Judas, New and Improved

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Just in time for Holy Week contemplation, the National Geographic Society had a news conference to reveal the existence of an ancient document purporting to be the Gospel of Judas.

It is authentic only in the sense that it's apparently not a forgery, but it doesn't prove that Judas was just misunderstood or lacked proper self-esteem. Actually, you would think that the reputation of Judas is beyond redemption, so to speak, considering his betrayal of the savior with a kiss in exchange for 30 pieces of silver.

But this text takes a stab at showing us a kinder and gentler Judas. This gospel suggests that, far from being the despised betrayer, Judas was a favored disciple and was asked by Jesus to betray him in order to complete the divine plan. This just goes to show that if you hang around long enough, either in life or in history, someone will try to rehabilitate you. It happened with Richard Nixon; it can happen with Judas.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 12, 2006

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Judas, New and Improved

Category: HEROES & ANTI-HEROES

By: Pete Kendall, April 12, 2006

On a philosophical level, the Wave Principle suggests that the nature of mankind has within it the seeds of social change. The social mood is always in flux at all degrees of trend, moving toward one of two polar opposites in every conceivable area, from joy and love of life to cynicism, from a desire to build and produce to a desire to destroy, from a preference for heroic symbols to a preference for anti-heroes.
“A Capsule Summary on the Wave Principle,” At the Crest of the Tidal Wave

As the April 17 issue of Newsweek notes, “Right now, people are loving the idea that Jesus and Judas were dear friends who were in it together.” The explanation behind this historically unprecedented shift in attitude (at least as far as we know) toward the fallen apostle is found at the end of the quote at the top of this page. In a bear market bad guys are embraced, and almost nobody is as “low-down” in Western culture as the man who sold out Christ. Judas is being resurrected in a more positive or, at least, mixed light because bear markets produce a social affinity for darker, more complex role models. This principle of bear market iconography was first discussed in The Elliott Wave Theorist of August 1985. It was demonstrated in 1991 when a market correction and resulting recession produced Hannibal Lecter, the infamous man eater of Silence of the Lambs in which Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar. It was the first Academy award to go a leading man in a horror movie since Frederic March won for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the end of Supercycle degree bear market in 1932. The decline of the early 1990s turned out to be a fourth wave correction in an ongoing bull market; so Lecter didn’t put the “traditional, white hat heroes that rule in bull markets on the sidelines” for good when he came out. But as EWI, has noted, “the social characteristics of fourth waves foreshadow more severe manifestations in the next bear market of larger degree (see excerpt from The Elliott Wave Theorist, March 2004 in Additional References below). As several recent entries illustrate (click here to visit the latest post), Silence of the Lambs was certainly the cutting edge of the much larger wave that is now splattering across the big screen.

Additional References
October 2004
Torture Themes and the Complexity of Social Experience
As dedicated as a socionomist might be, he can’t predict everything relating to social behavior. Back in 2000, I discreetly mentioned in an interview for Prechter’s Perspective the forecast that entertainment during the bear market would feature torture themes. It was an uncomfortable thing to say, but the signs were there. The prediction derived from the observation that the social characteristics of fourth waves foreshadow more severe manifestations in the next bear market of larger degree. For example, at the wave IV low in 1921, Nosferatu presaged a series of vampire films in the larger bear market of the 1930s. Likewise, at the wave 4 low in 1962, Psycho presaged a series of slasher films near the end of the larger bear market of the 1970s and early 1980s in constant-dollar terms. A caption in a book on movies said that slasher films had broken, “The Final Taboo.” There is no such thing, as bear markets must continue to shock people with new horrors.

The appearance of the book American Psycho in 1991 (and to a lesser extent the film Misery in 1990) during Primary wave 4 signaled that a major theme of the next bear market would be torture. (In September 2000, as the bear market began, a mild movie version of American Psycho was released.) I said that this theme would show up in the movies, which it has. But as specific as this expectation was, I was unprepared for many nuances of its manifestation. For example:
(1) Who would have guessed that torture scenes would appear first not in films but on a prime time TV show? The 2002-2003 season of 24 opened with a graphic scene of torture (administered by the good guys, no less) and featured half a dozen incidents thereafter. The hero died from torture (and was then revived with electric shocks).
(2) Who would have guessed that the most graphic mainstream torture film of all time would be promoted from the pulpit and prompt conservative, religious Americans to bring their children to the film as a family outing? Yet that is what attended The Passion of the Christ.
(3) While we would certainly have anticipated incidents of actual torture during a Grand Supercycle bear market, who would have guessed that U.S. government personnel would have perpetrated the first torture scandal? Who would have guessed that memos from administration officials could be read as condoning it?
Socionomists can predict what we call the “tenor”and “character” of social events but not often the specifics, which depend upon individual motivation and circumstances.

March 2001
A New Role Model
In 1985, EWT identified bear markets as the domain of complex anti-heroes. Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter certainly fits the bill. First, recall that Hannibal Lecter played an important but not central role in the 1991 horror movie Silence of The Lambs, which rode the cultural after-shocks of the last bear market in social mood to critical and box office success. Now Lecter is back as the focal point in Hannibal, and he is “bloodier and more violent” than ever. As the cutting edge in a new wave of horror movies, the most important element of this blockbuster is that Hannibal manages to gain the sympathies of the audience. “Here’s a thriller in which, by the end, you are rooting for a serial-killing cannibal to escape his hunters,” says one reviewer. As grisly as this seems, audiences are clearly thirsty for such a character. Hannibal had the best opening ever for an R-rated movie, grossing more in its first weekend than the next 15 movies combined. Hannibal signals a profound shift from the horror films produced by the downturns of the 1930s and 1970s. In the 1930s, the monsters got killed by the heroes; in the 1970s, the heroes got killed by the monsters; this time around, the monsters are the heroes. These are profound shifts that will undoubtedly put traditional, white-hat heroes that rule in bull markets on the sidelines for some time to come.

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