🧵🪡

The title to the Coen Bros film ‘A Serious Man’ in Yiddish is ‘Ein ernster mensch’, but this is extraordinary close to the German ‘Ein erster Mensch’, which means ‘first man/human’. This could indicate Adam, but maybe it’s closer to the similarly-named opera by Rudi Stephan ‘Die ersten Menschen’ (the first humans), the opera is about Adam and Eve and their children, Cain and Abel.

The opera was very controversial for including many Oedipal and post-Freudian/psychoanalytic aspects to the story. It’s interesting to note that Stephan was an Aryan (as well was the opera’s librettist Otto Borngräber) but, through the internalization of the profoundly Jewish field of psychoanalysis, it may have REM. Rudi Stephan based his two-movement opera on an original poem from 1908 called ‘Die ersten menschen,’ subtitled ‘erotic mystery’ by Otto Borngräber. Stephan began making the opera from 1909 to 1915, but was drafted and killed in action on the eastern front at 27. The opera eventually premiered in 1920, conducted by Ludwig Rottenberg.

A REM analysis of Glengarry Glen Ross. 🧵

The Company as a Metaphor for Yahweh and Judaism

Mitch and Murray, the unseen bosses of the company in Glengarry Glen Ross, can be interpreted as stand-ins for Yahweh or a plural 'Elohim'. The company itself sells properties, and functions as a metaphor for an organization for the transmission of mental/spiritual landscapes (religion), which influences the behavior and limitations of the customer (identified as Aryans).

In this reading, the company becomes a symbolic representation of Judaism, or perhaps proto-Judaism. The salesmen, all of whom are Jews or proto-Jews, exist within this theological-commercial structure, echoing a deeper system of religious manipulation. Blake as Aryan Front-Man and Ambiguous Symbol

Alec Baldwin’s character, Blake, might be interpreted as the Aryan front-man for this Judaic company. His ambiguous surname “Blake” derives from etymologies that can mean either "black" or "pale," suggesting a misleading duality in his persona. This duality supports the notion that he operates as a mask or intermediary figure between the Jewish essence of the company and the Aryan consumer base. Despite his presentation as an ethnic 'outsider', he is, in fact, deeply embedded in the inner structure of the organization.

Read the essay “In Praise of Polytheism” by Odo Marquard. In this essay he speaks of the inherent, alien tyranny of monotheism (that is bolstered by Monomythic thinking) and the pluralist nature of polytheism (of the kind that developed from polymythic thinking). He theorizes that the notion of the separation of powers and that the ‘genesis of the individual’ had come about from polytheism. This individualism had been understood implicitly through the practice of polytheism, but that this fact had been overlooked by prior scholars.