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Evanescent Dreams: The Dwindling Relevance of American Culture as Depicted in Films Not Yet Conceived

Manuscript by Keith
Edited by Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel

Foreword

By Jared Diamond

I don’t think I can count the number of times I’ve been to Paris, but until 1994, the visits had always been detached as if I were a local who simply viewed the city as home, not as one of the grand hubs of European civilization. While visiting with colleagues, I’d always be shuffled off to one local eatery or another where the bored-looking waitresses would dispense our meals with the sort of indifference that comes from having a local clientèle rather than an endlessly rotating stream of tourists whom you’re striving to please. During my free times in the evening I’d roam the generic streets of the residential districts, bathing in the substance of French home life, all the while trying to convince myself that this was in fact the true cultural experience, not the standard fixtures along the Champs Elysses.

Then in 1994, I found myself in Paris with time to kill between a conference in Prague and a lecture in London. Whether I was weary from denying myself or simply coming to the realization that my chances to see Paris were dwindling, I finally succumbed and did the touristy thing.

Following a memorable ride up the Eiffel Tower with a panic-stricken Greek lady, I retired to a downtown café where I could soak in the view with a cup of coffee. I was lost in thought for an unknown amount of time when a voice interrupted me. “Lo siento, senor. Habla ingles?” Confused by the sound of Spanish amidst the cacophony of casual French, I gazed up to a Cheshire cat grin and an extended hand. I think the one thing everyone who met Keith remembers is the size of his hands. They seemed disproportionate to his otherwise slight body. I stood to shake his hand and offer him a seat with me. After exchanging a few pleasantries, I asked him what had brought him to this fair city. Like the true adventurer he was, he had come in search of a bottle of brandy rumored to be stolen from Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV. I mused that, despite our very different purposes, fate had seemed to bring us together, a mutual admiration society of sorts.

For three breathless hours, we conversed widely over the range of minutia that only kindred spirits would dwell upon. Toward the end of our conversation, Keith spoke excitedly of a manuscript that he was preparing. While he had revolutionized the field of anthropology through his unique style of total fabrication, plagiarism and slander against rival researchers, he claimed that his next project would yet again turn the field on its head. Before I could content myself with a bevy of questions about his project, he apologetically rose to depart. I would never again see him.

Seven years ago, I was waylaid in a hospital bed following a botched colonoscopy. Despairing at the steady stream of harlequin romances provided by my wife, I was delighted to find a thick manila enveloped at my bedside one morning. A sticky note attached to the outside of the envelope read, “As promised….” Inside the envelope I found a complete series of essays composing a groundbreaking manuscript. How this document found it’s way into my room I’ll never know, although, sadly, at the same time in a hospital across town, Keith would be clinging to life, the first known human to succumb to the avian flu strain that ultimately ravaged the world in 2006.

To call the essays revolutionary is the grossest understatement possible. He completely extrapolated the future course of American society, including political, social and economic events, through a series of cutting critiques of movies that had yet to be conceived of, let alone made. He even had the foresight to publish some essays under the pen name of a second personality based upon his assumption that he would develop a multiple-personality disorder despite no evidence to supports this conjecture. The more I peered into Keith’s brilliant reduction of the impending incestuous, robot-driven degradation culture, I began to see the eerie parallels to the collapse of India caused by the worship of cows.

Last year, a consortium of Singaporean businessmen requested that I edit Keith’s manuscript into a workable form. Of course, I was flattered by the request albeit a bit humbled. I was immediately faced with the dilemma of how best to retain Keith’s vision while making the prose accessible to as wide an audience as possible. When he had written these essays, he chose a very simple writing style that curled a plethora of subtexts and implications into a modicum of words. To leave them as is would deny all but the most well-versed in modern anthropology, sociology and neurolinguistics in the dark, yet more clearly enunciating his ideas would inevitably extract so many of my own ideas as to render this not Keith’s work, but rather a hybrid of our two thought systems. In the end, I chose a minimalist approach to editing them. This is not pop scholarship; those seeking easy answers best look elsewhere. In the interest of giving newcomers to the anthropological sciences a starting point, I’ve included post-essays that translate Keith’s ideas into my own words. I hope that you will use all of this information to delve deeper into the topics at hand.

It is my sincere hope that you will enjoy these essays as much as I did. With each reading of them, I’m more astounded by the level of detail and insight. America truly lost a treasure when Keith passed, but I hope that these essays can carry forth his visions to future generations.

Jared Diamond
San Rafael, CA
August 7, 2007

Essay 1. Home Alone 3: Turbostratic Autophylogeny for Didactic Paleodromes – by Keith

I like this movie. I saw it on Sunday. It stars a boy named Alex who I like because he is funny and has adventures. It was made by a man named Raja Gosnell who likes it because it is Christmas and Alex gets sick. My mommy then watched a movie called Notting Hill with British people. I like that movie too because the man says funny things and gets nervous in funny ways. Home Alone 3 is my favorite movie in August but mommy said I can have the Transformers DVD when it comes out so then that will be my favorite movie. I was going to see Transformers when it was at the movies, but then Bobby went to jail for fighting so I had to wait.

Alex does funny things to the bad guys. If I were Alex, I would give them chicken covered in hot sauce that they then eat. I would also shoot them because I hate them. My dad said he’d shoot my mommy because he hated her Jew cunt and would gladly pay not to see her Jew kids on the weekend. Alex’s daddy goes to Cleveland because he has to for his job. Then the bad guys tie up the old lady next door who is supposed to help Alex when his mommy is at work. The lady burglar is not smart but the men aren’t too. My favorite part is when Alex electrocutes them.

I give Home Alone 3 five stars. Alex is a funny and smart kid like me and we would have fun playing together. He also has a mentally retarded big sister like me who cuts herself with things because mommy says she doesn’t know any better. I hope Alex comes to Baltimore so that we can play because I would show him the fort I built in the woods behind our apartment. Big kids smoke in it sometimes but I told them I’d shoot them if they did again. I hope I get Home Alone 3 for Hannukah.

Reflections on “Home Alone 3: Turbostratic Autophylogeny for Didactic Paleodromes” by Jared Diamond

In 1978, I submitted a letter to the editor of the journal Science questioning Keith’s conclusions regarding messianic imagery in the Maori sailing ceremony. Keith responded by circulating a rumor at the next national conference that I had been caught fellating an underaged bell-hop in the elevator. The point was well taken: having not personally witnessed the Maori sailing ceremony, I was not entitled to question his findings. This is integral to the scientific process – multiple lines of evidence validate conclusions but mere skepticism does not automatically invalidate conclusions. When Keith brought forth his evidence, I was obligated to see for myself and bring forth counterevidence to argue against him.

Upon reading the first sentence of this seminal essay on Home Alone 3, I immediately recoiled. The mere thought that he found merit in that movie turned my stomach. But, as I had so painfully learned in 1978, I needed to see for myself before I could attack Keith’s scholarship on this subject.

And that is how I found myself curled up in my favorite armchair nursing a cup of peppermint tea while Floosums slept at my feet, all the while beholding the spectacle of Raja Gosnell’s vision. To call the movie turgid and lifeless is an understatement. It chokes on its ambition as if the gigantaur of its superior predecessors was standing with its foot on Home Alone 3’s throat. The writers lacked the simple decency to hybridize torture gags from the previous movies into new forms of pillary. Instead, sight gags and slapstick abuse are lifted wholecloth from the previous films and reenacted here.

Virtually every decision made by the creator’s of this fatty turd are wrong, most glaringly the casting. Center stage is Alex Linz, a tousle-haired moppet who doesn’t seem to recognize the distinction between real life and acting. His chosen nemeses are non-charismatic dullards, no doubt the sort of j-grade actors that would have considered their careers a success if they had just landed non-speaking parts in a Wendy’s commercial. When put together in a booby-trapped house, the results are uninspiring, to be gentle. Some may say I’m being to harsh because the gold standard had been set by the Culkin/Pesci/Stern trifecta of the original films. However, I think any well-versed student of film recognizes that Daniel Stern’s finest work was with the ensemble of Crystal and Kirby in the City Slickers diad. And Pesci is revered for his knee-slapping turn in Casino. This is to say that, in many respects, the actual chemistry of the original Home Alone cast is overrated in light of the solidness of that script. Furthermore, in the same timeframe as Home Alone 3, another comedic triplet of baby/Mantegna/Pantoliano was demonstrating genuine warmth and pathos in Baby’s Day Out. Whatever potential this script had, it was no match for the cretins asked to bring it to life.

At the absolute nadir of the acting corps is a near-pubescent Scarlet Johansson as Alex’s older sister. As an adult, she has been able to establish a remarkable career based solely on the size of her breasts. As a gangly pre-teen, we are offered the chance to view her solely as an actress. The results are inconclusive at best for the simple reason that it is nearly impossible to focus on her acting. In the absence of a shapely ass and breasts that strain against the fabric of her clothing, it is impossible not to notice her disturbing looks, like the nightmarish end product of extensive Slavic inbreeding. Her dull, lifeless eyes induced within me a deep, forbidding depression and even Floosums was compelled to leave the room during one of Scarlet’s bursts of needlessly snarky dialogue. Lord help him! – he couldn’t stand to look at her either. To say puberty did her well is an understatement – it did the entire world well.

As my despair mounted, I came to realize that what I was witnessing was the worst thing imaginable – pure mediocrity. It obviously wasn’t a good film by any stretch of the imagination yet it lacked the truly intangible qualities that turn crap into a Son of the Mask. Aside from the occasional chuckle at ham-fisted dialogue like, “We didn’t anticipate the defenses the boy would mount,” my viewing time was mirthless. It was then that I came to realize the substance of Keith’s review.

You might presume that Keith was aiming for something ironic, but in fact, he was aiming much deeper than simple hipster scoffing. Let us parse apart some of his text to find the deeper meaning in all of this.

At the very outset of his review, Keith immediately states, “I saw it on a Sunday.” Of course, we all recognize that Sunday is the Christian Sabbath symbolizing the day of God’s rest in the Book of Genesis. This sets the tone from the very start. Religion is explicitly mentioned in regard to Keith’s father who “hated [Keith’s mother’s] Jew cunt and would gladly pay not to see her Jew kids,” and again in the closing stanza with “I hope I get Home Alone 3 for Hannukah.” But, religious imagery also appears deeper within the text. For example, Keith describes his mentally retarded sister cutting herself. When one ponders the actions of Jesus who foresaw and willingly submitted to execution by crucifixion, one could argue that Jesus, in a way, sacrificed himself – cut himself! – by not resisting his punishment. Even deeper, Keith makes mention of Notting Hill, undoubtedly named for the Nottingham of modern English mythology. It was in Nottingham that Robin Hood attempted to preserve justice while King John fought in the Crusades – wars in the name of Jesus Christ.

This all leads me to one conclusion – Keith was using a Home Alone 3 review to point out the erosive impact of religion upon our secular society. In the American religious world that is all too dominated by an “If you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all” attitude, far worse actions have supplanted speech. He was rallying here to say that we shouldn’t hold back our feelings about generic turds like Home Alone 3. We should all stand up and say, “I resent you cynical Hollywood suits expecting me to pay for a shoddy product!” Meanwhile Keith saw streams of Midwestern soccer moms shuffling into church, saying “Home Alone 3, it was….cute.” And the cycle continued.

It was about this point in my decompensation that Floosums wandered back into the room. The credits had long since rolled, but lost in thought, I hadn’t noticed. I vowed to fight for the last shred of America’s gritty, secular backbone. The next morning I told the Starbuck’s barista that his haircut made him look gay. It felt good to say it.