Last Woman on Earth – Roger Corman, Robert Towne Movie

Bumped to the top of the RL list for anyone who wants to see, “Saturday Night at the Movies.”

Original post, May 23, 2012, 5:50pm CT

I saw Monday night that Tallulah messaged me the satire vid currently making the rounds, “Elizabeth Warren: ‘I’m an Indian Too.'”  Clever it is, but I confess hauntingly obnoxious to someone awakening in his easy chair in the wee small hours. (Hate that fruity song – and those graphics – the rubber necked freak – the whole thing. Self: don’t watch goofed-up stuff when you wake up in the middle of the night.)

Somehow, through the YouTube sidebar I was led to, or tripped over this movie. I’m kind of a sucker for alone-in-the-wildnerness or post-apocalyptic stories, so I looked in.

Roger Corman is known for his little “B” flicks that despite their low-budget crudeness of craft nevertheless carry some big-time dramatic qualities.  This one may be B-, but ancient Greek tragedies probably didn’t have a very big budget, either. It’s written by Robert Towne (who also wrote the screenplay for Chinatown, some of which we happened to feature, a few days ago).

Last Woman on Earth
Click thru, to see it larger at YouTube, where there are more movie notes.
Spoiler paragraph – Towne also stars, along with two others in a kind typological triangle. He starts out as a reluctant protagonist, but eventually things change. The movie becomes a morality play, where nihilism, hedonism, and sloth conflict with corrupt, domineering, and unbridled aggression. By the end, one fails and the other just begins to be tamed to the essence of what America’s founding philosophers would call the Social Contract – thanks to the lady in the title – and that’s why the mention here in the Gulag.

Some might call the movie weak, failing to present much about the truth we should already know. I don’t even remember that God is mentioned, though I’m sure he’s seen it. But in exposing the vanity of not being true to life and life’s principles it comes on strong.

We live in a nation burdened by a lot of that sloth, hedonism, and nihilism, with only a feeble, inexcusable excuse lately, of the intentional work of Frankfurt School subversives to dumb us down. Truth is still being taught too and in large part, we pick what trains us. People will live and do as they choose.

We also live in a nation of corrupt aggressors. America’s founders had to ponder both problems, too. We must recognize that while governance is about individual liberty, our freedom will only flourish when we understand that liberty is meant for the expression of virtue. We are, after all, free moral agents, accountable to God, for the truth revealed to us through creation and his Great Intervention in man’s history (long before 1776).

We are told the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Liberty depends on Popular Sovereigny under God’s Sovereignty. Between aggressiveness and sloth, aggressiveness must be brought to under-stand that Sovereignty. It is to be made “meek,” Elizabethan English for trained, redeemed by discipline, self-controlled. Between aggressiveness and sloth, sloth doesn’t cut it at all.