The Myth of Bernie
The Myth of Bernie
Explained with John Carpenter Films
(This article was originally published on The Gutter Art Critic on 5-30-2020. It has been slightly updated for this publication.)
While we may have been wrong and unnecessarily hopeful about Bernie Sanders the presidential candidate, there is perhaps one ‘good’ outcome from the fiasco that has become the Sanders presidential campaign, The Myth of Bernie. Long story short, the myth suggests that it is better to be a failed presidential candidate (with its mythical and fantasmatic core preserved) than a failed president. The unfulfilled potential of the candidate cannot be taken in the same light as the unfulfilled promises of an acting president. We may now forever sit and debate ‘what would’ve been’ had Sanders won. The mythmaking process was kicked off properly in 2016 on the heels of the Democratic National Convention when Bernie Sanders was effectively pushed out by the Democratic party to make way for Hillary Clinton (herself a mythologized figure inside the Clinton supporter camp). The recent events saw a replay of 2016, though the Sanders campaign was, from the very beginning, already much weaker than its former counterpart. While in Vermont and to the old-school listeners of the Brunch with Bernie weekly segment of the Thom Hartmann program, Bernie Sanders is already a mythological figure, 2020 seemed like a testing ground for the Myth of Bernie against the entrenched establishment Democratic politics. We all know what the end result was. With much of this political debate now suspended because of Covid-19 and perhaps because of Sanders’ own handling of the campaign race, it is slowly becoming a reality that Bernie Sanders is now thought to be solely responsible for carrying the idea of universal healthcare into America’s public consciousness. One of Michael Brooks’ recent shows ends with him giving a hearty thanks to Bernie for accomplishing this task.
This is however not a political commentary on the reasons and effects of the failure of the Bernie Sanders campaign. I am much more interested in the theoretical aspect of Bernie Sanders as a sacrificial figure of an ideological struggle. Here is where we find the mythmaking properties of the recent and unfolding events. For some salient comparison I turn to film and in particular to John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy. Let’s take John Carpenter’s film The Thing. Is not the alien creature, a shapeshifter that assumes the bodies of his hosts, precisely like Bernie’s messaging about universal healthcare and Wall Street billionaires? In the beginning of the film, the alien appears as a harmless dog. Unbeknownst to the scientists of the US Antarctic station the body of the dog has been overtaken by the alien that was released much earlier by a Norwegian group of researchers. As the film progresses the scientists begin to realize something is wrong. People start to act strangely and to disappear, eventually they start turning into terrifying monsters and then on each other.
The cornered alien in John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’
From the perspective of the alien however the story is reversed. In this scenario the alien is simply trying to survive and to escape the ignorant and violent outbursts of the scientists that are constantly trying to find and kill it. In many instances what is actually shown on screen are scenes in which the alien is cornered or captured. In these scenes the alien is seen violently reacting and pushing back against (what to the alien seems like) a different alien force. This is the terrifying dimension of a new idea. Ideas take form, they then turn into theory and eventually into reality, but not before a period of chaos and uncertainty in which the merits of the ideas and theories are put into question. The myth is established when these questions and their potential results are incomplete. We may never know whether Bernie Sanders the president would have ever instituted universal healthcare, there is only the notion that he could have. The Covid-19 pandemic and the concerted disavowal of this specific public policy by both the Biden campaign and the Trump administration at a moment when the public needed it most, is precisely what gives the Bernie myth credibility, the way that most myths, including conspiracy theories, gain ground not from what is or what actually transpired, but what is/was possible, what is/was denied, and what occupied the invisible interstices of power.
Like the alien’s actions in The Thing, Bernie Sanders’ position and goals were treated as something strange and alien to the American way of life. A final successful attempt was made at the eradication of Bernie Sanders as presidential candidate, but what remained was the idea. In the end of The Thing we are still not quite sure whether the alien is alive or dead. To this day debates are waged who or what the alien was, did the alien assume the body of one of the two surviving characters, or is it loose somewhere on the burning base in another, completely different form? Thus, through the notion of incompleteness, the myth of the alien passes into the imaginary dimension of public consciousness. Sanders, though obviously not the originator of the universal healthcare idea, is now seen as the figure that introduced it to the wider American audience. The fact that Sanders was not allowed to implement his ideas is what structures the myth and its potency. Just like in 2016, Sanders was going to be sacrificed for the idea to take hold within the American consciousness, just as the amorphous alien in The Thing was always going be ambiguously sacrificed onscreen in order to live on in the follow up two films in Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy. From the standpoint of the Sanders campaign, being elected President of the United States and then eventually failing to deliver on the promise of universal healthcare, is infinitely worse than conceding to the establishment candidate Joe Biden. In order to preserve his image as a working-class hero and not an election-spoiler the likes of Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders exited the race quietly and unceremoniously, leaving behind an abyss of unfulfilled promises and vacated ideas. And yet, we in the US are now embroiled in a debate over universal healthcare and a universal basic income (somewhat a courtesy of Andrew Yang though going back as far as Buckminster Fuller and David Graeber) which is actually waged against the wishes and better judgement of the politicians and ruling elites. It has become a properly mainstream conversation, now being discussed by figures like Joe Rogan among others.
Another among Sanders’ ‘achievements,’ that adds to the myth, is that through his political failure or perhaps his political sacrifice, he had managed to introduce the idea of democratic socialism into US public consciousness. Here, Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy is also prescient. Let’s recap. In The Thing, the first film of the trilogy, a group of researchers on a base in Antarctica finds an alien craft. What they do not know is that the alien is already among them, ready to begin its reign of terror as it attacks, consumes and shapeshifts into the bodies of its victims. The alien thing can be read as a personification of the specter of socialism, it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, ready to strike in places one least expects it. The crew has to battle the unseen foe in a fight neither party is likely to win. The crew can only temporarily hold the alien in check and mitigate its infectious progress from one human being to the next. But because the alien is only seen in some other form (a human, a dog) we do not ever see the alien in its own ‘proper form.’ The alien is therefore a perfect void, a pure fantasmatic idea-thing. We must assume that the alien is totally formless, a collection of sleeper cells that communicate with one another by means we are unable to understand. What holds the alien together and what keeps it going seems to be a general idea of being-for-its-own-sake.
In the second film in the trilogy Prince of Darkness, a group of graduate students and professors are tasked by a Catholic priest to do research inside a church on a large cylindrical drum of strange whirling green liquid. We are told that this is a vessel containing the essence of Satan who was imprisoned there and kept watch over by a hidden sect known as the Brotherhood of Sleep. The vessel was held in the church basement for centuries but now changes are happening and the ‘evil’ that is kept inside is trying to escape. Again, this evil can be read as some sort of spectral essence of socialism. It operates in the shadows, it is unknowable, it lives inside every cell and atom, it infects and relies on the poor foot soldiers, the homeless, to hunt down and kill its enemies, so that it may enter this world from beyond the light, from the primordial darkness. There is a long and interesting speculative conversation in the film, between the priest and the quantum physicist, in which they discuss the theoretical aspects of anti-matter and anti-particles as relating to the religious conception of the anti-Christ. In other words, given the context of the trilogy films, made during the Reagan ‘normalization’ years, where the USA signified the ultimate good and Soviet Union the ultimate evil, both films suggest that this evil originates somewhere totally foreign to the West, perhaps in Russia or the Far East. The alien in The Thing is first encountered in the frosty lands of Antarctica (Siberia?) and the drum of green liquid is hidden in the church’s crypt (communist armies were well known to occupy churches and monasteries and were disdainful of religion in general) but this time it is located in the US.
‘Prince of Darkness’ by John Carpenter
Since the third film In the Mouth of Madness seems to be out of step with the previous two, I have substituted the third installment of the Apocalypse Trilogy with Carpenter’s They Live. Unlike In the Mount of Madness which was shot in the 1990s, They Live was released in 1988. It shares in the atmosphere and zeitgeist of the times and works as a modern critique of Reaganism in the US and Thatcherism in the UK. It is a reversal of the corporate point-of-view. The film shifts the vantage point to the homeless, who were in The Prince of Darkness seen as the personification of blind obedience to evil (communism, socialism, ideology, etc). The reversal is completed by the fact that aliens are now firmly, but covertly, in control of the planet. But the homeless city dwellers have access to a secret, they know something that the TV-addicted aerobics-driven yuppies don’t, namely that the aliens are using a type of matrix or fully integrated hologram, laid over existing reality which can only be penetrated by donning a pair of special sunglasses. They reveal how the aliens, who have mysteriously occupied Earth and ingratiated themselves in positions of power as CEOs, socialites and power brokers, actually control society through subliminal messages inscribed within the symbolic order.
‘Put on those glasses or start eating that trash can’ scene in ‘They Live’ by John Carpenter
The Apocalypse Trilogy is a critique of class and social hierarchies rather than political systems. Each political system uses the political apparatus to control and administer its subjects, and exercise its political project in step with its own prescribed ideology, privileging certain classes at certain times to enforce its program. The only thing that seems to be outside of the political apparatus is the idea of certain inalienable rights (that Bernie Sanders pointed out included healthcare )which first appear as radical ideas that must be violently fought for and continually defended against encroaching obfuscation. The Sanders myth is built on the premise of a radical break with the current reality. This break was to become our ideology-penetrating pair of sunglasses, but like John Nada at the end of They Live, Bernie Sanders was sacrificed for the greater good of the Democratic Party and the neoliberal capitalist system represented by both Tump and Biden. John Nada ultimately fails in his self-appointed quest to infiltrate the alien base, though he does manage to convice his friend that the aliens and thus his quest are real, in the infamous ‘start eating the trash can’ scene. In a sense, Bernie Sanders accomplished something similar. Though he failed in his quest to deliver the American society to the promiseland of universal healthcare, his failure did reveal the trash can from which we have all been eating.