It’s not often that I hear a new and interesting idea in teleology, and that is one.

This last film of the Harry Potter series is different than the rest that I have seen in that its technical execution and artistic vision have transcended any genre. You may not appreciate the artisic atmosphere if you don’t find Urbex landscapes, like those in BEAUTY IN DECAY appealing. However, I think any objective viewer would be hard pressed not to appreciate the unbelieveable technical realism – supra-realism, in fact – with which the film is executed. It is possible for me, and I think for many others, to see technical mastery so vast, and to be in awe of it, even if it is being used to materialize a world we are not enamored of. I must have spent a good portion of the film imagining how those tools could be used at my command to create my imagined worlds – and the results were very satisfying. I’ve not seen anyof the TWILIGHT or the HBO TRUE BLOOD films. The latter have come highly recommended by a broad cross sectioon of friends, and I very much liked Alan Ball’s SIX FEET UNDER series. In fact, I own it on DVD.

One final word; don’t keep yourself too cloistered, or otherwise isolated,even from a psychopathic culture. Diversity in stimulation is essential to intellectual and psychological health and one of the things that it teaches you is that there are excellent, and often powerful tools to learn about, even in the hands of, and when develped by moral bankrupts and monsters. By interacting with a vast range of people, I’ve learned that ther are very valuable and powerful things to be learned almost everwhere you look. The most debauched human being often has as much or more to teach about the nature of life and being as the most venerated saint – and sometimes, I think, quite a lot more. If you are not familiar with the works of Leni Refienstahl, she is a classic case in point. She developed and entire new genre in film and her artistic sense is one that has not only endured, but come to thoroughly permeate the culture. — Mike Darwin

After all, vampires live the American dream: They don’t age, and many of them look physically attractive; they display superior stamina and recuperative powers so that they can party every night and not suffer for it; they don’t have to save for disability, health care and old age, so with their simplified needs they can build up wealth for decades and centuries and therefore have the resources to live lavishly when they choose to; they have the opportunity to become super-sophisticated and adept at influence and seduction; etc.

Poor Victor, by contrast, reminds people of the geeky kid you knew in middle school who watched Star Trek, played Dungeons & Dragons and read books by Carl Sagan. Therefore he lacks status and respect in mainstream culture.

Yet the Victor types generate the ideas which can lead to scientific and medical breakthroughs and new high-tech industries; in Victor’s case, he thought way ahead of his time by attempting to conquer death itself. If some people fantasize about becoming vampires because vampires don’t age and can live a really, really long time, then why can’t they see that Victor Frankenstein shows them a way to that end which might have a basis in reality, namely through science? I’d like to see the era when we want to compliment someone by calling him a “Frankenstein,” because if we survive to the kind of “future” we want, we will all have become the beneficiaries of the Frankenstein myth, properly reinterpreted.

I also find it interesting that Rowling has stumbled on a myth which has obsessed a whole generation of children not noted for its literacy and attention span in other ways. Indeed, many children have defied their parents’ prohibitions to learn everything they can about this fictional world, especially the Potter obsessives in christian fundamentalist families. If we could just figure out how to introduce something like Harry Potter to the Muslim world, it might interfere with Islamic indoctrination (because of the zero-sum nature of time management) and make the next generation in those dysfunctional countries less religion-crazed.

I’ve tried to avoid exposure to the Twilight fad as well, but unfortunately until about a year ago I worked with a young woman, again not particularly literate, who had read all four of Stephenie Meyers’s novels, then had to tell me more than I cared to know about them. Apparently in the fourth novel, the heroine Bella Swan plays a “reverse Arwen” by choosing to become a vampire so that she can she can live youthfully forever in the standard-issue vampire superhero body with her vampire husband. This seems to turn the usual trope about the beauty of abnegation and self-sacrifice unto death on its head – or perhaps we’ve had the trope upside-down all along, and Meyer in her clumsy way has tried to orient it properly.