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INT. A COLLEGE EXAMINATION ROOM – DAY

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TOOZIE

The point is, they are very much like us in a significant way, these Greeks, both in the kind of civilizations we both have and in our interest in human sacrifice, although in our society this interest evolves not through myths but through popular culture: in the weird menace fiction of the 1930s, in a muted form in the monster-chasing-girl science fiction of the 1950s, and back again in a more potent form in the slasher movies of the 1970s and 1980s.

PROFESSOR ROSENBLUM

But why this fascination?

TOOZIE

I must speculate.

PROFESSOR ROSENBLUM

Please.

TOOZIE

In archaic times human sacrifices, if they took place at all, were made to Gods. In contemporary times, we have practices we shy away from calling human sacrifices, but in reality what has really changed is that in the place of gods who had names — Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, and so on — we have abstractions: Progress, Economic Development, National Security and so on, and we make our sacrifices to them. We sacrifice men by calling them up for military service in war, or by chaining them to machines some of which will kill them. Fritz Lang was an artist who intuited this: do you remember the “Moloch” scene in Metropolis?

The Professor nods.

TOOZIE

Women, by the way, are sacrificed in childbirth or in caring for others. However you want to add it up, civilization is founded on shed blood. The Greeks understood this explicitly. We don’t — most of the time. We like to go around saying things like “people have human rights” and “every individual is equally and infinitely precious.” But sentiments like these are really just our civilization’s public relations work on itself. They aren’t true, and at some level we know they aren’t true. Our own literature or paraliterature of sacrifice reconnects us with the fundamental and awful truth about our world and as such provide us with the thrill of forbidden knowledge, which is surely one reason why we find it all so entertaining.

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