Obscenity is a form of violation. That’s the idea behind it, anyway. When you say a movie or a painting or a book is obscene — okay, not you, dear reader, but the kind of people who do say movies and paintings and books are obscene — you mean they violate the dignity of the reader or viewer. If performers are involved, you might say it violates their dignity too, or that of their whole gender. You could say the same about the use of the word to refer to, say, income — “So-and-so makes an obscene amount of money,” violating the social compact that no one person should command that kind of wealth when others do not — but of course it’s the purportedly degrading sexual and scatalogical stuff that gets people really riled up. The human body is sacred, and this is how you treat it? Shame on you, and may the full force of capital and the state be wielded against you.
There’s a line about obscenity I return to over and over, from the film Apocalypse Now. Ranting and raving as per usual, Marlon Brando’s mad Colonel Kurtz speaks of the hypocrisy of the United States military, from which he has defected to create a society more honest about its brutality:
“We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won’t allow them to write FUCK on their airplanes, because it’s obscene!”
Kurtz knew that the most vile imaginings of the most uptight general or admiral in the armed forces could not imagine a more unspeakable violation of the human body associated with the word FUCK than the actual, physical, cataclysmically violent violation of the human body associated with napalm. There’s no question what’s more obscene, no question where our ire should be aimed, no question what we should be trying to stop at all costs. Instead, we’re banning cusswords while we rain death upon all of Indochina. Translated into modern terms, it’s expelling student protestors of genocide in Gaza rather than lifting a finger to do anything to stop that genocide.
Brother Dusk commits genocide in this episode of Foundation, three times over. Appearing as a Wizard of Oz–sized hologram before the galactic council as they prepare to hand the Mule not only Trantor but him, too, the last Cleon standing decides to make a counteroffer. With sadistic mirth in his voice and that unmistakable Dusk twinkle in his eyes, he uses the Novacula, his black-hole bomb, to wipe out the homeworld of the Council, the sacred planet of the Luminists, and the entire cluster of worlds called Cloud Dominion. He does it in seconds, with the push of a button. A blast, a brief detonation, and then poof — billions of lives reduced to floating ash as instantly as a dandelion blown apart by a child. And it’s all done with about that level of consideration.
Foundation is no stranger to planet-destroying weaponry. But it’s the anticlimactic nature of these planetary blasts that turns your stomach. There’s no suitably huge explosion of flame, like the mushroom cloud after a nuclear detonation, or planets and Death Stars bursting apart in Star Wars. It’s like I said: a blast, a rumble, a conflagration that lasts about two seconds, and then nothing. If the body is sacred, then the sacred was just profaned in the most grievous way imaginable, billions upon billions of times over. They weren’t even afforded the dubious dignity of going out in a way that suited the immensity of the loss. Their funeral pyre was denied them.
“Don’t fuck with Empire,” Dusk says before signing off.
It’s one of the most shocking, disgusting, horrifying acts in the history of this show, and that’s saying something.
I reviewed this week’s Foundation for Decider.
Tags: decider, foundation, TV, TV reviews