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Even though I've gone on the record as having said that The Filth is self-indulgent, I'll add an addendum by saying that self-indulgence isn't *neccessarily* a bad thing. Having read the final issue, it all clicked into place for me in ways I really wasn't expecting.
It seemed to me that the whole point of the series, in the end, was about integrating different levels of existence to achieve a greater whole. In this sense, The Filth really was a magickal exercise in bootstrapping consciousness to accomodate these different levels of reality, though I'm not sure if it was all meant to be synchronous with the spheres on the Tree of Life (or Qlippoth) or not. By bootstrapping, I mean absorbing and refining the information/memes on whatever level one is at and recaptiulating them in more precise ways at higher and higher levels of existence, perhaps analagous to the spiral dynamics model...
There's the comic book level, the I-Life level, the Hand & its environment level, the Greg Feely/Ned Slade level, the "real" world level of the comic book that Feely lives in, the comic book medium itself, and the world of the reader. I think what Morrison was trying to do was take emergence theory and the spiral dynamics concept of the meme and use them as templates for expanding the whole idea of "as above/so below". (Maybe that's what he meant by "Blank Magic" in an interview a while back?)
Also, the end scene of Feely walking into the subway reminded me of Mr. Six and (Tom O' Bedlam) ending up in the subway tunnel in The Invisibles, where the subway tunnels are implied as the gateway to another level of existence and/or initiation (Tunnels of Set?) I think that in the end though, Feely represents a shamanic figure in that he survived an almost ritualistic form of illness as initiation into higher orders of being. He literally "walks between worlds". |
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If that's the case though, why bother having Dmitri and Hughes try to kill Feely? I guess Dmitri could be seen as an example of the old Hand before I-Life, which brings us back to the evolution argument.
