Morrison's music and legend are manipulated into a multimillion dollar-sign, star-studded cross,

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on which Morrison, the would-be revolutionary, is crucified into a spectacle martyr, along with his would-be revolutionary message. This is a mass sacrifice because it is rehearsed and staged before, literally, the eyes of tens of thousands, again and again. It is a spectacle because for the most part it does not approach the intensity, the depth and most importantly purgation, of a wholistic, tribal, sacrificial experience. The mass, as a euphemism for lack of community, makes the crowd's barings at Morrison's zenith concert in Miami as superficial as the alleged nudity only mockingly proposed. A purging of the violent impulse of the tribe stands at the center of Girard's concept of the archetypal sacrifice. He holds this position simultaneously with the belief that it will well up again from human nature (Girard, "¶VIOLENCE IS NOT TO BE DENIED").¹ Central to Debord's concept of the spectacle is a partial giving, essentially a tease, disappointing and sterile in its very nature. Fuse these concepts and one can grasp the spectacular and sacrificial nature of the mass sacrificial spectacle. A halfway house, it approaches the disrobing of the sacred (Morrison in his boxer shorts at Miami) yet is always cut off at midpoint.² Violence is saved and in fact invested for a future outburst, the continuation of the "destructiveness" of the "established state of affairs."³

© Christopher M. Balz 2010 All rights reserved