Thursday, September 5, 2024

Movie Trailer Illustrates Hollywood Neo-Paganism

 Yesterday evening, I happened to read in intriguing post by Andrea Widburg at the American Thinker entitled A new movie trailer may be the ultimate expression of feminist neo-paganism. Sure enough, Widburg does not disappoint, though as has become quite usual, Hollywood does.

This coming weekend, a movie called Nightbitch, starring the popular Amy Adams, opens. The premise is a simple one: A frustrated career woman who becomes a stay-at-home mom transforms into a dog at night. I haven’t read the novel on which the movie is based, and I doubt I’ll see the movie. It’s the trailer that’s intriguing because it is the ultimate expression of unhappy feminism, coupled with leftism’s neo-paganism.
Regarding the unhappy feminism, I know all about that. I was utterly unprepared for motherhood, in large part because I, like most in my generation, was last around children when I was 15 and babysitting in high school. After that, I lived in a child-free world, so the reality of children when I hit my late thirties (yes, I waited that long) was a shock. I also worked from home, so I was simultaneously a mommy and a wage slave, which was a challenge I did not gracefully rise to meet.

I have always understood the feminist desire to "have it all." But I have also always realized that we cannot "have it all." We make choices, many of which are unwise choices, and some of our choices foreclose others. Men too have tried to "have it all" and have failed just as spectacularly.  Sometimes we can repent, but we can never undo the damage we have done. That is the human condition. It is why I admire Harrison Butker and he speech to the graduates of Benedictine College, because he has learned early the way to a happy life.

The trailer, though, makes it explicit that happiness is not a choice. Indeed, only a pompous, condescending man who doesn’t understand the horrors of motherhood would think it is.
Rather than embracing and celebrating what we have, the trailer goes in another direction entirely: It literally tells us to tap into our divine side. Thus, Amy Adams, the frazzled mother, announces, “We [i.e., women] are gods,” complete with the creative power of gods.
There are two things going on in that statement. First, it represents the left’s neo-paganism, which rejects the monotheistic Judeo-Christian God. Rejecting that God means that one can also reject His worldview (e.g., “male and female he created them”) and His ethical values, both large and small.
Second, the statement taps into the Marxist concept that, when people are freed from the chains of labor, they essentially become gods. Logan Lancing’s and James Lindsay’s The Queering of the American Child: How a New School Religious Cult Poisons the Minds and Bodies of Normal Kids explains that Marxism is not an economic theory; it’s a religious cult that sees the Western economic system standing in the way of each person’s apotheosis (that is, their ascendence to god-status).

I urge gentle readers to read the whole post. Widburg tells us how she came around to embrace her role as a mother, and I would suspect also how she became a conservative. She also credits some of her wisdom to Dennis Prager, a man I highly admire as well.

(As an aside: I was asked by a militant atheist once would I like it if my kids were taught by a practicing Jew? My answer surprised her. I said I wouldn't mind at all. After all, my Saviour and God was a Jew. According to the very Jewish St. Paul, all we gentiles are grafted onto the Vine of Christ, making us all now Israelites.  Of course, the modern state of Israel and the ancient Israelites are two very different things.)

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