Satan and the Clitoris: Southpark the Movie as Neo-Nietzschen Gnostic Allegory
Many apologies to my beautiful readers for not having answered any of your emails for so long - and to Netribution for not following my first column yet - but please rest assuredly that I have not been stroking my thumbs. I have been hard at work on my latest book, Delivery Device for Mr Meme: Cinema's Dark Con of Man, which should be ready at some point before 2012. I would like to offer the reader now a small slice of one of the chapters I have been most recently working on, in the humble hope that you, good soul, may forgive me for my silence, and perhaps even find sollace in the inadequate and clumsy words this foolish scholar does pen.
Satan and the Clitoris: Southpark the Movie as Neo-Nietszchen Gnostic Allegory
“Off to the movies we shall go, where we learn everything that we know,
‘cause the movies teach us what our parents don’t have time to say.”
It has been said that any film good enough to join the World Cup Finals of immortality, as one that is always available on the great filesharing server in the sky, talk of a journey which on some level holds a kind of mirror up to our own life's journey. Popular films, like those ceaselessly flowing from optimistic countries such as India or America, show this journey as ultimately a hopeful one.
(Films that are more commonly labeled art films show this journey as a somewhat meaningless - at best poignant, and at worse hopeless - pursuit. Devoid of the ability to cheer you up or illuminate and provide hope in the dark, these - typically European - works are commended solely on their artistry, as if to say a popular film must be devoid of any art whatsoever, when the truth is more that the films contain little that your average overworked, undervalued, semi-terrified, neurotic suburbanite would wish to pay money to endure.)
But I digress and I paint my opening paragraph with some crude and sweeping generalisations to make the point that the splitting of the popular from art prevents us from seeing the artistry within the popular, and indeed seeing 'art films' that could otherwise be very popular.
To return to the original thesis, finally, that cinema depicts a journey which on some level echos our own life journey, is to say that our engagement with the film stems from our own deep seated desire for resolution, and to know, in this mysterious movie we are all living, What On Earth Happens Next.
In South Park the Movie, from the esteemed auteur partnership of Parker-Stone - one of modern cinema's most aesthetically influential creative fusions - we see a finely meshed lattice of journeys which can be seen to echo the contemporary psyche - the collective unconscious.
There is Kyle's Mum ('the bitch') standing for the crusading mother. Part Daily Mail reader, part Ann Coulter, she is the angry avenging call-to-arms, battling a fiercely corrupting mainstream culture to protect her children. And yet her rage and compassionless self-rightesousness leads her - Medea-like - to send forth her and fellow mother's children onto the battlefield for an apocalyptic battle with Saddam Husein.
Then there is Stan as the eternal romantic set on a grail quest, a voyage to find the Clitoris in the hope of winning the heart of his love. In South Park the Movie: Bigger, Longer Uncut, the Clitoris becomes the true earth mother, and on a gnostic level can be seen as the search for the sacred feminine and a reunification with Sophia/God. His journey starts with romantic songs ('there's the girl that I like') which is swiftly followed with him blowing chunks in her face, a reflection of his inability to mainfest his internal desires in an externally acceptable way. Set forth by Isaac Hayes' Chef - appearing here as wisened sage - to find the clitoris, Kyle decides that being involved in politics might make him more attractive.
The mold-shattering relationship at the heart of the inferno of South Park the Movie, however, is the relationship between Satan and lover Sadam Hussein, arguable one of cinema's most difficult portrayals of homosexual love against the odds. Satan here, given some of the best songs in the film, asks Saddam with a boyish innocence - do you just want to use me for sex, or do you love me ('why do you always want to go on top?'). Saddam - in what some critics have described as a naively two dimensional caricature of selfish masculine sexuality - comes to represent the base male, or in the alchemical ladder, lead. All his activities revolve around the search for and pleasure of getting sex, to the point at which he wouldn't hesitate to break the heart of the king of hell.
At the other end of the scale, the alchemical gold, if you like, is Kenny. Voiceless, hopeless, and until this film faceless, Kenny is condemned - like us all perhaps - to perpetually revolve around the wheel of life, the Buddhist DahmaChakra, as each episode he is reborn and then dies. In South Park the Movie, however, Kenny finally attains rebirth as a Christ figure. After his early death in the film (from Cartman's bet that he cannot light his own fart), he is turned away from a highly selective heaven and banished to hell. Like the Christ he is later resurrected at the point of the earth's final destructive hour, whereupon he is offered any wish he wants from Satan, who stands - to paraphrase Thus Spake Zarathustra - as lion between Saddam's camel and Kenny's lamb child, as ladder between lead and gold, Caliban and Ariel (The Tempest).
Kenny's final choice secures both peace and harmony on earth and his place in heaven which, in the absence of a male god, and adorned with bare breasted women, represents a kind of universal unconditional motherly love. But like Aslan and indeed the Christ, it is a resolution and reunification of epic proportions that began with an egoless sacrifice. A sacrifice which on a broader level, in this post 9-11 world on the brink of 'perpetual retribution', could be seen as a collective dropping of the ego, it's selfish righteousness and private crusades. We can but hope.
The World Church of the Universal Harmony Singers will be performing 'Shut Your Fucking Face Uncle Fucker' and 'Carl's Mom is a Bitch' at a special service this Saturday.
Further reading: Censorship and American Exceptionalism in the 'Masterpiece' of the 1990s