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The Populism of Roger Ebert and Ancient Aliens

4/5/2013

9 Comments

 
It happened again today. Giorgio Tsoukalos needs to get himself a website with some contact information. He’s missing out. Today a producer for Russian state television contacted me to try to get hold of Tsoukalos because they want him for a show about aliens. Giorgio, if you’re reading this: Please try having some kind of web presence. It’s not good when I’m at near the top of a Google search for you.

I wondered why I started receiving more comments and emails than usual on my old reviews of Ancient Aliens this week. I should have known: Ancient Aliens has a new episode tonight. Among the more interesting responses I’ve received, besides the standard claims that I am arrogant and making “regular” folks feel stupid, was the bizarre notion that I was being offensive to Christians because I doubted the truth of the extra-canonical book of 3 Baruch, which Erich von Däniken insists is evidence of time travel. If the standard of religion now is the need to believe even in texts that are not part of the Bible, then I have some apocryphal gospels that will knock the socks off of some believers.

Tonight’s Ancient Aliens is entitled “The Von Däniken Legacy,” and it promises to assess the impact of Erich von Däniken and Chariots of the Gods on the book’s forty-fifth anniversary and just a few days before its author’s seventy-eighth birthday. I suspect I’ll be going into von Däniken’s checkered past in more detail tomorrow when I review the episode, since it’s unlikely that Ancient Aliens would do anything to acknowledge von Däniken’s criminal record, his diagnosis as a compulsive liar, or his plagiarism of Chariots of the Gods from Robert Charroux and Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier.

This retrospective on the life and work of Erich von Däniken comes only a day after the death of Roger Ebert, and I can think of few contrasts between individuals that are more marked. Roger Ebert was intelligent and curious, a populist in the best sense of the word—one who could appeal to a broad audience but with the deep knowledge of a scholar and a respect for the expertise of those who work hard in other fields. By contrast Erich von Däniken remains a populist in the worst sense of the word, cultivating a message of anger and hate directed at an imaginary conspiracy of elites plotting to put down the common man. He appeals to a broad audience, but he has no deep knowledge of even his own subject, and resents anyone who works harder than him, or knows more. Ebert often said that his guiding principles were generosity and empathy; von Däniken and his associates, especially Giorgio Tsoukalos, operate in a world of petty feuds, hubris, and charlatanism.

Those of you who know me exclusively or primarily from reading this blog may not be aware that, in addition to a writer about alternative history, I am also a critic of the horror genre. I wrote what is now one the of the standards histories of horror, Knowing Fear, as well as a critically-acclaimed anthology of early horror criticism, A Hideous Bit of Morbidity. My horror criticism has appeared in several publications, including the massive anthology 21st Century Gothic.

Roger Ebert influenced my criticism, even if it doesn’t seem immediately apparent, and it was due entirely to chance. When I was growing up not that long ago, there was still a morning and evening newspaper—imagine that!—and the morning paper ran Roger Ebert’s syndicated movie reviews, while the evening paper did not. My parents subscribed the morning paper, and thus I read Ebert’s reviews. In time, the paper began cutting back on feature space and slowly cut down and then eliminated Ebert’s reviews, and I transitioned to reading them online.

What I learned from Ebert is to find value in popular media as well as in elite media; or, in plainer terms, to see that movies like The Horror of Party Beach have as much to tell us about culture as The Exorcist. In Knowing Fear I tried to do my best to tell the story of horror in all its many aspects, but especially how the majority of the audience would have experienced it, from the blue books (cheap chapbooks) of the Gothic era down to Syfy’s Saturday night monster flicks. I’d like to think that some of that has carried over to my work in alternative history, in that I always try to think about how the non-experts who consume alternative history understand and interpret what they see and hear, not just how academic elites would read it.

In this, I’ve challenged alternative history practitioners in specific practices they use to avoid academic scrutiny while deceiving popular audiences. The most common technique—and Erich von Däniken’s favorite—is to phrase all claims in the form of questions: Did ancient aliens have sex with Jewish women in Palestine? Could the Nazca lines have been used as runways? Asking questions means that academics can’t hold them accountable since they never actually claimed anything at all—“I’m just asking questions!”—but the audiences who buy these books and watch Ancient Aliens don’t hear the implied doubt, and they take the question for fact, especially when combined with jeremiads about how academic elites are hiding the truth and working to prevent the ordinary citizen from learning forbidden facts.

The other thing I learned from Roger Ebert is that the aesthetic quality of a work is separate from its moral value. Ebert most famously made this case in exploring how Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will could simultaneously be a great movie and a morally repugnant exultation of Nazism. This is one reason that I have no trouble saying that Fingerprints of the Gods is a well-written, fun book even though its evidence is flawed and its ideology troubling. Conversely, it’s also why I got in trouble for explaining that while I felt Adrienne Mayor’s Fossil Legends of the First Americans had important things to say, I found the book a disorganized, unreadable mess. Most people simply decide a book is good if they agree with it and bad if they don’t. A leading skeptical magazine wouldn’t publish my review of Fossil Legends because of this issue.

I think, however, that it’s important to understand how the language of media and the power of aesthetics contribute to how audiences respond to and choose to accept or reject a message.

9 Comments
Gunn Sinclair
4/5/2013 09:21:41 am

Could the Mandans have looked like zebras?

I'm just asking questions! (Of course they did.)

Reply
Thane
4/5/2013 01:35:11 pm

Jason, since people are treating you like George T's booking agent and promoter, maybe you should get 10% off the top...

..or is the going rate 20% these days?


Reply
Thorne
4/6/2013 02:15:10 am

I wasted an hour yesterday afternoon watching a rerun of AA, just because I find it important to see for myself what kinds of crap the enemy is spewing. And it was, as noted here, a lot of silly questions with no real answers. "Could the ancient gods have been...?" and "Is it possible that...?" or "What if that story is really about aliens?"

Sadly, the only truthful statement (if you can call it that) was, "Ancient Astronaut theorists think that it is!" Wow! That's enough to convince me! Where do I send my donations?

Reply
CFC
4/6/2013 03:18:24 am

I so enjoyed Siskel and Ebert’s show and respected Robert Ebert immensely. Just goes to show you how valuable a serious and thoughtful reviewer can be to educating and informing the viewer.

I also made note of some of the descriptions of Ancient Aliens and the cast of characters and was struck by the similarities to America Unearthed:

“cultivating a message of anger and hate directed at an imaginary conspiracy of elites plotting to put down the common man”

“no deep knowledge of even his own subject”

“operates in a world of petty feuds, hubris, and charlatanism”

Very sad indeed!

Reply
Titus pullo link
4/6/2013 12:13:34 pm

My nephew knew giogio when he was at ithaca college and used to go drinking with him. The guy majored in sports mgmtbut u have to give him credit for creating a brand. He is on a large poster at my sons high school asking if aliens are real. He is a global icon...haha

Reply
mxyzptlk
4/7/2013 04:51:49 am

Didn't he start as a bodybuilder and promoting bodybuilding events?

Reply
Jason Colavito link
4/7/2013 05:04:01 am

Yes, he did.

The Other J.
4/7/2013 05:04:27 am

Could it be that some alternative history propagators are using a particular rhetorical technique to implant opinions without necessary evidence?

Is it possible that these people are master rhetoricians using enthymematic structures to place concepts next to each other without explicitly linking them because they know their audiences will subconsciously link the concepts for them?

Is there a chance that by asking a question and then "speculating" on the possibilities that they expect the audience will accept the speculation as the proof?

Could these rhetoricians even not even realize that structuring their arguments in that form effectively short-circuits the questioning process for their audience, and that their technique is in the same category of mind-control these same rhetoricians accuse reptilians, occultists, and Freemasons of?

Does answering questions with questions just create an echo chamber of opinion encrusted by calcified accumulated layers of received speculation?

...I'll miss Ebert too.

Reply
Jim
4/10/2013 03:15:02 am

The Horror of Party Beach is a classic.

Reply

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        • The Secret Doctrine >
          • Volume 1: Cosmogenesis
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        • Phoenicians in America
        • The Electric Ark
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        • Prince Henry Sinclair
        • Pyramid Prophecies
        • Templars of Ancient Mexico
        • Chronology and the "Riddle of the Sphinx"
        • The Faith of Ancient Egypt
        • Spirit of the Hour in Archaeology
        • Book of the Damned
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        • Richard Shaver's Proofs
    • Alien Encounters >
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        • The Condon Report on Ancient Astronauts
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        • Noah's Ark Cables
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      • Ancient Extraterrestrials >
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        • Plane of Ether
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      • A Message from Mars
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      • Orville Wright on UFOs
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    • The Supernatural >
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      • Science and Fairy Stories
      • The Cursed Car
    • Classic Fiction >
      • Lucian's True History
      • Some Words with a Mummy
      • The Coming Race
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      • An Inhabitant of Carcosa
      • The Xipéhuz
      • Lot No. 249
      • The Novel of the Black Seal
      • The Island of Doctor Moreau
      • Pharaoh's Curse
      • Edison's Conquest of Mars
      • The Lost Continent
      • Count Magnus
      • The Mysterious Stranger
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      • The Lost World
      • The Red One
      • H. P. Lovecraft >
        • Dagon
        • The Call of Cthulhu
        • History of the Necronomicon
        • At the Mountains of Madness
        • Lovecraft's Library in 1932
      • The Skeptical Poltergeist
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      • The Second Satellite
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      • A Martian Odyssey
    • Classic Genre Movies
    • Miscellaneous Documents >
      • The Balloon-Hoax
      • A Problem in Greek Ethics
      • The Migration of Symbols
      • The Gospel of Intensity
      • De Profundis
      • The Life and Death of Crown Prince Rudolf
      • The Bathtub Hoax
      • Crown Prince Rudolf's Letters
      • Position of Viking Women
      • Employment of Homosexuals
      • James Dean's Scrapbook
      • James Dean's Love Letters
      • The Amazing James Dean Hoax!
    • Free Classic Pseudohistory eBooks
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