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The Faculty: Narcissism, The Failure Of Equality And The American Zombie
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The Faculty: Narcissism, The Failure Of Equality And The American Zombie

NOTE: This post ballooned over the course of three days to over 20 pages on Word. Way too long, way too rambling with no clear, coherent thesis. I really feel that this post could have been much more, but I start studying for the bar tomorrow, so I really had to chop it down to its essentials. I boiled it down, cut off a bunch of stuff about Orwell’s 1984. Enjoy!

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The Faculty was a science fiction/horror/dark comedy released in the late 1990’s. I found the flick last night in a bargain bin at Walmart in a horror film compilation. The movie features an ensemble cast, with Salma Hayek, Jordana Brewster, Elijah Wood, Josh Harnett, Piper Laurie, Jon Stewart and Usher. Quite the cast, eh? In any event, it is a creepy, pretty good movie. However, I want to highlight the ending monologue by the alien queen, as it encapsulates a critique I seek to advance about America. Liberal autonomy theory is a deficient organizing principle for a society, the traditional systems eroded by the emphasis on personal autonomy has resulted in self-absorbed society unable to change, unable to better themselves and are slaves to government handouts, guidance and indoctrination by the mass media.

The movie opens up with a conflict between the local high school teachers at a late-night meeting over funding. The principal, a dark-haired woman I could never decide if she was attractive or not, retires to her office and is confronted with the aggressive football coach. He stabs a pencil into her hand and she flees, only to find she has been locked in. Another teacher, Piper Laurie, tries to help her - but only right before the coach descends on her - she lets the principal out. The relieved principal turns to her savior, only to find Piper Laurie stabbing her with a pair of scissors.

The Breakfast Club crew
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The next morning comes and we are introduced to a number of characters. The beta male nerd portrayed by Elijah Wood, a high school star quarterback, the queen bee of the school portrayed by Jordana Brewster, the genius and drug-dealer portrayed by Josh Hartnett, a low-status goth girl and the new girl from Atlanta. The movie progresses from there, we see the beta male Elijah Wood nurses a serious crush on queen bee Jordana Brewster. We see Josh Harnett dealing some of his personally-made drug “Scat” (important – remember that) to some burnouts. Also, in a bit of foreshadowing, we see the new girl trying to befriend the outcast goth girl. The goth girl had spread rumors of dyking it out help socially isolate her, but, predictably, she is nursing a crush on the star QB. The new girl begins to develop a crush on Josh Harnett.

The story develops when Elijah Wood finds a strange organism on the football field. He takes it Jon Stewart – the biology teacher – who identifies it as some strange new cephalopod. In one of Usher’s finest moments in the movie, he accidently spills water on it. The cephalopod responds, and Jon Stewart decides to drop it in a tank of water and see what happens. The creature grows very quickly, with long tentacles and a nasty little mouth full of teeth.

The next development was when Elijah Wood and Jordana Brewster go into the faculty lounge to spy for front page stories for the student newspaper. Understand that the reason Wood gets to nurse this crush on Brewster is because she the editor of the paper, he is the photographer. He seeks her approval by trying to find a blockbuster front page story. In the course of their snooping, they are forced to hide in a closet while the football coach and Piper Laurie step in. Salma Hayek steps in soon after and he forces her onto a coach, while the coach gets into her ear and we see the aforementioned creatures chew into her brain via her ear.

They also find the corpse of another missing teacher in the closet while they are hiding, but they run out and past the teachers. They find the principal – who by all accounts should be dead by being stabbed in the throat – walking through the hall and is flanked by other teachers. They all dispute the fact that anything is wrong at the school and the fact there is a desiccated teacher corpse in the faculty lounge. The police get called, and the administration and teachers cover everything up. Wood’s parents get called and he is chastised strongly by his parents for making stories up. We see the principal invite the police officers into her office and some weird noises later, they all come out. By this point, we see the infected have a queer, lifeless look in their eye. If was to describe it, it is one of supreme indifference, coupled with times of arrogance and just lack of real thought.

Moving forward, Elijah Wood begins to tell everybody at the school, that will listen, that the school is infested with aliens. Brewster ignores him at first, but is noticeably wearing glasses and dressing like a nerd; she decides to hear him out. He manages to collect a Breakfast Club-type of group, as the new girl, the goth girl, the high school QB, and Wood, Brewster and Harnett. They proceed back to the biology lab to investigate the creature they groomed in the tank. It is gone. Jon Stewart approaches and asks them what is going on. When pressed about aliens infesting the school, he starts to laugh and locks the door. He tells them this will be quick. A fight ensues, involves hacking off Stewart’s fingers, and eventually, his stabbing in the eye by one of Hartnett’s scat tubes. His body has a weird reaction as it fizzes greatly and he dies.

They leave campus, well aware that most people are infected by the look in their eyes. They head back to Josh Hartnett’s house and his lab in the basement. He clearly is very smart when it comes to science, as he has quite the laboratory spread. They experiment on an alien specimen they have and come to realize it can only thrive with water. It reacts very badly to Hartnett’s scat drug because it is a diuretic. Diuretics force the release of water from the body. In order to purge the non-infected from the group, they all have to take a hit of his drug. In the end, all take it but two (foreshadowing), but Brewster reveals herself to be infected. She reveals the alien queen will never be stopped and controls the minds of the affected. She destroys the lab so there can be no more production of scat, and then uses her alien strength to break down the wall (bizarre, because this was the only example of this ability). They grab the remaining scat and bounce.

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They go to the school, where they are hosting a football game. It is an entertaining scene, as with every tackle, the home team is infecting the visiting team. Thinking the high school principal is the alien queen, they isolate her in the gym. They kill her, find out she is infected, but not the queen. In the process of killing her, the new girl dumps all the remaining scat on the principal – guess who the new girl is? Josh Harnett realizes he has several vials of scat in his car – which is in the parking lot, which is crawling with infected football players. The scene where Harnett recovers the scat is very good – just know Hartnett and Wood recovered the needed scat. They come back to find the new girl has revealed herself to be the alien queen – a massive, hulking beast that can change form at will. A few bloody scenes later, she walks naked through a locker room, delivering a monologue to a hidden Elijah Wood. This important, so I bolded it all.

Quote:Quote:

You know in my world Casey [Elijah Wood], there were limitless oceans as far as the eye could see. Beautiful, huh? Till it started to dry out. So I escaped, came here, and I met you, all of you, and all of you were different from the others. You were lost and lonely, just like me. And I thought that maybe I could give you a taste of my world. A world without anger, without fear, without attitude. Where the underachiever goes home at night to parents who care. The jock can be smart, the ugly duckling beautiful, and the class wuss doesn't have to live in terror. The new girl - well - the new girl she can just fit right in with anybody. People who are just like her. You see Casey, even Mary-Beth's feelings can be hurt by a bunch of pathetic, lost, little outcasts who truly believe that their disaffected lonely life is the only way they can survive. I can make you a part of something so special Casey, so perfect, so fearless... Don't you want that, Casey?

He eventually lures the queen to the extended bleachers. Before she gets into the auditorium, he hits the retract bleachers button. He lures the queen in and runs through it. The queen is crushed and trapped at the opposite end and Wood stabbed the remaining scat into its eye. It dies from the direct infusion of the diuretic and the all is well in the world again with the queen dead. It has the blue-pill ending with nerd Elijah Wood kissing his girlfriend queen bee Jordana Brewster, but the arc of the movie and the ending monologue is of interest.

First off, understand that this plot is somewhat of a rip-off of the 1950’s flick “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” It made me smirk to see the comparisons between the two, as the original Body Snatcher’s movie is a favorite of mine. However, the original is only of passing concern and I don’t own a copy to directly compare the two. Understand that the movie was about an invasion of aliens who would place a pod and, over the course of the night, develop a replacement version of the said person – a perfect replica, just devoid of emotions and feelings. The Faculty directly mentions this movie, with two characters discussing the lack of pods to replicate the imposter humans. In any event, the movie was seemingly directed at the McCarthy era in America. The McCarthy Era refers to an era when Senator McCarthy of Wisconsin led a witch-hunt on communists, communist sympathizers and Soviet operatives in the US. I will not get into a discussion of it because it beyond the scope of this piece, but it is fascinating to me. For purposes of this writeup understand the mentality of “you are either with us or against us.” While McCarthy’s power waned and he lost his power, for a period of time, he held serious sway over the arc of American politics, using accusations of being a communist as a war cry. Take note of the in-group, out-group dynamics here.

However, let’s break this story and monologue down – there are so many ways to do so. The first is narcissism. I do sometimes sound like a broken record about narcissism, but this theme is reflected in “The Faculty.” In both movies, the infected or the replacements are devoid of emotion and feelings. In “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers,” it is explicitly stated that the replacements lack emotions, they lack feelings. That is consistent with narcissism. Narcissists display a complete lack of empathy. To others, they put on displays of what emotions they think need to be reflected to others, but, in private, they won’t lift a finger. It is a dance of superficiality. Narcissist to narcissist, they may implicitly understand the context – for others, it will usually go over their head. They may assume genuine interest on the part of the narcissist – it never is true. Claw away as you might against the veneer – understand that is all it is. A show, a façade.

In “The Faculty,” we see the faculty and the students turn into zombies that really only stare and judge the non-infected. It is very noticeable when the Breakfast Club-group leaves the school – under the glares of the infected students. Once infected, they don’t exhibit any real emotion toward anybody – especially the non-infected. As I laid out above, when Wood and Brewster confront the infected principal about the corpse in the teacher lounge, she displays nothing approaching understanding but a level of haughty disapproval bordering on treating the allegations as sheer entertainment. Later on, the infected are aggressive and seek to assault and convert the non-infected.

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Let’s break down the monologue before I get into some social critiques. It is a revealing monologue - I will break it down on the basis of the insufficiency of equality. In the alien queen’s monologue, she suggests a world that lacked aggression and fear. The underlying point seems to be that if everybody was on the same social scale, then problems would go away - her exhortations that if jocks could be smart and ugly ducklings could be beautiful reinforce the point. While the dumb jock is a stereotype, you can’t be an ugly duckling and be beautiful. That reeks of the hatred of beauty standards that feminists have. Despite that, she is selling a world devoid of “negative” emotions. She says that if these emotions are eliminated, then we can have two parents that a kid will go home to. However, when considering the whole arc of her speech, we see the implications – she wants to impose her views onto humanity. Elimination of emotions - even if they are negative - reeks of narcissism. People should be able to feel emotions - how they act on them is the difference maker.

Her speech begins by appealing to Elijah Wood’s emotions she knows he feels – loneliness and isolation. She reassures him they feel the same things. She closes with saying that she likes this setup because new girls can fit right with people who are just like her. The claws come out after that, attacking him as pathetic and needing the acceptance the whole of the infected. She admits that this all about her and her vision for humanity. That is generally the psychology of ideologies, cliques or cults trying to inculcate new members - empathy out the gate; if that is not enough to rope them in, resort to outright anger and aggression to bully them into the movement. That is also how the psychology works going forward - if you play by the rules, you get “empathy.” If you don’t, you are visited by isolation, anger and bullying. It is a ploy to get the weak in line, the people who crave acceptance and people who wish to be a part of something bigger than themselves.

Let’s step through the false visions of equality. Okay, in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” we a get a sense of the fact these people aren’t really humans – they are interchangeable and lack human emotions and feelings. While this is little more than the development of American narcissism, this also reflects the failings of liberalism – that personal autonomy, as a guiding principle, will help, guide and progress society. A potential interpretation of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” is anti-communist. The seeking of supreme social equality (except the leaders of society) reinforces the idea that we will all be the same level – we will have no way of differentiating between each other.

Dealing with social inequality, the problem is hypergamy. Equality is nothing but a mirage in the desert between the sexes. Men will always compete for female access, women will consider suitors. There is no way to simply equalize the sexual landscape. The best way is to ensure female virginity to a husband and ensure that those marriages are for life. I know it’s not the playboy lifestyle, but it is best for society on a going-forward basis.

That’s the easy part. Let’s step through the insufficiency of liberal autonomy theory. Liberal autonomy theory is that idea that if an individual’s personal autonomy is maximized, then we will grow as a society – it is usually shown as the only way forward for society. However the theory isn’t about autonomy as a sole, overriding goal – it is just a new ideology.

Lets’ say you want to ban commercials that target the young. If you do, but for what reason? The moment you admit you have reason, you admit you have a plan to alter behavior – the antithesis of autonomy. I would be interested in that plan – does it involve what is or is not appropriate to be seen by children? Of course it does, which reinforces the idea we can never have a purely autonomous approach, but just an approach to raise children within certain ideological boundaries. While the argument could be made that liberal autonomy theory is just a way to maximize autonomy, not supreme autonomy. Ignoring libertarian approaches, if you are a liberal, this approach often goes hand in hand with government programs – aimed at getting people in to college, into careers and put off family formation. For the poor, it seems to be to eliminate the need for men – which we are seeing directed at the middle-class and above from feminists – single motherhood is just fine, men are not necessary to raise children. Which is always the deficiency of autonomy theory – it gets put out there as an ideological goal that always – and probably was really about a new social order – gets hijacked by private or public citizens. The social gap that is presented with the lack of traditional institutions (nuclear family) is a hotbed for social engineering.

The truth is that there are always and should be restraints on social behavior. The sleight of hand is trying to convince the public at large they have freedom. Government will always have an incentive to maintain population levels. They may use poor wombs (often black) to subsidize the barren wombs of the progressive women, but that is lacking. As we see, the government and media is trying to shore this up by not criticizing single motherhood, talking about the benefits of late motherhood or trying to get government money to pay for childcare and the costs of raising a child. I always thought the Sandra Fluke birth control controversy was a slick way to get free birth control to the poor and stop the poor from breeding at such high levels.

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Back on point, liberal autonomy approaches are about creating a new social order. However, maybe expectedly, maybe not, was the rapid growth of media control of the population. Let’s go back to beauty standards. Feminists often rail against media depictions of “traditional” forms of female beauty. They correctly note the power of the media to affect populations – that’s why kvetch so hard for strong female leads in movies and TV shows. The mass media control of the population is staggering. While fully fleshing how and why this works is not all that relevant here. Let’s just being a short conversation on the fears that lead Aldous Huxley to pen “The Brave New World.”

Huxley feared that we would not succumb to a totalitarian state so much as we succumb to our own indulgences. In the book, he describes a society where soma (a drug) is universally consumed by the population and a world in which any romantic relationships are very much frowned on. You have to engage in superficial sex with many, many partners. He obviously ignores hypergamy, but do note the unbridled indulgence in anti-social behaviors – over consumption of drugs and sex. It is a society that is very controllable because they are so dumb-downed and drowned in pleasure they have no consciousness. This is an allegory for America. TV, Facebook, porn, video games, Eat Pray Love, The Bachelor, gossip rags (OMG, IS KANYE GAY!?!!) , 24 hour ESPN – I could go on all day. You literally could drown and kill your mind in the senseless media circus. That is the point. Don’t pay attention to the shitty economy, don’t pay attention to social decline. I was reading the Economist a few weeks back and they were talking about family formation in Britain and comparing it to Sweden. They painted a fairly bleak figure, then quickly summed up it will end for the best as it always had. Whew! Nobody needs their blue-pill hamster spinning out of control – take your soma and trust the government. They know what you need.

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Which leads back into the alien queen’s monologue. She offers up the blue-pill to Elijah Wood – let us think for you, let me think for you. Drop your disaffection, join the crowd and become one with your fellow equals. Note this is a usual technique for Christian evangelization. What has living your life for you done for you? Despair and loneliness. Join the crowd where everybody is getting self-actualized. As I discussed above, it is the veneer of freedom and autonomy that practically means you will have to obey the dictates of the alien hive. Which brings me to my next point, which mirrors my analysis of the beta male in the Fatso Thread.

The sleight of hand around autonomy is just that – an illusion to help foster false senses of growth and self-actualization in the population. Change is hard – you might fail. In a narcissistic society, you have already spent a lot of time imagining yourself as people will never be. The laziness and self-entitlement such a society encourages reinforces that. The TV, Facebook, etc depict people and lives of extraordinary character – once again reinforcing self-absorption. However, do note that I don’t think that everybody has the capacity for real positive change. Part of that is psychological – I believe that no matter how healthy a society, a significant minority will resist change. The other part of that is desire – some people just don’t have the incentive to change. If you want to change, it has to be 100% your choice. Which is why the alien infection is a false choice – it is forced on you. You didn’t change, somebody had a cephalopod chew into your brain and plug you into a new order.

Which the chasm betwixt the desire for change (self-determination) and the desire for kowtowing to an order (non self-determination) operates. The alien queen appeals to the superficial desire to change, a desire that is second, third, whatever to the first principle to which she knows she is primarily appealing to – the desire for a dominant social order. Upset with your decisions, don’t be – we can decide what is best for you. Lonely? That your fault because you didn’t let the superior organization control you. You don’t have survive alone, but you can survive in the hive.

Most people are sheep. The vast majority of women are sheep, many men are. Their lives are ones characterized by the dominant social order. In a stable patriarchy, with early marriages, childrearing and betas working hard to provide for their families, that is eminently appropriate. However, when taken in hand with new social order, it is a recipe for supreme disaster. As we saw with the Date Lab Roosh posted today, a talented doctor gets turned down by chubby 30 year-old? Sure, dude was thirstier than a person after sweating 8 hours in the July sun, but 100 years ago? It probably won’t be a great relationship, but homeboy would have a wife at this point in his life. It isn’t stable – it will collapse. This fact is probably already well-worn on the forum, so I am done with it.

The destruction of the old gender order was just a way to usher in a new social order, one that government and corporations endorse. Tax bases are increased, women and men can now freely spend their money before marriage - and after that, women still control the finances. Corporations love that because women are more likely to blow their money on worthless chotchkies and material possessions.

The Faculty highlighted the blue-pill approach, where you allow the dominate social order to decide your thoughts and what is best for you. The appeal of equality is a false one - and the approach to autonomy liberals take is just one of creating a new social order under the false pretenses of liberation. Most people are just fools and sheep - they don't want to change - they want change to be put on them. In other words, they want to be infected with a new social order - whatever is in power. The promises of conversion are usually oversold. However, the resistance to conversion is usually superficial, deep down, most people love Big Brother. Not everybody can be red-pill - they are usually blue-pill zombies fueled by wider society.

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