hierarchy, coalitions, and conflict and crime driven by revenge. The few “beams of light” in the film make all this clear, such as when Harley Quinn says to a young girl, “You made me less bad.” Then, in an analytical tone, she says, “Revenge rarely brings the catharsis we desire.” These and similar statements are the framing devices that show the effect of Human Sin in bringing back into cultural focus hubris, conflict, revenge, and the violence that all these psychologies sometimes engender.

Frozen II (2019): This film takes a familiar plot—redemption from our original social sins—and simply injects into it some basic bio-gender psychology, like the nature of male and female sexual display in relation to each other.

Richard Jewel (2019): I am not surprised that Clint Eastwood directed this film since it is a good response to my analysis of his film Gran Torino (2008). Human Sin shows that a basic driver of modernism is the demonization of white males, and Gran Torino is a good example of this. Clint Eastwood responded to this by showing how Richard Jewel is himself unjustly demonized during the FBI investigation of the bombing at the Atlanta Olympic Games.

Tom and Jerry (2021): This is a fairly normal story that injects themes of evolution and biodiversity into its plot.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019): This film by Quentin Tarantino portrayed Hollywood in the 1960s when it had feet in both the past and the present—with the past being phased out and the present not looking very good. This is one of the few films that treat the skyrocketing crime of that time.

News of the World (2021): This film treats traditional nineteenth-century problems and identities, using Tom Hanks to report a mining accident in order to show how the Civil War catalyzed the process of subdividing the country internally to create competitive groups.

Joker (2019): This is a highly stylized treatment of the different problems that people have in trying to connect to and get “fellow feeling” from others.

The Witches (2020): Roald Dahl’s story explores themes of purity and pollution in the context of some old cultural debates.

The director’s cut, Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021): Toward the beginning, this version has an essential change from the first film. Bruce Wayne, a.k.a. Batman, tries to persuade Aquaman to join him in battle by describing the importance of stopping global warming and the “boiling oceans.” Much of Human Sin is devoted to showing that environmentalism is a nature cult whose claims and visions regarding global warming are forms of divine punishment. In the director’s cut, this scene is deleted, allowing the rest of the film to be anthropocentric, illustrating how humans themselves must fight and strategize to stop themselves from being assimilated to the universal coalition of Antilife. This entails different groups of humans overcoming their resistance to an alliance necessary to defeat the forces of Antilife.

This double conflict among humans—first among themselves and then against the forces of Antilife—is fundamental in Human Sin: the West must unite against the forces of nature, or Antilife, to continue the project of civilization and the rebirth of the fine arts. Zack Snyder’s cut of the reference to global warming shifts the film to pure anthropocentrism and supports this shift in our lives and policy, as illustrated in Human Sin.

Assassination Nation (2020): this powerful film takes place in “Salem,” the location of the witch-hunts during the late seventeenth century. This location was chosen to symbolize how, today, social media and human nature combine to create a similar culture of “threat,” hysteria, and persecution. Four girls are suspected of outing different kinds of “sex perverts,” which starts a witch-hunt that consumes the community and almost kills the girls. The members of the mob all have masks, two of which are ape faces. The point is that the human “animal” impulse to revenge and conflict has to be mediated by formal institutions to slow down emotion and stop chaos from consuming a population and harming innocent people. This matrix of emotion and circumstance is a common one in Human Sin.

The Croods (2021): This is a spoof on the idea of evolution and biodiversity.

Rampage (2018): This film basically draws from two parts of Human Sin: the analysis of the film Alien (1979) with Sigourney Weaver and the psychology of coalition.

The film Alien is about how a wicked company plans to sacrifice a space crew in order to bring a reptilian monster back to Earth. My interpretation is that the film portrays the body as innocent but Big Business, or the “social body,” as evil.

In Rampage, Big Business plans to bring back from space a genetic code that enlarges normal animals to “monster size.” The monsters then spend the rest of the film terrorizing people. Instead of creating an artificial reptilian monster, as in Alien, nature itself is made “monstrous” in Rampage. One of the geneticists who create these natural monsters has a “Ph.D. from Stanford”—the point being, I believe, is that our present maladies are in part the “brain children” of the academics.

The other aspect of Human Sin that Rampage draws from is the strong coalitional psychology between the hero, Dwayne Johnson, and an albino gorilla turned King Kong. Johnson is the primatologist who brings the gorilla back from Africa as a baby and raises it. He does his best to shepherd his gorilla-turned-King-Kong to salvation at the end of the film when they are joyfully reunited. The gorilla is moderately anthropomorphized with human emotions and sign language, abilities that help to make credible the ongoing coalitional exchanges with Johnson. Toward the end of the film, they “join in a final battle” to defeat a huge crocodile and a wolf.

The film does a good job of alluding to the similarities between humans and apes by opening with two women with big blue eyes, which we then see in the albino gorilla, in addition to its light skin. In my chapter on film analysis, I describe how, in a fight between two humans, an ape will side with the human who is a friend, even if that human starts the fight. At the end of Rampage, Dwayne Johnson says, “This is what I do to help a buddy,” and then he fires on a huge crocodile just before the creature is finally killed by the albino King Kong. The point is that the gorilla is more humanlike than the crocodile and has the advantage of a long-term friendship with Johnson that the crocodile lacks. The more profound point is that coalitional psychology is so baked into human-adapted nature that it is easily extended to near-human species. Gorillas have a certain charisma that, say, monkeys lack. The prototype for King Kong could just as easily be a monkey, but gorillas have greater emotional similarities to humans, so it is more plausible to “supersize” a gorilla than a monkey.

Knives Out (2019): The plot twists in this film illustrate the idea that it is counterproductive to blame victim groups since they are just living out roles and ideals of love and generosity created by the educational system and the West’s masochistic love ethic. In Human Sin, I say explicitly that the entire culture is on “moral automatic,” and we see this in the film in the suicide of the elderly writer and, to an extent, in the private detective’s attitudes of loving regard toward the murder suspect.

We get a snapshot of this when the grandson says, “Why did Harlan say that you [the nurse] always beats him at Go more often than I do.” In other words, the grandfather romanticizes the nurse’s wins in the game, which reflects well on her but badly on his grandson. The point is that we are so trapped by socialized love and veneration that we will “follow it unto death”—or, less dramatically, to social redemption, paving our way to salvation in the afterlife. There are many examples of this “fight for salvation” in Human Sin or Social Sin, and they help to explain the book’s rapid acceptance by academia and popular culture.

Long, Hot Summer (2018): This film makes the point that criminality is a normal part of human nature and not a “deviance” that needs to be “diagnosed and treated.” It also shows how status, display, and spontaneous vengeance are the natural forms of justice in social psychology.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021): The basic points that this film makes are about the nature of power in sexuality and civic and religious identity. For instance, the suggestive comments from the female scientist about Kong are similar to what a girlfriend of a mobster might say. The intersections of power and religion are shown when Kong, with a club in hand, is enthroned in a huge cave with gothic arches, and his elevation is accompanied by reverential brass music, which alludes to both his kingly and his godly status.

Six Minutes to Midnight (2021): The director, Andy Goddard, described this film as a “fact-based” treatment of a German school for girls in England during the months leading up to World War II. The film supports my work by representing both history’s positive and negative aspects—for instance, traditional Western nationalism generally and English and German nationalism in particular.

The dynamic between individual and group is explored in the tensions between the student Gretel, the “black sheep” of the school, and her classmates and teacher. The film also highlights the traditional practice of corporal punishment to show how imperfection or “sin” was understood to be part of human nature and not inherited from our collective past. Like many recent films that use Human Sin, this film shows the salience of applying virtue to individuals.

As my books have transformed history into an empirical science, this film helps the viewer to see the good in history—such as the confidence it took to develop and maintain the great arts and other intellectual and moral traditions. But it also shows the bad history, as when confidence becomes an end in itself, a will to power that simply demonizes people—in this case, the Jews—and blinds its votaries to their real merits.

Moffie (2021): This film takes place during the Apartheid era of South Africa and portrays the military in its fight with Marxist guerillas in Angola. The film uses homosexuality as a syncretic device to portray the South African efforts to survive as free people.

Nobody (2021): This film is a highly stylized treatment of the contrast between our traditional ideals of family and civility, on the other hand, and our new natural ideals of “kicking ass.”

Guardians of the Galaxy (2017): This film uses the standard postmodern technique of choppy editing to insert themes of biodiversity and some humorous comments on the conflicts between modern gender ideals and the realities of life.

Mank (2020): This film is a piercing examination of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz during the period when he wrote the script for Citizen Kane (1941), for which he won an Oscar. The film portrays Mankiewicz’s life during the 1930s as a mini 1960s cultural revolution at MGM. The film starts with him in a drunken stupor as he prepares to write the screenplay for Citizen Kane. During the rest of the film, there are frequent flashbacks to the 1930s, when he has conflicts with such MGM luminaries as Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg. The flashbacks portray him as a socialist, which he tries to hide from Mayer and Thalberg. The gist of the flashbacks is to show him as a “no-rules,” “screw-the-rich” precursor of the 1960s. As he sits at a banquet table with MGM executives, he leans forward, pulls a large bottle of champagne from the center of the table toward himself, and says, “What are you having?”

That this scene—and similar ones—is symbolic of cultural rebellion is shown by a small scene involving Louis B. Mayer and silent film star John Gilbert. The camera shows an open office door as we hear Gilbert say, “My mom was just a prostitute,” to which Mayer yells, “How can you say that about your mother?!” Then we hear Mayer punch Gilbert, who stumbles out of the office, holding his jaw with Mayer in pursuit.

This scene alludes to an observation I made in Human Sin about John Gilbert that “He used to brag, even to studio executives, that his mother was a prostitute; so attitudes were changing.” In my book, I gave this as an example of cultural rebellion, and the film Mank intends the viewer to see the scene as also a symptom of the rebellion, both cultural and political, from Mankiewicz and all the rebellious students later during the 1960s.

The film ends with Mankiewicz insisting on taking credit for the screenplay for Citizen Kane, which sends Orsen Wells into a rage. The next scene shows Mankiewicz holding the Oscar, followed by a title that says that he died ten years later from complications of alcoholism.

Mank does a nice job of supporting my descriptions of early Hollywood as a battleground between conservatives, such as Mayer and Thalberg, and the emerging cultural Left, such as Mankiewicz and many others whom I describe in Human Sin, including Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburn, and Gene Kelly.

This may be a good place to mention that the new Cary Grant biography by Scott Eyman, Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise (2020), shows a similar trend in Grant—namely, that in his prime, he viewed himself as a victim, which resulted in his moodiness, which became florid during the 1960s.

It is interesting for me to recall here that when I first learned of the problem of periodizing contemporary culture, which was in 1984, the burning issue at the time was “What happened during the 1960s?” After spending thirty-five years approaching that problem from many different angles, I appear to have solved it: with a lot of help from my friends!

Voyagers (2021): This film is an updated version of the novel Lord of the Flies (1954), which described a group of boys stranded on an island and their power struggles necessary to form a stable hierarchy. The film version in Voyagers takes place on a spaceship with a teenage crew and adult leader. When the leader dies, the emotions start to rise among the two boys as they make claims and counterclaims about who should lead and how the ship and its resources should be managed. As the crew divides into two rival gangs and more and more people get shot, a black woman cries, “We can do better than this. Let’s talk like rational people and solve these issues.” Someone then shoots and kills her.

One of the two boys, Zack, is portrayed as the more bloodthirsty and hubristic of the two contenders. During a fight, a door opens, and Zack is sucked out into space. That starts a process whereby the crew settles back down and works together to manage the ship for the good of everyone.

Of the more than thirty films made in support of Human Sin, this film, with its scene of Zack getting sucked out into space, may be the most significant. The scene alludes to a similar scene in the film Alien (1979), with Sigourney Weaver, in which a dragon gets sucked out into space, which saves the crew. In my analysis of Alien, the dragon represents our understanding of evil as external in “society” and not internal to the body. The point of Zack getting sucked out is to show that the elites have gone back to the humanist perspective of human nature, and not “society,” as the source of our “demons,” which is the point of the dragon in Alien.

As we once needed to fight the demons of “society,” like race and gender, today we have gone back to seeing individuals as demons whom we need to control—as we saw in Six Minutes to Midnight. Without the reconceptualization of evil as internal and no longer external, no significant change is possible, which was the point made by the Italian humanists of the fifteenth century. Our problems are internal and not “in the stars,” to use Shakespeare’s image.

The Courier (2021): While I cannot detect any obvious reference to Human Sin in this film, it does fit a pattern of films that deal with the difficulties that individuals must negotiate in helping their group during the war.

Claudio Monteverdi | Galileo | Francis Bacon | Sir Isaac Newton | Joseph Haydn | Charles Lyell