"The Disappearance of Alice Creed," "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," "Hard Candy"
What
do these titles have to do with the supposed cosmic/consciousness transformations of 2012?
Depending
on who you talk to and what planet they're from (culturally/philosophically/religiously), we could be in for the End Times,
more of the same old same old only worse, or else a much-needed morphing from a blinded-by-the-blight corporate patriarchy
into a sharing of power with a more feminized mode of being, which could maybe, just maybe, save our sorry asses.
I
have no idea what's in store for us -- other than the obvious doom and gloom if we don't collectively wake up and at least
stop shitting in our own nest -- but there do seem to be some changes in the global mental continuum that bear witnessing,
at least in the so-called First World (which could, if we ignore the warning signs, become Worst World).
I
will begin my observations, as I do so often, with myself. About thirty years ago, I wrote a soon-to-be-unpublished
novel with the title "Murder in Mind." It was about a serial killer, a psychic sleep researcher, and a beautiful
young equestrienne. Tying these three disparate character strands together was relatively easy because at the time,
I was riding dressage, learning how to read auras and chakras, and -- as it happens -- a killer of women was loose in my exurban
neighborhood. A spooky coincidence became the seed of the novel: I was out riding in the parkland near our house
on the same morning that the murderer killed and buried one of his victims. Gruesome.
As
a woman, I was enraged at the calculated slaughter of other women at the hands of this inhuman man; and the fact that it happened
so goddamned often. So until he was caught and imprisoned, I wrote a story that helped to assuage my fears. And
try to make sense out of this all-too-common horror story. What I came up with, according to an English professor friend,
was a tale of "revisionist feminism," in which the woman's plight was not one of passive powerlessness in the face
of murderous male violence.
Thirty years later, this theme is becoming commonplace, for good or
ill. (One could wish it wouldn't take so much violence to grab people's attention.) With a shiver, "Hard
Candy" comes to mind, the blood-soaked "Kill Bill" series, as well as many of Angelina Jolie's movies. Hard-bitten,
revenge-seeking, karate-chopping women are a dime a dozen, it seems, (though I personally never seem to meet any). So
is it wishful feminist thinking, that we can actually beat the men at their own game of running the show through gun-power
and ruthlessness? Is it a step backward or a step forward? Or is it an overdue warning to male pedophiles and psychopaths
that we, too, can now lock and load?
These depictions of women would have been unthinkable
just thirty years ago, just as women in the military would have been. Indeed, my novel was considered an oddity then,
but it's practically old hat nowadays. Add to the mix two recent flicks -- "The Disappearance of Alice Creed"
and "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" -- in which the tables turn violently against the violent men and you have
a verifiable cultural phenomenon: the uprising of damaged but strong women.
Are we
merely going into a phase of predictable feminist revenge? Are we just gaining equality in our ability to inflict harm
on each other, leveling the killing field? Or is it the precursor of what some say the cosmic transformation of 2012
portends? That is, the change from a dominator model world (which clearly at this point is species-suicidal), to one
that follows a feminine model of cooperation rather than competition? I must admit that such a change doesn't seem all
that likely considering our collective "pre-enlightenment," but I am trying to keep some positive thoughts about
the future, if only for the sake of all our grand-children.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama said that
women should have a lot more power in the world. In Tibetan Buddhism, women symbolize wisdom whereas men symbolize method.
We now have all the technology to save ourselves but not, sad to say, the will. Maybe that's what the hypothesized
2012 shifting of the magnetic poles is all about. Turnabout, after all, is fair play, and perhaps, just perhaps, our survival.
