Milan Kundera, the famous, perpetually Nobel-shortlisted novelist, when he was a young man in Prague, addressed the Fourth Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers Union. The year was 1967. Kundera brought attention to a major event underway in Czech literature which wasn't happening between the lines, but instead was openly challenging Communism, part of the “thawing” of Soviet tyranny that led to the Prague Spring in 1968. Kundera was referring to the influence of the Czechoslovakian movie miracle, now called the Czech New Wave, whose most famous exponent was Miloš Forman, who afterward became famous in Hollywood with movies like One flew over a cuckoo’s nest (1975) & Amadeus (1984), winning two Oscars. Kundera claimed the Czech New Wave revitalized not just national cinema, but culture in general, by adopting a dark, absurd, sensual approach which was in direct opposition to the social realism favored by the Communist tyranny.
I would like to talk about one of the pioneers of this movement, Jaromil Jireš, whose movie The Cry (1963) inspired the artistic movement by its use of dark humor, ambiguous perception of reality, & non-professional actors. After suffering the wrath of the Communist authorities by adapting Kundera's debut novel The Joke (1969, a remarkable movie reviewed by Titus for the Acton Institute), Jireš moved on to adapt Valerie & her week of wonders (1970), a surrealist novel written by the Marxist prosateur Vitezslav Nezval.
With Valerie, Jireš turned out to be more Marxist & post-modern than Communism itself, so that the class struggle that defines Marxist politics becomes sexual struggle, & sexual liberation becomes political liberation, & community-mandated atheism (for the state withers at the end of Marxist history) becomes a necessary precondition for these goals to be achieved.1 Looking at this movie, we see clearly the problem of the moral revolutions of the ‘60s, their political & artistic roots, & the incredible spread among the collegiate class, bypassing the boundaries of the Cold War conflict.
Now, the plot: Valerie & her week of wonders follows the innocent, yet nubile Valerie as she is faced with a series of ‘adventures:’ An attempted rape by a clergyman, another, by a vampire, a lesbian tryst, probable incest, &c. After poor Valerie survives through these attempts miraculously, she is also burnt at the stake by the clergy, whom she mercilessly mocks (in the movie's only hilarious scene). As she is being burnt, she takes the name of her lover & asks why he has forsaken her, mirroring Christ's plea but changing the recipient of the plea from the transcendental to the material. Purified by this encounter, she kills the vampires (yearning, as they are, for eternal youth) who have been giving her trouble since this movie began, & she then reunites with her parents (who had been banished for, surprise, having sexual relations prohibited by their different class standing).
To make Valerie's sexual liberation obvious, she sheds the modesty which she gad protected, to great sympathy from the audience, throughout the: Jireš gives us a full nudity shot. This is followed by an innocent orgy, whereby everyone, the children & the adult, frolic together in an open expression of carnality. Even the bloodsucking vampires who wanted to kill Valerie throughout the movie are resurrected, & are shown copulating. The only person imprisoned is the clergyman, desperately looking at the bacchanal, vainly seeking an invitation to join.
Thus, as the end of history approaches, i.e. as the dialectical struggle towards a true universal consciousness finally unravels all master-slave relations of oppression into full equality—as the materialist process of liberating man from want, necessity, labor, suffering completes its development—we will see that even the vampires are not really monsters. For monsters can only be defined against the virtuous, & with virtue being merely a class construction reflecting what is favorable for a certain economic oppressor, the monsters we have traditionally shunned are not monsters. They are instead to be interpreted as outcasts which dehegemonize the dominant narrative, whose open lust & amorality is an heightened representation of the desires which in reality are ours. They are not to be seen as deviant or depraved, nothing is their fault (for no individual is really at fault in the Marxist worldview, everyone is merely a victim of the society he lives in). Instead, the blame falls on the bourgeois worldview which has needlessly stigmatized their desires, thus making it necessary for them to become devilish in their nature to satiate what any person, absent social alienation, would desire. Their bloodlust is hence just a perversion of normal desire caused by the needless strictures of society, & if they had been allowed a healthy free-expression of their sexual nature, they would not be what they are. This is highlighted when Valerie has a lesbian encounter with a vampire-bitten girl named Hedvika; waking up after their romp, Hedvika points out that she is no longer afflicted by the bite of the vampire, & has been cured by Valerie's kisses. Hence, lesbianism (associated with witches, & considered a ‘perversion,’ like witchcraft) is redeemed as actually curing vampirism (a result of prolonged celibacy, as shown by the gradual process of Valerie's grandmother becoming a vampire, a punishment for her sexual puritanism). All such traditionally-marginalized positions are considered indispensable for a true sexual & political liberation, since they represent alternatives to the society's dominant narrative. Enabling their freedom will hence reveal the true nature of society to one & all. Thus, the marginalized will lead the march for our freedom: The idea behind today's liberal establishment bowing down to the LGBTQ community.
Valerie is an anti-fairy tale. A fairy tale was a moral act (as Faith Moore makes the case in Saving Cinderella), whereby the stages of life were given allegorical representations, with the forces of the Freudian ‘id’ being symbolized by the evil characters. The conflict between the ‘id’ & the moral ‘superego’ eventually restored an healthy sense of ‘ego’ to the protagonists, & the lesson was learnt, to direct one's desires correctly, for allowing them free rein leads one to evil. In Valerie, this is subverted: The evil vampires & witches are in need of acceptance, the conflict instead is against society. In a Marxist view, monogamy has nothing to do with love, but is only a convention that assures the transfer of property to the next generation (depicted in the movie by the young Hedvika's marriage to an old landlord). The only person to be excluded is the Church, symbolized by a priest, now imprisoned & left helplessly lusting in a cage, similar to the historical oppression & subjugation of the people, by forbidding them pleasures other than monogamy, preventing them from communal living, from classless revelry, from bisexuality, expression of child & teenage sexuality, & sex for the sheer pleasure of it2. Interestingly, even in the classless society, a moveable orgy, there is not just fun, but also a cruel desire to punish & humiliate, redirected against authority & God.
The ugliness of this vision is above all visible in abandoning Valerie's modesty, which she ably defends throughout the movie (at one point she even blindfolds her lover because she is in an indecent dress). Valerie understands that her freedom is made real through her body, i.e. our embodiment as a free soul. There is some claim to human dignity in shame & embarrassment; that dignity implies self-ownership—all of our rights are based on it. The theory of right is felt immediately in the body. This is why a woman is disturbed when a pervert stares at her breasts, not because he sees her body (for even her lover does that, & she is not disgusted then3), but because the pervert sees her only as a body, thus denying her self & its dignity. Yet Valerie would make perverts of all its viewers by violating privacy.4
I believe Valerie & Her Week of Wonders is what the psychologist Philip Rieff called deathworks, works of art which reverse a culture’s ideas of good & evil. Jireš offers us an upside-down movie version of our civilization by corrupting the innocence of the fairy tale. This happens a lot in Hollywood, nowadays, as pop culture for the whole family rather than experimental cinema for a select few artistic types. In the 2021 Cinderella, the evil stepmother is actually goodly, or in the upcoming animation movie Ruby Gillman where the mermaid is made evil & the kraken monsters are good. We should heed Italian thinker Augusto Del Noce’s warning: “Surrealism should not be regarded as an artistic phenomenon, in the sense in which art is distinct from other forms of spiritual life, but above all as a revolutionary phenomenon, characterized as such by totalizing categories; in fact, it intends to carry out not just a revolution in art, but a revolution through art.” When people speak about art or even entertainment as revolutionary, we should believe them. What they want is what Valerie & her week of wonders offers, anti-art.
Regarding the sexual struggle, we have to go back to Sigmund Freud, who claims that the central fact of our existence is our identity as sexual beings, since what we want deep down is to operate on the “pleasure principle,” the most intense activation of which happens during sexual congress. But Freud also claims that civilization cannot sustain, or for that matter become a civilization, if the “pleasure principle” is not curtailed by the “reality principle” by which we have to toil for food & subsistence, thus imposing a limit to our unlimited libidinal drives.
Enter the 20th c. Marxists who claim that Freud's central insight regarding the primacy of our carnality may be correct, but is insufficiently historicist. They claim that the forms of repression which exist in a society at any stage are class-bound, since they arise out of certain economic relations between rich & poor, & they are largely perpetuated so as to maintain the hegemony of the bourgeoisie over the petit bourgeoisie & the proletariat. What we commonly understand as ‘civilizing forces’ (morality, marriage, church) are all considered by Marxists super-structural tools of subjugation of the working class. Hence, they claim that rebellion against these restrictions will destabilize the inner logic of the capitalist system, resulting in its contradictions coming to the fore. The people, thus made aware of the arbitrariness of these institutions & of their character as means of advancing an alienation from their innermost desires will develop a revolutionary consciousness & work towards creating a society where such alienation can be minimized. Since the “pleasure principle” cannot be pursued effectively because of tradeoffs with the “reality principle”, & since the “reality principle” is bound to economic concerns, an egalitarian society based on the principle ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ would guarantee a more sexually-open society. One of the first steps such a society would take is the abolition of the purveyors of traditional sexual morality: Church & clergy, who restrict sexuality to the institution of marriage, & delude the public by declaring marriage to be a holy institution when in fact it is an arbitrary arrangement serving certain economic needs.
The movie's call for ‘free sex’ calls to mind Foucault's failed odyssey in his History of sexuality. That French sybarite set out to show that sexual pleasure is morally neutral, & ending up discovering that sexual norms are not transient & are inherent to our understanding as communities. From the Romans & Greeks (where sex symbolized social status) to the Victorian era (where sex became about care of children), sex is always ‘problematized.’ Although Foucault draws no moral conclusions from this, his basic discovery is that concepts of virtue & honor are always tied to the first impulses of desire; & that it is impossible to express sexual desire without raising the question of whether it is rightly expressed & rightly received.
As Roger Scruton notes, this is not a surprise, because “sexual desire is by nature a directed pleasure, & since it involves commitment with another person we cannot detach it from the surrounding social circumstances.” Those circumstances, our traditions, are products of long years of social evolution, which, sociologist Richard Udry notes, is grounded in our inherent differences: “Humans form their social structures around gender because men & women have different biologically influenced behavioral predispositions. Gendered social structure is an universal accommodation to this biological fact. Societies demonstrate wide latitudes in this accommodation—they can accentuate gender, minimize gender, or leave it alone. If they ignore it, it doesn't go away. If they depart too far from the underlying sex-dimorphism of biological predispositions, they will generate social malaise & social pressures to drift back toward closer alignment with biology. A social engineering problem to de-gender society would require a Maoist approach: Continuous renewal of revolutionary resolve & a tolerance for conflict.” Thus, the sexual paradise which the movie aspires toward can only be achieved by political fiat which would have to, at the end, abolish all fidelity between lovers to keep up the ruse of this utopia. The call seems to be the same as in Huxley’s Brave New World, to sleep with as many people as one wants, but dare not love only one!
The telos of the sexual act is erotic love. Therefore, the stable dispositions of character which makes it possible for us to experience erotic love are virtues; & the dispositions of character which reduce or cheapen our ability to experience erotic love are vices. It then makes sense to acknowledge sexual shame as an attendant of virtue, for it is a refusal to be treated as an object, & testifies to the impulse to suffer no wrong & do no wrong. Thus, Max Scheler: “Sexual shame is a shield emotion which protects us from abuse.” Chastity, which incorporates sexual shame, lets a person acquire control over his sexuality in a way that can foster a sense of sexual innocence. By not following the sexual promptings which do not bring intimacy, or social wellbeing, a chaste person offers an example of self-control which it is rational for others to follow. It is precisely by impeding the sexual impulse, so as to achieve a sexual maturity which involves incorporating the sexual impulse into personality, that we make sexual desire an expression of who we are. This cultivation of the capacity to give & receive erotic love makes one capable of avoiding encounters except with that one whom one truly desires, & renders it possible to fully enjoy the bliss & freedom that erotic love offers.
I quote J. Budziszewski, an American professor who teaches natural law: “Our wisdom traditions used to call marriage a ‘remedy for lust,’ making a true point that is almost always misconstrued. Lust isn't sexual desire per se, but disorderly sexual desire—the problem isn't the desire, but the disorder. The idea in the old saying isn't that marriage provides a way to blow off steam when the pressure inside the boiler gets too high, but that the sweet disciplines of married life have a tendency to rearrange our desires, to help them become more orderly. Of course that won't happen if a man does treat his wife as a steam-pressure vent. But part of the meaning of marital purity is that he learns to treat her as a wife.” Marriage provides a framework whereby the two parties learn to treat each other with respect & love, with the erotic act becoming an expression of these virtues. Hence, we need to be eternally vigilant about the vices which hamper our capability to experience this erotic experience, which diminish our capacity to experience sex as an act involving one's self. The tragedy of not doing so is best seen in an example like Nabokov's Lolita, who has no sexual shame & hence becomes engaged in relationships & a marriage in which she never experiences erotic love, & dies tragically without it. Instead of learning from Nabokov’s satire about the too old & the too young pursuing freedom in mad ways, we allow this to happen with children who want to grow up too fast & never really do.
Since jealousy poses grave risks to erotic love, we are bound to see fidelity as a virtue in order to eliminate it. Hence, extramarital sex, polygamy, open marriages are all vices which harm erotic love. & since fidelity is wedded best to the institution of marriage, chastity emerges as a virtue. Contrariwise, survey the modern scene: As Mary Eberstadt notes, even the most-sexually liberated women in Sex & The City bemoan the impossibility of finding a good man (for the incentives & virtues needed to settle down have been decimated by casual sex). & the consequence of feminism is the #MeToo movement complaining about bad men, & the normalization of transactional sex.
Budziszewski again: “One's most precious treasures, he hides; no one piles his diamonds on the street. Modesty suggests that there is something of great beauty & worth to be concealed; immodesty suggests that it is too plain & cheap to need concealment. In the final analysis, lust extinguishes more fires than it starts; the ardent flame of love can burn only when shielded from that wind.” Modest dressing is hence a necessary prerequisite for love to arise, & a bulwark against the moral corruption of lust (now repackaged in our secular world as ‘objectification’). The crowd which will now reply that it is men who should control their lusts, no matter what a woman wears, are misguided. Clothing is charged with meaning, & demands different feelings for different looks (why else do we dress formally to job interviews?). Thus, a woman who dresses in a way which highlights her sexuality invites being seen only as a sexual being, thus making way for her own debasement. This simple fact can only be muddled in today's discourse, whereby we are told to demand our freedom even from consequences. The demand to be seen naked & yet respected can only be satisfied by what we call monogamy, whereby the lover finds its impossible to separate the body from his beloved's self.
LOTS here to think about--and I'm puritan enough that I won't be seeing the film. I thank our anonymous contributor for some fine work!