Vagabond Blues

More Sort Of Poems

2010-09-13T20:49:00.000-07:00

The Battlefield

you are on the battlefield

watching your comrades blowing up

losing limbs, hearing their screams

thinking, how did i get here?

still thinking about what's on the other side

of the battlefield

that there's a reason you are fighting

there is no reason

seeing another man go down

you have to believe

they died for something

but they didn't

except maybe to see

what they wouldn't see while alive

and then they see

that they didn't have to die

to see it

you are only fighting

to re-own your reality

watch out for that

when you do re-own it

you may find yourself alone

re-owning your reality means opposing

those who tried to take it from you

by imposing their version

your family

secondly

if no one else is willing or able to see

and own that reality with you

then you are going to be alone in it

as you choose reality

over the comfort of illusion

and enmeshment

The Hole

i am learning to listen more and talk less

even talking is

or can be

listening

finding whatever it is

that i need to hear

that is what i get to say

it's not about the other person

the desire to touch, somehow denied,

becomes the desire to grab

denied becomes the desire to fuck

denied becomes the desire to hurt and kill

"I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch"

if we knew how alone we were

we would crawl up into a hole

and die

The Father

it doesn't matter how down i am

i have to go to work

and no matter how down i am

to some people

it still looks like up

perhaps because honesty

is the only measure of where we are at

being honest about our insistence and indulgence

soon curtails it

if you find yourself dishonest

then own up

instead of adding to it

by covering it up

even if you have to go back and re-open

a 10 yr old case

and say, "I did it"

right now i wish i knew

it's dishonest of me to feel sorry for myself

because i know that's not true

so half my family died

so what?

that's the true of it

it happens to everyone

one way or another

we think we are especially burdened

and in that belief

we start to believe the lie

that we matter

truth is, none of us cracks easily

then knowing that it doesn't matter

if i indulge in thinking i matter

that makes it *really hard

i keep making it about others

i ought to keep it together for others

then i know that's BS

so i think, fuck it

i'll come apart

but what about me?

why not do it for me?

live?

the answer is:

self loathing

I couldn't hate my father

so i had to hate my self

punish my self to get back at him

and now i am crippled like he was

so now i feel for him, a little bit

that is a hell of a loop

now I am feeling for him!

what he couldn't own

his hatred for life

for doing this to him

casting him out and down

luciferian

when my father died

i felt no connection to him at all

it was like he never existed

i just didn't believe that any of him

survived death

because he never really existed in life

for me

i wonder if he's been in bardo all that time

some souls take longer to process...

he was so deeply entrenched in denial

and so fervent in his disbelief

he may have gone into black out

he believed there was nothing after

so that was what he got?

until now...

Settle for Less

2010-08-12T20:54:00.000-07:00

as persons, we equate intimacy with the personal

the reverse is really the case

only the impersonal can really allow for intimacy

most couples "put out" to keep the agreement of enmeshment intact

it's scary to let that "meshing" come apart

but there are times

when you love the other to the core

without wanting or needing anything from them

a moment, here & there

a moment is enough to know

that that deeper connection is there

letting the moment be enough is hard

settling for less

always a little bit less

when we're programmed to always want more

is hard

we want to bring the deep into the shallow

to make what's fine coarse

in order to secure it

instead of dropping down to meet it

just drop through the thoughts and feelings

into what you know is true

settle for less

The Alchemy of Marriage

2010-08-06T11:49:00.000-07:00

(the missing 82nd chapter of the Tao Teh Ching):

The Cunt that stays closed

When it is time

Is every bit as insistent

As the Cock that stays hard

When it's not

If as the one softens

The other opens

Then there is true flow

and everything comes into balance

Morality

2010-07-19T16:56:00.000-07:00

Morality is the invention of people who are triggered, as the means to avoid being triggered again. “Thou shalt not trigger me.” Jehovah acts in the same way: he gets triggered, his wrath descends on humanity, and he sends Moses to lay down the law. Man then agrees to follow the commandments in order never to trigger God again. Enmeshment on a cosmic scale.

And what was Jehovah most afraid of? The Goddess.

Morality is the root of all evil, because the root of all morality is fear of the female.

I do have a deep fear of female sexuality in me, and it does come out in rage and intolerance.

I was thinking this morning that the Nazis were sweethearts compared to the Inquisition. That’s the real naked face of distorted masculine energy, directed wholly at the female. I think I have an Inquisitor inside me. It just wants to snuff out female power, female sexuality, at the first sign of it. Because of how terrifying it was to me, as an infant.

Lion & the Lamb

2010-07-15T16:13:00.000-07:00

I finally watched the JDR video, the one with me in it. (See here. Or see Transcript of our dialogue here.) It was uncomfortable seeing myself. I look like a frightened rabbit in the first part; funny, because I wasn't aware of it at the time. I was only aware of trying to be as open as I could. I guess my body was experiencing fright, and being open meant I wasn't doing anything to disguise that fact. But compared to all the perception management I do with my videos and podcast, it was quite painfully exposing. It's the first time I have felt distaste seeing/hearing myself in a long time. Mild distaste, but distaste nonetheless.

There’s a moment in the video in which John is looking at me and his eyes tear up and I felt this fatherly love emanating from him. I hadn’t consciously experienced it at the time, but it was there in the video. Watching the whole thing back was a strange experience. I wondered afterwards, why they picked this particular one, and whether it was John who chose it. It doesn’t seem to be the most accessible talk he gave during that trip. I also thought how, if someone were skeptical of John, they would think I was such a putz, with my eyelids flittering away like a little bird. They’d think I was faking it, a New Age sucker.

So be it. If this “historical” event ~ a public transmission of my encounter with JDR ~ wasn't undermining for my person, I’d know something wasn't right.

Two days later, today.

I thought about John, the words he'd said to me. That was the thing I didn't mention above: I wrote about what my person thought about the whole thing, but not the effect hearing his words had on me. They are powerful words, and since this is John, I know they are true, because John can't lie. When I was hearing the words at the time, a big part of my reaction was to do with my person feeling special, happy that John recognized me and what was happening in my life. But hearing them again without that element of “me” (in fact, I felt anything but special seeing myself looking so timid and goofy), it drove home the meaning of the words: that I am in the midst of a huge shift in orientation, a shift that is going to happen no matter what I do.

I remembered then that John tears up right after I say to him, “I couldn’t have done it without you, John.” My Wife laughed at that bit, watching the video, and I didn't know why at the time. Now I’d guess it was because it’s true, what I said. It took some presence of mind to say those words, and afterwards, I wished I hadn’t said them. I’d had to close a little, and come out of that unfocused/surrendered space, in order to assert myself to the degree of saying something like that. As a result, it seemed a bit forced. But then, when I watched the video, it appeared as if somehow, if not the words then the truth behind them, seemed to move John. I felt this fatherly love coming out of him. And now I wondered if maybe it wasn’t fatherly, so much as male motherly? If when I said those words, John recognized that one of his chicks was about to hatch, that his attention and nurture had caused another being to come forth. So his love “shone” through for a moment, seeing that and knowing that.

That is the truth: I couldn’t have done it without him, not the way it turned out anyway. And so John was getting to see how the fruit of his being had seeded the fruit of another’s being.

Recently, my Wife told me that I am exuding gangly teenage energy. Apparently, it has to do with how my individuation process has finally begun again, having been hijacked/arrested in adolescence. Joseph Chilton Pearce writes about how, in adolescence, we are readying for a huge shift in consciousness which entails a whole new area of the brain being activated, and which probably has to do with the heart opening also. A natural enlightenment. But because this never happens, that sense of a big event being on the horizon is never satisfied. We are left incomplete, unformed, dormant.

What John told me was that I was about to experience “a massive, clean, clear growing up.”

Remembering all this on the rock, seeing all this, I opened and tears came. I was careful not to try and make it into anything. The closer I get to this, the bigger it seems, and the more I see just how ordinary it is.

John wasn't seeing my person heading for some great apotheosis. He was simply seeing another being coming forth into its fullness. It didn’t matter in the least bit “who” I was. All that mattered was that another flower was opening in the great cosmic garden of being.

It is massive; and yet it is nothing at all. Just in the natural way of things.

I thought about how everything we fear is in the past: the supreme terror is a memory of the distant past. So although we live in dread for the future, what we fear is actually in the past. What is in the future that gives rise to fear is a time when we get to let that terror-trauma all the way back into consciousness. So then, we live in fear of that fear.

I know that I need never fear anything outside of me again, because I have identified the great fear within me. And nothing external could ever amount to more than a trifle, compared to that vast, nameless (because it's pre-verbal) internal terror.

Weeding the Garden

2010-07-05T21:28:00.000-07:00

Really all we need to 'do' to allow a deeper knowing, and a deeper seeing, to begin to inform our lives, is to clear up enough space for our unconscious beings to begin to emerge into and express through. That comes down to de-cluttering our lives, our heads, hearts, and bodies, weeding the garden, as it were, so that the flowers and fruit of truth can begin to grow there.

Overly intellectual, analytical types continue to try and 'figure out' the riddle of our despair. Trying to find the answer that will 'fix' the problem. But the distortions of our mind and heart (and body) are precisely reflecting the ways in which we have distorted yourself as consciousness. Then, as consciousness, all we need to do is really see those distortions, and by seeing, be fully present inside them, without trying to fix, change, or use them for our person. Then we-as-consciousness will begin to return to our true, original form.

Naturally, this takes time, and the process of being more and more fully in those patterns as a means to see them, this means that we are likely to feel worse, overall, rather than better, during the first part of this process. So our tendency is to keep seeking ways to feel better, ways to come out of your patterns and find some relief, whether through a candy fix or a video game, getting to be 'the man' at our job, a sexual high, or whatever it is (or getting to feel like we have a handle on the process and are making progress!).

Asking the right questions is a start, provided we don't require answers, because the right questions are those that only we can answer: not so much by thinking about them, but through new forms of action which being in a questioning frame of mind allow.

The first obvious step is to change our habits and free up some space, so that we can start to generate some self-worth that actually comes from an inner sense of knowing, and not from surface achievements in the external world ~ all of which are really of no value at all, unless they stem from an inner knowing.

Advice on Parenting From a Childless Sorcerer

2010-06-21T19:22:00.000-07:00

If a parent comforts a child from a place of excess personal involvement ~ feels pity, anxiety, and such, because his or her own wounds are being stirred up ~ then this increases the enmeshment. Although the child is ostensibly being "comforted," what's really happening is that their own patterns are being confirmed and consolidated by the parents' patterns. When a child falls over, it looks to the parent for a cue as to how to react; when the parent shows fear and concern, the child then begins to cry. The parent has taken the child's feelings seriously, so now the child knows it is supposed to do the same (or that s/he can get away with it!).

Enmeshment, all down the line.

The alternative (stand back for the wisdom of a guy who never had a kid advising fathers!) is to hold a neutral, impersonal space for the child, one that is constant. This way, the child knows that, when it really needs protecting or soothing, the parent is there. The rest of the time, it is on its own. The space is always available to the child, but because there is no enmeshment, there's no pull for the child to go into the space simply for comfort, only for real nurture and support when needed.

That "pull" is the result of the parent wanting the child to need him or her, in order to feel especially loved themselves.

***

What it comes down to is that, as long as we raise our kids from a personal space, no matter how functioning and "happy" they may turn out, they are still going to be living from a place of personal sovereignty, hence, in a way of being that's untrue based on the way of being taught them by their parents. So they are basically in Hell.

Perhaps this is why sorcerers don't generally have kids. They know they'd be raising livestock, food for entities. Knowing that, but not having the ability to change it, could make for an insufferable tension.

As for the kids-in-bed thing, it's not true that children naturally grow out of wanting that sort of proximity and comfort from the parents. Again, this would depend on whether the parent is enmeshing, using the child for its own comfort. A close relative allowed her daughter to sleep in her bed until she was 12 (for all I know she still does), largely because the child was so insistent. She was unable to sleep alone and her mother didn't have the necessary ruthlessness, or neutrality, to be detached about her child suffering. De-enmeshment is always painful for both parties.

Clearly, a case can always be made for both sides of the argument, or any argument. Too much love and not enough discipline spoils the child; the reverse, and the child grows up damaged in other ways. No parent could ever get the balance right through conscious will alone; the only way is not to be personally involved with one's children. I would guess that even sorcerers find that nigh-impossible.

***

Spelled out very simply: when a child doesn't receive enough of a clean, loving physical connection to its mother, it is imprinted with that lack and seeks it elsewhere, into adulthood and sometimes unto death. This wound is further compounded if, during later infancy (from about 2), when the child begins to individuate and wants to bond with the father, the father is also lacking, absent, or physically distant or disconnected. Then the child grows up with a double wound that comes down to a sort of emotional hunger for touch, for "validation" (for an infant, physical touch can be necessary not just to well-being but to survival).

As adults, we are unlikely to find ways of bonding with men to meet this hunger (though lots of guys get into sports and join the army just to rough-house with guys); so then almost 100% of that emotionally-patterned neediness is going to be directed toward women. What guys consider horniness is usually nothing of the kind, because their physiological responses are hooked into those emotional/psychological patterns, and when they think they are looking to get laid, they are really looking for mommy's (or even daddy's!) love and attention.

If a child was really cut off from the father, and maybe overly smothered by the mother (as well as sometimes neglected by her ~ which was my case), they often wind up homosexual, or, as in my case, rather waif-like, ephemeral, romantic types with low libidos. (My Wife might disagree on the last point!)

***

Notes from Underground

2010-06-06T15:32:00.000-07:00

Collection of different seeings occuring at SWEDA over the past week or so.

We inherit the unlived life of our parents. One way to ensure that we continue to carry that load is to make sure that we always fail, because then we’ll continue to be driven by that ambition passed down to us.

Because when we fail, we are left always wondering what we could have achieved if things had been different. That's a real curse. On the other hand, if we become successful at whatever our parents program us to want, we might eventually see it wasn’t our thing and move on to other goals: goals that aren’t installed in us by our parents. As it is, because we can't quite let go of that ambition, we continue to carry that load for them: the parents’ unlived lives become our unlived life.

It’s a similar situation with me and writing. My father wanted to write, but never got anywhere with it, and quickly gave up and became a businessman. I became a writer and to a degree succeeded (I got published); but by and large, I have failed as a writer, at least on my own terms (and those of my father), since I haven’t been able to make a living doing it.

If the son fails in realizing the father’s dreams, then the son is never a real threat to the father. Even if, at a conscious level, the father wants his son to succeed, at a deeper level, the father needs the son to fail, because that way, the son continues to carry the load of the father’s unlived life.

I know for myself that one of the reasons I kept on writing more books was because none of the ones I wrote had the kind of success I felt they deserved. Failure breeds ambition. Success tends to create a healthy indifference.

***
Reconciliation between the brothers (Cain & Abel) is all about each brother owning the shadow. A big part of owning the shadow comes down to integrating the unlived life of the father, by recognizing it for what it is: a foreign element passed down to us, like some genetic disorder, that cannot define us or tell us who we are, but that nonetheless has to be fully assimilated in order to be overcome.

***

The male individuation process entails repeatedly separating from the female, to re-experience that key period in childhood, when we no longer "have access to the woman's body." This is a kind of "crossing of the abyss," because the father isn't quite there yet to provide an alternate physical connection, but the mother is already withdrawing.

The matching pattern for a woman is perhaps that a girl identifies with the mother, and only begins to experience herself as separate through a connection with the father. Hence women only experience themselves through men, where men only experience themselves by separating from the female.

In The Lovers card, woman is connecting to divine, while man is connecting to woman. This has to do with women being all the way in the nagual, with their wombs, so they don't exist in the same way men do, as individuated beings.

Is the reason why women tend to kill themselves over men more often than the reverse because a woman has no purpose outside of a man? My Wife agrees there is truth in this. But then the reverse is kind of true, in that I experience myself as having no purpose, and even no existence, with my Wife ~ except when my cock is doing its thing.

It is like the Moon: women reflect the light of the man and so they exist, but they also have a dark phase, when they turn away from that light, toward the mysteries, the nameless or nagual. This is when the man is "pushed out of the nest," denied access to the woman's body, and has to wander the wasteland, cross the abyss, in order to continue the endless journey of individuation. It happens time and again, in cycles, because the original trauma and disorientation is so great it takes repeat experiences to fully integrate it. And most relationships die because the winter phase is too hard on the persons, and leads to recrimination, bitterness, violence.

It is only when we allow death to become a part of love that it becomes alchemy. This is not even preparation for death, it is death. We die a little bit at a time, until there's nothing left.

Inhuman love: the scariest thing there is.

***

In the Gospel, Christ promises to send "the comforter" (the paraclete) in his absence. Women bring a different sort of comfort to men, not access to the female body but something finer, an awareness of our own innermost potential, or Christ consciousness.

The upright father = solar king = Christ.

Sexuality awakens in the male infant after mother-bonding and father-bonding have passed, and the child begins to experience his "uprightness" (individual physical existence) through erections and sexual sensations. This is another reason why we seek sexual connection when we are in the abyss, or in despair or a disconnected state, as a way to feel grounded, connected to our own bodies, present, alive.

***

My Wife pointed out yesterday that part of why a husband is unable/unwilling to see his wife, and therefore contain her, is that he doesn't have a support system of male allies to provide a space for him, a space in which he can be neutral and receptive enough to hold the space for the woman.

I couldn't be the husband I am to my Wife without the other men at Thessaly helping to create a matrix (morphic field) in which I can experience my own non-existence (connect to the nagual) ~ by some other means than access to the female. Without that nexus of connections to other men, we, as males, are too individuated, too self-aware, and at the same time, too desperately dependent on experiencing a loving connection to women.

***

Someone posted at SWEDA recently about how their parents had done all they could to prevent them from developing their self-awareness, but that they had failed. I had the thought that it was more than that they failed, because their efforts to suppress that side of the child actually made it stronger. That’s the way it always is, and we often even need that kind of parental or sibling adversity to strengthen our spirit for later in life. That sparked the thought that the worst thing a parent could do was provide a superficially “loving,” “healthy,” “functional” background, while not providing a deeper connection. I suspect that this cripples us far more than outright abuse does, because it is then almost impossible to identify and own those distortions. It is all under the surface. At least if we know we hate our parents, and why, we can begin to move past that.

Don Juan talks to Carlos about how all the men of knowledge he knows endured all kinds of adversity and suffering right from day one. When parents try to protect their children from suffering and create a bubble for them, they provide all the surface elements of a loving childhood only by concealing the stark reality from them. So not only is the child not protected from “harsh reality” (since it is being affected energetically anyway), but it is deprived of the opportunity of conscious growth and individuation, because it isn’t allowed to see and confront all those unpleasant truths about reality ~ starting with its parents. There is a dark complicity at work, a secret agreement to maintain the cover-up into adulthood; so then the wounds are passed onto the grandchildren, with no possibility of being owned and healed.

It makes me sick to the core. Presumably, this is how I felt growing up with a drunken, sex-addict of a dad, who was totally indifferent to what was happening with (and to) his children, while at the same time ostensibly providing everything we “needed”: a nice house, comfort, and all the surface luxuries of a happy childhood (he even took us swimming every week, presumably some sort of token gesture in order to make himself feel like a “real” dad).

The truth is, my father really had no business having children at all.

And yet here I am.

Jake Horsley and Jason Kephas Together Again for the First Time

2010-05-24T21:05:00.001-07:00

How I Wound Up as a Film Surgeon

2010-05-22T13:40:00.000-07:00

From a post at the forum:

Morality and taste are both equally irrelevant so far as being honest goes.

One thing first off: BL II had a point about bringing the big picture into it, because if I didn’t, at that time, really believe that George Lucas (or any corporate entity of his ilk) wasn't strictly human anymore, I wouldn't have let loose on his ass with such fury and glee. At the time, I considered Lucas fair game for anything I might say, because he was One of Them. (Which he probably is, but that's not relevant to this post.)

Father issues are at base of it all, on top of which is my frustration at failing to attain even a modicum of the recognition and success that George had attained. And of course, the very drive to attain such success (getting world’s attention) is itself sourced in those father issues.

But all that is rather rudimentary, and a bit simplistic. It’s true that if I had succeeded as a scriptwriter/filmmaker in Hollywood, I wouldn't ever have written The Blood Poets. But on the other hand, I began writing film criticism before, or simultaneous with, writing film scripts (at about 14). In fact, some of the first “reviews” I wrote were imaginary ones of the films I would some day make (I recall one called Houses in Motion, starring Robert De Niro and Jessica Lange, the title taken from the Talking Heads song). . . . So the two drives co-existed from the start, which indicates that it wasn't frustration that led me to write the film books, but merely a natural alternative mode of expression that pertained to the same area, that of movies.

What actually inspired Blood Poets was re-reading Pauline Kael for the umpteenth time and thinking, “I wish I could do that.” The penny then dropped: "Hey, I could!" By that time (late 20s), I was less into movies, watching or making them, than I was into reading about them, and as already stated, I had more passion for Kael and her writings than I did for most, if not all, filmmakers. She was closer to a kindred spirit, let's say, than any filmmaker, presumably (in part) because I was more of a writer than a visual artist.

One of the things that most impressed me about Kael was how she could influence my own feelings about a movie. Films I liked I would grow cool towards after reading her totally demolishing them; films she admired I would give a second look. (Ironically, she was less persuasive in this direction, and rarely did one of her reviews change my mind about a movie I didn’t care for, while it was frequent occurrence for the reverse to happen.) Kael saw through the contrivances and conceits of filmmakers, and the gullibility of audiences, and exposed the hypocrisy and dishonesty at their core. Her influence was especially profound on me because I discovered her while I was still a teenager, so with movies that I would have grown out of/seen through eventually, she accelerated that process. (A good example would be Midnight Express, a film I loved at 14, so that I must have been disappointed by her trashing it at the time. Yet by the time I wrote about the film for Blood Poets, I found myself trashing it also, albeit in my own voice ~ because she had been right, it did suck as a movie!)

I said already to BLII that my desire to write film crit., and specifically to demolish films that were highly regarded and bring the filmmakers down to size, pertained to a need to validate my reality.

When during our discussion, I, as Jake, defended my vitriolic attacks by stating that the filmmakers rarely read the pieces, BL pointed out that, in that case, they weren't having any effect on the quality of filmmaking per se. This is probably accurate, and now that I think about it, the target of my vitriol was always less the filmmaker than the audience , who, by buying into such crap, were endorsing it and keeping the crapola machine running. If a talented filmmaker made a poor movie and was critically drubbed for it, I had no interest in mucking in. Why kick them while they are down? My target was always films that were crap but which audiences embraced as wonderful works of art, that won awards for their filmmakers despite being some of their worst work, films such as Wild at Heart, Silence of the Lambs, Barton Fink, Match Point. I wanted to show how, when a filmmaker gets praised for his worst work, he is likely to lose sight of his own gifts and never recover. Beyond that, I wanted, needed, to “set the record straight,” if possible, by persuading audiences who had let themselves be fooled into thinking a work had merit (just because it won awards) that it clearly didn’t.

(On the other hand, like Kael, I often went out of my way to praise, and even overpraise, works of merit that were being ignored, such as United States of Leland, some of Keith Gordon’s films, Hottest State, and so forth.)

In the case of Lucas’ films, it's true that no one was really praising them, but countless people were defending them, even critics, not only because the great whore of the media was ensuring they do so, but because of “the psychology of previous investment”: all those star wars fans who’d grown up on Lucas' pop mythos, and were now determined to enjoy the new movies, no matter how bad they were. I felt disgusted by that, and obliged to point out just how naked the Emperor really was.

Reality validation.

To this day, it disturbs me if I get the impression that only I can recognize something that isn't right. Recently, I watched Bad Lieutenant with Nic Cage. Halfway through, Cage begins to distort his voice and assume a very broad, almost cartoonish accent. I kept asking my wife if she’d noticed. It baffled me that he would do this deliberately, it was so obvious to me, and I became mildly anxious that maybe I was the only one who noticed it. Did the director even spot it? Why did he allow Cage to do it? (My wife did notice it, at least when I pointed it out, but she put it down to the character’s exhaustion.) Something like this might even cause me me to go online and do a Google search, just to make sure that other people spotted it. I find it unsettling, to say the least, if something very obvious to me, something that seems incongruous, isn't being commented upon.

As a child, there is one thing that was very obvious to me that others didn’t see: my brother’s bullying. There must have been countless other things also that I saw that weren't commented upon, even if they were obvious to all (my mother's madness, for example). I suspect that this is what’s behind my emotional need to validate my own perceptions about movies: if I can see, clearly, that a movie sucks, for example, it upsets me when people are talking about it like it’s something wonderful. This is especially the case when they are people close to me. One of the most uncomfortable social situations for me is if someone I respect brings up a movie which I hate, and starts praising it. (A recent example was In Bruges, a really mediocre movie that lots of intelligent people seemed to enjoy.)

Consider the following, an argument of my former self:

Dan Brown is a great author.

Opinion, or error of judgment?

Dostoyevsky is a great author.

Opinion, or statement of fact?

To my way of perceiving, neither of the above statements are opinions. One is a fact, while the other is an error. Most people here (at least if they have read the authors in question) will surely agree, intellectually at least, even if they have an emotional resistance to this position and perceive it as “tyrannical.” They might then argue (intellectually) that it is all relative, or whathaveyou (define “great,” etc, etc).

OK. Now try these ones:

Stanley Kubrick is a great director.

Opinion or statement of fact?

Stanley Kubrick is overrated.

Opinion or statement of fact?

Eyes Wide Shut is an underrated movie.

Opinion or statement of fact?

Eyes Wide Shut is a pile of horse manure.

Opinion or statement of fact?

As most of you know by now, I would consider the second statements to be statements of fact, the first ones to be mere opinions.

If given the time, I, or my former self, could show you why, whatever greatness is on display in some of his movies, and however much you may like his work, Kubrick certainly is overrated. I could also describe to you the sociological, and even conspiratorial factors (a culture that worships intellect, for example) that contribute to Kubrick’s false canonization, and the way the psychology of previous investment obliges Kubrick-devotees to defend a work of such shocking ineptitude as Eyes Wide Shut: in order to maintain their structure of beliefs around its maker.

The question is, however: why the Hell would I bother? Why would I care enough to try and change people’s minds about Kubrick, or anything else?

The answer is two-fold, like everything. First there are the patterns mentioned above, which cause me to feel threatened when my own perception of what-is isn’t being supported by other people’s perceptions.

This creates a rift. Sweatyk is one of my closest associates; the fact that he adores Kubrick doesn’t come between us, as such, but that’s only because we don’t spend much time talking about Kubrick. In my mind, it is still there. I think, "Keith is great, but he does love Kubrick. Damn. That’s a real shame. I really need to do something about that."

Now, is that entirely because I want Keith to validate my perception of reality, and to be as much like me as possible?

Or is it also because I know that he has been hoodwinked, and want him to see something that he is unable to see?

When Kael exposed the dishonesty of a movie I liked, she also exposed my own complicity with that dishonesty. It was disillusioning, even painful, and sometimes infuriating; but it was also liberating. After all, I had “lost” an emotional attachment to a movie I’d liked, yes. She had "ruined" it for me. But then, I’d also found a more honest, accurate perception, one that allowed me to see that the attachment I’d forged wasn’t worth having. It was basically a lie.

So then, my desire to criticize movies and filmmakers and “set the record straight,” wasn’t just an emotional need to validate my perception of reality. It was also an impersonal drive to get to the truth, and to bring the truth to others, by exposing their own distortions to them.

In other words, just what I do at SWEDA!

(Eos mocked me a while back as having gone from film critic to dream critic. This was one of his insights which I suspect he failed to understand himself, since he apparently used it to denigrate what I do, rather than to deepen his own awareness of it: not that it can't be both!)

So there is my answer, to BabyLion II and Eos and all the trolls, and why I'd like to thank you for poking and heckling me into seeing this, and into coming clean about it. Because insofar as I use the power and authority given me (that of seeing the truth of our distortions) as a way to validate my own reality and make it more comfortable for myself, then I am abusing that power and authority, in however subtle a way. And in both cases, the giveaway is when I take a little too much relish and personal gratification in tearing others down to size. What's going on then is that it has become a way to big myself up. (Kubrick, schmubrick. I'm the guy who gets to judge Kubrick.)

My apologies to all those I have taken down a peg or two, in order to increase my own status.

Surrendering to Matriomonial Bliss

2010-05-19T18:36:00.000-07:00

Some of you guys still think I'm a Somebody in this Town!?

2010-05-15T19:48:00.000-07:00

Only four copies been sold so far.

All copies are signed and come with a free JK DNA sample.

SWEDA Mythic Narrative Series, No.1

Order it today at over here

Seeking Goodness

2010-05-12T11:28:00.000-07:00

Men Like Fish

2010-05-10T20:25:00.000-07:00

2010-03-31T19:26:00.001-07:00

Not feeling very writ-y these daze, so here's some doodles:

2010-03-09T21:42:00.000-08:00

2010-03-09T12:16:00.000-08:00

2010-03-05T12:14:00.000-08:00

Knowing Vs. Intuition

From the forum:

A knowing can be expressed through thoughts and feelings and intuition; but it's not sourced in those things. What experiences knowing is you-as-consciousness. That's what makes it independent of those surface layers of identity: physical, emotional, mental, intuitive, and volitional bodies. It is like a part of you that is totally foreign and unfamiliar to you, and yet that is you, the real you.

We can only tune into that part by dropping through the surface noise of thoughts and feelings and by going finer and finer, into intuitive and instinctive (bodily) responses, then dropping even through these, into something so fine that it is as if it doesn't exist, and yet it is there.

The essence of second matrix program is to lure us into putting our hands on our awakening. I am an Aries so my whole adult life, I have been all about becoming. But like the man says, "No one can do 'to be.'" A caterpillar doesn't feel any pull to become a butterfly. It feels a pull to go inside the chrysalis, lay its head down, and die. That's all any of us get to do.

A caterpillar doesn't have to "do" anything, except maybe make it to the right place at the right time for its putrefaction to begin. And even there, if it doesn't, then the process will probably start without him. The point is: butterfly-ness is wonderfully none of the caterpillar's business. The caterpillar's discomfort or effort or desire has no influence over the transformation process. Neither, I'd say, does ours.

I never thought I'd end up quoting Osho, but this one seems apt:

All the Buddhas of all the ages have been telling you a very simple fact: Be –
don't try to become. Within these two words – being and becoming, your whole
life is contained. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance.

There are two ways we can go, one is inward, deeper into what we do know; the other is outward, and upward, looking for more to know. Being, and becoming.

It becomes increasingly clear to me that the latter is actually the surest way to come out of that little bit we do know. Even the "pull to become" goes against a very simple knowing, that the little we do know is enough.

We may never fathom the mystery of being that is a chair. Yet we are not interested in chairs; we want to know the galaxy.

An interesting metaphor occurs to me: the oceans of the planet are largely unexplored; yet instead of exploring them, we fill them with toxic waste and garbage, and focus our gaze on the stars. The ocean then is considered beneath our interest; besides which, it's full of shit! The stars, man! That's where it's at.

In this analogy, the ocean represents our unconscious being.

2010-02-26T09:35:00.000-08:00

From Warrior Dialogues (new pre-SWEDA waiting area at the inner forum)

There are no good things ahead for any of us. There are only good things here and now, and there is nothing grandiose about them.

Settle for the little that you know and begin to discard the rest, based on the knowing that it might well be a delusion, and that if it is, there's nothing to lose by discarding it, and if it isn't, it will stick around anyway.

Truth is the one thing you can count on to never let you down.

It is only the mind that says we cannot know anything. And the mind is right: IT cannot know anything, including that WE cannot know anything. The intellect assumes since it can't access reality, then nothing can. But our bodies know all sorts of things, and so do our hearts. Try listening to them for just one day, one whole day, ignore your mind, and see how that changes your perspective.

***

Family relations: The main thing is to find and reestablish our own boundaries. Then it will cease to feel (so much ) like other people are doing something to us, because their actions won't be interfering with our own orientation and space, except when they really are, which is when those boundaries are being crossed. Then we will know it and are free to respond with all the anger and hostility (protective energy) the situation calls for.

Being surrendered isn't about being Ghandhi, or a walk-over for all our family and friends. Anyway, the AA is to learn about being a warrior, not about surrendering. That comes later.

There is nothing wrong with direct confrontation with other people, provided we aren't trying to change them, only their behavior around us. "This is acceptable, this is not." If the other, or the mother, understands our reasons for drawing those boundaries, that's great. If s/he doesn't, it's not our business. They can at least respect them, and we are entitled to give them hell when they don't. The trick is to give them hell from a place of openness and not a place of hardness. That's when you can really have some impact!

In simple terms, it is more effective to express your anger calmly ("I am really furious with you now and here's why") than to let our anger possess us. ("Fuck you, you bitch, I fucking hate you!!")

***

Being all at sea reduces our options. All the paddling and thrashing we do may help or it may not; chances are it's superfluous, because the wind and the current is going to determine whether we reach shore or not, and if we don;t even know which way the shore is, then stillness would seem to be the only reasonable option.

Observing the signs may help, however. Birds are usually a signal that land is close. And floating debris.

I am certainly feeling all washed up myself these daze. Is the advice of the fellow shipwrecked worth anything? Perhaps more than those still sitting comfortable on their ships, at least, unaware of the iceberg ahead.

As for people depending on us: are we sure that's true? We are responsible to our own story, our own truth. No one does anything to a warrior, so then a warrior isn't beholden to others. Our life intersects with those of another, or others; does that mean those lives are then conjoined? If we experience others' dependence on us as a heavy load, it's safe to say we are becoming a burden upon them. A warrior sees all beings as equal, whether a king or a cockroach. He never alters his coarse out of a sense of duty or obligation to another, because to do so would be to assume he knows better than that person what they need. Not only that, it is to assume he knows better than the Universe, since, whatever predicament that person finds themselves in, it was the Universe that brought them there.

The only question then, as ever, is does this path have heart? To leave our path because we perceive others as depending on us is to let everyone down, starting with ourselves and ending with the entire Universe. And our paltry compensation? Knowing we did "the right thing"?

If we can't do right by ourselves, and keep to that path with a heart, how are we ever going to do right by another?

2010-02-15T12:36:00.000-08:00

Patterns 101

From an email to a friend of the family, a heavy drinker.

We are all wounded by childhood, there are no total exceptions, only relative exceptions. And there's no such thing as a 'normal' or 'healthy' childhood, because the world we are born into is too greatly distorted, so whatever the local environment you are born into, it is still part of the greater environment of 'the world.' You only have to look at hospitals births, and the incalculable damage they do to us, to see this.

The wounds we carry are all the things that happened in our early life, starting with that nightmarish birth process, that cause us to harden and close in defense against the world, and to construct the false identity which we think of as who we are. This is what we all do, as children, because it is the only way to survive. Our identity, then, is made up of patterns of reactive behavior, habits of thought and action, that are sourced in early wounding. Wilhelm Reich calls it identity armor.

The "genetic affliction" you refer to is generational wounding. It's in the genes, sure, but this is why it's in the genes, because of repeat, generational abuse. It's not either/or, it's both/and. There is a reason why our ancestors were alcoholics. Nothing is entirely random.

Unless we can remember (let in) those early traumas, we can't let them go.

I don't recall anything majorly traumatic in my past, but i am fairly sure that it happened, because of the way that I am now. I can deduce backwards, without actual memories to go on, and tap into emotional patterns and even physical responses, to find those wounds, without knowing exactly how they got there. Yet I know they are there, now, because i can feel them. Feeling and locating the wounds then allows healing to begin. As we let in that disowned trauma, we can let go of the defensive behavior (such as drinking, for example) that we have been using to keep it out of our awareness.

This process has nothing at all to do with anyone apologizing for past wrongs. But one thing that does help to allow the letting in/letting go, is to revisit those wounds with the person directly involved in them, because this can be a way to literally right the wrongs of the past. For example, for my mother to see that side of my brother that tormented me in the past, to see it now, would provide some sort of 'closure' for the part of me that was wounded, all that time ago, by her refusal to see it then. It is a form of reenactment that allows the letting in to be complete, and the letting go to follow.

The Greeks had a theater based on this, called catharsis. Naturally it is painful and uncomfortable. But then, so is child birth.

2010-02-09T14:36:00.000-08:00

2010-02-05T10:33:00.000-08:00

Blueprint of a Wound

In the face of the Mother’s uncontained sexual passion and dementia/rage, the Father realizes his lack of uprightness (falls on his ass), and experiences a wound that will eventually cripple him.
Though he resolves to remain, to be as upright as he can, despite the wound, this is itself an avoidance – a way not to go deeper into the wound (which is the solar quest for healing/transformation).

The Father begins to fear intimacy with the Mother, due to her lack of tenderness, her cold fury, her power and dementia. Instead, he seeks comfort through the pseudo-intimacy of casual sex.

(Note: Jason’s Father was a Taurus; astrologically he has Venus, which rules comfort as well as sexuality, in Taurus.)
As a result of this growing estrangement between Father and Mother, the Mother turns to the Son (often the youngest Son, i.e., Jason) as a Husband Surrogate. This might also stem from a desire to protect the Son from an abusive Father or, in Jason’s case, to compensate for the aloofness of the Father.
The Father reacts to this Mother/Son bondage (presumably due to jealousy) by becoming further estranged from the Mother, and experiencing/expressing hostility (or indifference) towards the Son.

(Note: if there is more than one Son, the older Son receives the brunt of this hostility, since, the older the Son, the more of a threat he is perceived to be, and the more he can receive the Father’s projected anger and disowned masculinity.)
In Jason’s case, at least (and this blueprint is particular as well as general), the hostility of the Father towards the Son (and the Son’s fear of the Mother) leads to an unbalanced relationship with (reliance upon) the power of the Intellect. The Intellect, instead of being a sword to discern, becomes a weapon to defend, a shield to protect, a buffer against the raging uncontained Feminine. Hence, the Father scorns the Son for his perceived lack of Intellect, or even for his femininity. Perhaps the Father is unconsciously challenging the Son to develop his Intellect—to be less feminine—in a misguided attempt to give the Son the means to survive?
The result is that the Son receives neither comfort from the Mother, nor guidance from the Father. In the case of two Sons, the younger Son—being a threat to the older Son’s sovereignty—not only doesn’t receive comfort from his Brother, but becomes the object of his anger and hostility, specifically that which the older Brother himself received from the Father.
Since what we cannot receive we often try to provide, the younger Son then seeks to comfort the older Son (as well as the Mother, though not the Father). This he does primarily by becoming less of a threat to him, i.e., by suppressing his own nature (uniqueness). In Jason’s case, he developed Intellect as a less threatening way to outshine his Brother, though this backfired because the Father had already made Sebastian feel inferior about his Intellect!
For Jason to develop his Intellect is a way to impress the Father, then, but also a means to supplant him. By comforting the (older) Son and developing those same intellectual capacities which the Father values as a means for dealing with (being superior to) the Mother, the second Son is perhaps attempting to replace the Father.

To add a new twist to the tale, in Jason’s case at least: a New Man arrives when the second Son is 2 (his Brother being 7), and things then move to a new stage in the wounding process.
With the arrival of the second Man, the Mother’s affection and desire moves away from the second Son. The second Son, like the first, now experiences the loss of his own specialness, as he is “replaced” by another.
The Father, on the other hand, receives his deepest wounding yet (in the context of the Marriage), that of betrayal. This then finalizes the Father’s loss of uprightness—as he is metaphorically slain by another Man (though actually by the Mother). He then seeks deeper refuge in two places: sex and work. In both cases, the movement is away from intimacy (vulnerability), which means, most of all, estrangement from his children.
When the Father cannot contain the Mother—female sexuality—two things occur. He loses his confidence as a Man, and so becomes even less upright than he was before. And secondly, the uncontained female sexuality strikes at the Father and wounds him more deeply still—completing the emasculation process started by the Father’s own Mother. This second wounding is often fatal, and results in complete emasculation. (In the case of Jason’s father, he became a cripple.)
Thus the relationship becomes sadomasochistic and vampiric: the Female feeds upon the Male’s wound, growing drunk upon it, until there is nothing left but an empty shell.
Because the Man does not provide containment for the Woman, the Woman does not give comfort (nurture) to the Man. Instead, she offers only heartbreak.
This is why Marriage so rarely works. Each partner seeks pleasure and comfort in the other, and loses sight, in fact never actually realizes, the true nature and purpose of Marriage, which is surrender of the personal to the archetypal, allowing for the alchemical transforming of lead into gold. Sensing the pending annihilation that a true Marriage forces to occur, the two Players, in terror for their identities, strike out at the other, attempting to destroy the other rather than surrender together, to mutual annihilation. Ironically, tragically, it is only in this surrender that any true, lasting comfort or pleasure exists. The other route leads only to anguish, despair, and divorce.
Symbolically then, this process is designated in the Tarot by the Moon card (Pisces, for female) and the Tower card (Mars, for male), both of which relate to a form of annihilation, the Moon spiritual/emotional, the Tower psychological/ physical. Both also relate to powerlessness, and both represent the respective energies of male and female in their destructive or overwhelming forms: the Moon signifies madness, despair, dementia, while the Tower represents war, violence, and extreme crisis. Yet, as means and not ends, the Moon signifies initiation, and the Tower signifies regeneration.
Bringing it back to the personal: As he enters into adolescence, the Son(s), following the Father’s example, seek comfort through sex. This may be done by imitating the Father (as in Sebastian’s case, whoring and alcoholism and work-fixation), or by going against it, as in Jason’s case (celibacy and vagrancy).
Inheriting the Father’s wound, the Son also receives the Father’s disowned hostility and rage against the Mother. This is then added to the Son’s own, somewhat more conscious hostility towards the Mother, from the terror and instability of growing up with an uncontained Female. (He would also then develop Intellect—and the cold contempt which Intellect allows—to keep the Mother’s annihilating influence at bay.)

Since no comfort is forthcoming from the Mother (in fact the reverse), the Son seeks comfort in sexuality that is empowering and violating (rape fantasies), which is the inverse of intimacy. This betrays the Son’s shame of his sexuality. On the other hand, using rape and murder imagery for sexual stimulation is a more extreme way of avoiding intimacy, since rape and murder are an inverted form of intimacy. Rather than mutually sharing the same feelings, rape/murder allows the Male to experience the opposite feelings to those of the Female, and to experience a supreme sense of power and control. At the same time, such activity still relates to shame, being an attempt to banish it through shamelessness, i.e., committing acts (even if only in fantasy) in cold defiance of any “moral” (empathic) considerations. The effect may be the inverse, however (as is often the case), because by indulging in dark practices, the shame that has been suppressed actually forces itself back into consciousness.
This also relates to the development of the Intellect as a buffer against female sexuality, since the Intellect is cold and removed, potentially cruel, and is the inverse of female Mother energy, which (ideally) is warm and nurturing.
Mercury/the Intellect also serves as an ideal (tho false) surrogate for the true masculine energy of Mars. Intellect allows the Son to feel manly (and the Father to feel upright) when actually he is not, wielding his Intellect when he cannot wield his sexuality (i.e., through casual sex, prostitutes, and through a dominant role in work place). Yet, because it is being wrongly applied, in a compensatory fashion, the Father’s (and Son’s) Intellect becomes distorted, ineffective save as a weapon, or shield. This is because Mercury is not an exclusively masculine energy, as Mars is, but is both masculine and feminine (in the Tarot, the Magician/Mercury is androgyne).
There ends the first layer of the blueprint for the male wound.
The next phase of mapping the blueprint/wound, then, is to look more closely at the Brothers. The Cain and Abel myth is the abstract core of this wound, as made abundantly clear by Jason’s relationship with Sebastian. If there is only one Son, however, then the Cain/Abel dynamic must play out inside a single Psyche.

For this, the interested observor is referred to the current series of Warty Theorems podcasts, starting tomorrow.

2010-01-29T14:09:00.000-08:00

The Real Environmental Crisis

“If you want to know where you are at, look around you.” JDR.

By definition, there is nothing we can “do” about living in the end-times.

But we can do something with this awareness. Paranoia becomes paranoid awareness, which eventually grows into self-awareness.

The apparent environmental crisis. First, we learn that the Earth is under threat and our future is in jeopardy. Paranoia. Then, we discover that there are secret agendas manipulating (and even fabricating) this crisis for other, more mysterious ends. Paranoid awareness.

The final step, that of self-awareness, is when we begin to see that the crisis is our own creation: a way of waking ourselves up to our lost identity as primal beings dependent upon the organic matrix of life itself. In our slumber, we are rebelling against the program: our unconscious minds are calling forth the memory, the spirit, of Nature, in all its terrible glory.

From this perspective, the ecological crisis is not a threat to survival but a means to a greater awakening, the collective unconscious becoming conscious of itself. As conditions within our false-construct world become increasingly intolerable, the pressure from the unconscious mounts. We begin to stir in our slumber and to doubt the validity (and durability) of the program. Consensus reality cannot hold up.

One major manifestation of this collective unease is the apparent environmental crisis.

Garbage Man

Information is what ‘in-forms’ us, i.e., forms us from within. An organism is shaped and defined not merely by its physical and biological make-up, its external form, but also by its inner experience. If we are defined not so much by what we eat as what we contain—our programming—then humans, having supplanted their natural, genetic program for the social program, are the garbage cans of the cosmos.

This is our function, and this is why we, as individuals, can only ever experience living in the end-times. So far as this information in-forms us and becomes true knowing ~ that we are worthless garbage in the process of being recycled ~ we then have the option of transformation into a new state.

So-called “evolution” is the journey of the caterpillar into the chrysalis. It is a process of putrefaction. History, as such, is the chrysalis, a rigid, confining structure that serves not as an end but as an intermediary phase between two states of being, that of the animal and the “god” ~ the information entity, holographic man.

2010-01-22T12:43:00.001-08:00

Convictions Make Convicts

There are three kinds of belief.

There is belief that we insist is fact that becomes opinion/conviction.

There is belief that we assume dispassionately, to try it out (the spirit in which Lucid View was written, and which my alternate creation theory of tulpas was presented).

A conviction is a belief that we insist is a fact, while to believe something without insisting it is fact can be effective as a thought experiment.

The third kind of belief is one that is sourced in what we know.

To believe what you know means to turn a knowing into a feeling and a way of being or action. In the coarsest way this comes out as principles, but of course principles usually fit squarely in the first class: beliefs that are convictions. Sometimes a warrior dies for what he believes without being a fanatic, i.e., warmly and tenderly. Then he is dying for what he knows.

A belief that stems from a knowing is warm and open and doesn't ever need to be defended, or even communicated. The only reason to share it at all would be out of enjoyment, as when we wish to communicate to a beloved our belief in our knowing that we are in love with them. Or as when a prophet walks the earth and spreads the gospel.

To the intellect, it's an absolute that we cannot know anything. Yet we know, if we are honest, that it is only the intellect that cannot have an absolute knowing about anything, including this statement!

Anyone who has ever been in what they know, even for a moment, knows this.

When we know something, no one can tell us that we only "think we know." All they will succeed in communicating is that they don't know, and perhaps that they feel threatened by our knowing, or by our knowing something they do not.

Put differently: we may not know "what Truth is"; but we do know it when we see it, provided we are being honest.

If we try to persuade another of our POV, we must come out of what we know, close and harden and cease to really communicate; we then oblige the other person to oppose or dismiss our arguments, in order to hold fast to their belief. They match our own closing and hardening.

The mistaken assumption is that two POVs cannot co-exist in harmony, even while being opposed.

Yet this is precisely how the Universe functions: as a polarity of male and female, yin & yang, black to white.

It is only when the moral criteria of good and evil, right and wrong are superimposed over this natural, cosmic polarity, that war supplants love as the ruling principal of existence.

2010-01-15T10:06:00.000-08:00

Fingers & Farts, and the Limits of Free Will

Picking up where the above post left off, and coming back to Lion Attacks:

When faced with a hungry lion, zero intellectual interpretation of the situation is needed, so far as "do I run or do I make a stand?" goes. The body would simply know what to do and do it; the adrenalin rush would ensure that there was no hanging about making conscious "decisions" about it. ("Lemme see now....")

In a way, this is always the situation: every act is a life and death act.

This is what surrender comes down to, IMO: reducing the element of intellectual decision-making until all that is left is pure response. And pure response is always an opening and softening, no matter what is happening on the outside. (One can run or fight to the death while opening and softening.)

Granted, in many circumstances less extreme, we do have to make a conscious decision to act upon a response, to embody a subtler movement of being and turn it into real action. This is one more paradox of self-awareness: the more we assume responsibility for our thoughts and actions, the more we come to see that we have almost no say in them, save at the most wonderfully shallow level.

The fingers do not move the hand, much less the body.

An easy analogy would be a passenger on a train: he has lots of freedom of movement so far as where he wanders on the train, who he interacts with, and even possibly where he sits; and most of all, on where his attention goes ~ whether inside or outside the train. Yet the traveler has absolutely no say about where the train is going or what stops it makes. He could choose to jump off while it's in motion, but (besides pulling the emergency chord) that's the only real way he can override the train's trajectory: by self-destructing.

If a starving baby (or in my case, a tiny black kitten) is placed in our path, this is the conscious Universe doing its thing (i.e., it's a grand circumstance that was presumably beyond the conscious control of any of the players). Whether we attend to that baby or not in no way depends on whether we have personal sovereignty, but simply on whether we allow ourselves to respond to a movement of being (assuming there is one). Such movement is the Universe gently nudging us into that baby's path (and it into ours), in order for some exchange to occur.

It may be no more than noticing and connecting to that baby, or it may be taking that baby home and adopting it. That decision, however, isn't ours. Personal sovereignty is the illusion (and insistence) that we ever get to determine the outcome of something on that scale. It may seem like our decision, but that doesn't mean it is. I'd say it only means we aren't sufficiently sensitive to movements of being, even when they are moving us. And so we take credit for our actions, and blame ourselves when we act wrongly. Credit and blame (the whip and carrot) are the business of sovereignty, but have no meaning to the Universe.

We are only responsible if we are able to respond. If we simply act on our own volition, from a place of personal sovereignty, based on our beliefs and opinions about what is the right thing, etc, etc, although we are still accountable, we are not responsible. We are simply being used as an unconscious tool. Our actions then will always be unclean, because only conscious action can be clean.

The only way to be out of alignment with the Universe would be to attempt to serve our personal agenda, including (or especially) the personal agenda of "serving the Universe." It doesn't matter what it is: if we really think that we are doing it, then we are holding onto our sovereignty and acting unconsciously, which means we are being driven by unconscious wounds and patterns. (And dark entities.)

Those who aren't the Universe's fingers are merely its farts.

2010-01-10T21:41:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts on Lion Attacks, Global Warming, & Personal Sovereignty.

If a lion is attacking you, do you need someone to tell you you have the "right" to run?

The whole idea of rights is predicated on the idea of personal sovereignty, manifest destiny, democracy, and an unholy mess of MiST-created memes meant to nudge us ever further out of what-we-know, and into a morass of empty theory and polemics.

Global warming isn't directly threatening either ourselves or our families. The only thing it is threatening, maybe, is civilization, and so what? Living in a stinky, polluted city is a real drag. But no one has to live there. It's a choice.

I live in a relative paradise, free of visible or smellable pollution, while still on the grid (I shop at a grocer's store, go to the sauna, and download movies on my PC), and on an income of around $500 a month. That's my reality. So from my POV, I know the environmental crisis is a scam. At least for today.

It's true that I think our current way of life is messed up, but I'm OK with it and I don't pretend to have any solutions. Nor do I think a solution is required. The urge to create "solutions" and improve upon the way things are is at the root of any and all problems you could care to name.

The real disease is personal sovereignty, and one of its leading symptoms is the desire to want to fix or change things.

The Universe is taking care of everything, and absolutely nothing happens that isn't a direct result of its mysterious movements.

All we get to do is look after our own: our bodies and those under our protection. It's not a right, either; it's a delight.

There's nothing else to this life, once we let go of our personal sovereignty (and the arrogance that thinks we have control over anything outside our own actions), besides that sheer delight of being.

The world may appear to be in a quandary; but that's only because the world (like our constructed identities) is a false edifice blocking the flow of being.

If a snake identified with the skin he was shedding, that snake would perceive itself to be in a quandary. But snakes are not that dumb.

The Universe is not in a quandary; how could it ever be? The idea's a joke.

Does anyone here really think that we-as-a-species are more responsible for global warming, or anything else, than the Universe?

We are just the fingers and farts of the Universe anyway. Anything we do, the Universe is doing through us. Might as well get used to it. Fun and frolics for the Universe is a living Hell for sovereign beings.

2010-01-07T16:28:00.000-08:00

Molecular Showtime

OK, I have started a new podcast site (see over there ->) and recorded the first audio for my awesome, unknown amorphous audience...

The first episode is called A Conglomeration of Molecules and is a free-associative discussion on living beyond struggle, grotty sorcerers, the effects of I-phones on our chances of survival in the end-times, attachment theory, people-connections as the means to connect to Earth, love as the only engine of survival, and the incalculable cost of freedom.

The woman I mention who discusses attachment theory, Sue Johnson, can be heard here.

2010-01-05T14:27:00.000-08:00

Maintaining two blogs, a podcast, a forum, running an Existential Detective Agency, and putting together a new website is not easy ~ lemme tell you!

The best solution seems to be to think less about what i am doing and just let whatever comes, come. Hence this post, which is the beginning of an attempt to keep this blog chugging along rather than let it slide away into non-existance, which seems like it would be a shame, since, however silent my readership may be, they do seem to be out there.

The Aeolus blog will be focusing on mythic narratives as a warm-up to the unveiling of the new website, and the all-new SWEDA courses. This blog, then, will be a place for me to air everyday personal thoughts about stuff. I may even start up a new, sporadic podcast, if i can do it without any fancy editing or packaging, for the same end. We'll see.

So what's new? Just read David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries (Viking Pernguin, 2009), which is a collection of David's blog posts (here), accounts of his visits to various cities which he traverses with his trusty folding bicycle, inc. London, Istanbul, New York, & Buenos Aires. It's an enjoyable read, a mixture of historical detail and eccentric obvervation, with somewhat less of the expected irony that has been DB's trademark for most of his career. There is also some borderline paranoid-awareness commentary on self-censorship, thought control, and the like, and some suitably visionary theories about organic architecture and morphic fields and the like.

By the end, however, I felt a tad disappointed at how "pedestrian" (ha ha) DB's view of the world is, not compared to your average human, of course, but compared to what i have grown used to, here in the alt. perceptions community where I currently quite happily fraternize.

It's all too easy to take for granted being among folk who take it as a given that all politics is theater, that reality is being manipulated by hidden non-human forces, and that the end is nigh, etc, etc. I forget that plenty of otherwise sophisticated folk still seem to harbor the illusion that humans have a future that has anything to do with what we understand from our present POV. Not to say that we don't, because who really knows? It's just that - well, much of my own apocalyptic bent comes from Byrne's lyrics having shaped my consciousness from teenage years on, so it's a bit odd to find that he doesn't necessarily see things that way, after all. Or maybe he is just keeping it under his hat, and letting his music speak for him?

Speaking of the APC, I noticed yesterday (checking to see what Chris Knowles had to say about Avatar, the trailer of which was enough to ensure I stay well away from), that CK has removed the link to Aeolus' blog from his site; Kotze did the same a while ago, which was no big surprise; but I wonder what caused Knowles to withdraw his support like that? Was it something I said?

2009-11-23T17:28:00.000-08:00

Hollywood Tulpas

Some responses to Peter Levenda's passage in Sinister Forces, vol. 3, The Manson Secret (taken from a post at the Stormy Weather Inner Forum):

Some key ideas from the passage:

"artists are the first point of contact for upcoming events of a global nature."

the question this raises in my mind is: can artists and art-forms then be used to actually shape and direct - to summon in the sorcerous sense - events? Artists are attuned to growing memes, and by expressing their own impressions of these thought-forms or mind-viruses, they inevitably make the memes stronger. So - what if memes are created from whole cloth by the corporate control system of HW (apparently for commercial agendas, but actually with subtler intent), using artists-for-hire (former artists, now "hacks") to give substance and Imaginal resonance to these memes, as in (e.g.) when Spielberg was (possibly) recruited by US intelligence to make E.T.? (And, to address a somewhat stickier area of false narrative creation, Schindler's List.)

"Hollywood is the new religion of America and, to a certain extent, of the rest of the world as well. Hollywood brings the gods ... down to earth, where they can be seen and heard and touched by the masses."

Once again the idea of magikal evocation is suggested here. What if stars are actually tulpas, thought forms created via sorcery using the fantasies of the sleeping masses - and not human at all? Just an idea!

To bring it a little closer to Earth, what if the humans who are chosen to become stars - having been primed or initiated to this end - then become vessels or "hosts" for archetypal/demonic energies to work through? Could this relate to why Scientology is so prevalent in HW - because stars need to be handled at a metaphysical level? They are literally "high" (magik) maintenance!

The energy stars draw off the masses - via their charisma and sexual magnetism - would then be directed towards these entities or forces for their own sustenance. This would enable the creation and maintenance of a subtle power system by which - as of old - the gods devour the awareness of their worshippers - and by the traditional method no less: that of "idols."

So, every time someone gazes lovingly, or admiringly, or desirously, at an image - moving or otherwise - of a "star" - just as through supplication and prayer - their psychic energy, prana, orgone, whathaveyou, is being directed, into and through that image, to a hidden recipient. Energy follows thought.

This would be why the sexual element is so key to HW movies and to star-appeal.

In the same book, another passage (pg. 346, quoting Wolfgang Pauli), Levenda addresses this idea of "a ‘magical’ connection between sexuality and eroticism on the one hand, and political or historical events on the other.” Levenda then posits “the political ramifications of a consciousness that can be manipulated as much as subatomic particles can be manipulated, but using as the ‘energy source’ … ‘sexuality’ and… ‘eros,’ resulting in the phenomenon of induced synchronicity.”

What a can of worms indeed.

Moving on:

"Americans emulate movie characters more than they do the saints of their religions: they dress like them, drive the same cars, have the same attitudes, talk like them, and eventually adopt the same cultural mores."

This relates directly to the idea I posited in the last podcast, that tulpa creation is a way to direct the species into specific modes and mores of behavior, via imitation. Stars would be particularly affective because of course one single star (tulpa) can reach millions via a movie, and what’s more, they are not just imitated but admired and emulated at a far deeper level, that of worship, i.e., complete subjugation. People would "give anything" to meet such and such a star (or to be a star, which of course they know can never happen - hence proximity is the best they can hope for). As in the myths of Vampires, humans are mesmerized and willingly submit to the devouring supernatural presence, if only for the chance of a taste of immortality!

Tulpa creation could be achieved via a combination of stars and specific narratives/characters, such as, for example, Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry, or Bruce Willis and the Die Hard persona, or Stallone and Rambo - all of which are maverick heroes who represent the lone wolf, "rebel" figure, and yet actually serve (and discreetly represent) the State, the US as a Nation.

Whenever we read a book, we essentially create a thought-form for the events and (especially) the characters within that narrative. The more emotionally invested we are (the stronger our attention/identification), the more energy will be directed into the creation of that thought form. So imagine millions of people watching a movie and adoring/identifying with the character: can this process create an actual “living” (somewhat conscious and "autonomous”) thought-form in the astral/Imaginal realms? If so, wouldn't it then become more powerful and autonomous, exponentially? The bigger it gets, the more it can enter our subconscious, the more energy it draws off us, and so on, ad infinitum. (Freddy Krueger and the Nightmare films would then be a sort of B-movie "revelation of the method" of this phenomenon!?).

There is also a subtler process at work here, witnessed by the ways in which male audience members (especially teenage) embrace dubious role models who, tho apparently rebellious, actually serve and represent the controlling elite. This form of misguided hero worship strips males of their true heroic (solar) potential, by giving them a false model, and a false narrative to follow, that of “resistance”, defiance, and brutality, which completely subverts and undermines the true heroism of surrendering the personal self to Spirit, that of service to what is greater. Such ideas are seen as wimpy, unmanly, in the context of the HW narrative (and especially the revenge fantasy of the "heroes" mentioned above).

HW heroes rarely actually serve the community in a true way – they aren’t nurturers or providers, and they certainly aren't healers. Their heroics comes down to one thing: killing and destruction—exactly in imitation (embodiment) of the military industrial complex that covertly directs the making of these movies.

2009-11-11T14:02:00.000-08:00

Diet Soap Interview

2009-11-06T10:09:00.000-08:00

Did this interview last night with Nightstalkers radio, talking about Homo Serpiens, galactic consciousness, and retards!

Night Stalker (1972)

2009-11-03T09:45:00.001-08:00

OK, here's some journal bits from recent SWEDA posts:

It is passivity. It is like giving up. But in a way that's warm and soft, not cold and hard.

I am a dead man. If I stay in the knowing that I am already dead, I experience being a ghost among the living, and the whole world becomes a ghostly hologram. I have found what is real within.

What is real, what has meaning and value, is there at the center of knowing within me.

Silence is an awesome possibility.

***

Feeling a pleasant sense of detachment and neutrality, and faintest curiosity. I wonder if this is, or would be, the predominant mood of consciousness, once it is freed from our patterns: faintest curiosity?

The way the shaman glances at the clouds and passing cars, for signs or indications, but uninvested in the story, like a child reading a comic book on a lazy sunny afternoon? Not wanting to miss anything, yet unconcerned by the outcome.

***

Was thinking yesterday about how, for most of my life, I have been imagining and willing myself into some future state, of happiness and completeness and joy and perfection, while becoming increasingly doubtful I will ever make it to this imagined state. I have clung to this belief that some day, I would be "there," but inevitably combined with the fear, the nagging voice: "What if I never am?" What if this is as good as it gets?

What struck me yesterday (while swimming) was that I don't feel or think like this anymore; I have become, without really noticing it, "warmly OK" with being less than happy and less than perfect as a human being. But the real surprise was that this being warmly OK was what I had always been yearning for, without knowing it. The idea of needing to be something I was not (happy, carefree, funny, loving, whatever) was the only thing keeping me from being OK with myself as I am. And yet this is all we really want anyway!

Not expressing it very clearly, its a sort of living paradox. The moment we are OK with never being OK, we are OK! Really, really OK.

Give it a try some time. It is so much easier than you think.
(Even so, it took me til my 40s to get it! )

***

Living for others as a way for us to feel good about ourselves: it never works. Taking other peoples' "needs" seriously when we can no longer take our own seriously is just habit. It's even a kind of hypocrisy, don't you think?

I used to say it was about giving in without giving up. But now I think that, for us as persons, there really isn't much difference. If anything besides warm OK-ness is what gets us out of bed in the morning, maybe its better if we stay in bed? Maybe we need to be warmly OK with being useless before we can even begin to be useful to anyone?

2009-11-03T09:18:00.000-08:00

Secret Life of Movies, the book is out, after ten years sitting on my hard drives, as well as Homo Serpiens, about 8 years in the pipeline. Both books came out the same month, which is an old ambition of mine finally fulfilled: to have two books coming out the same time and double my chances of Being a Somebody. As you all know, by now I am more than a little ambivalent about the whole business of writing books. Maybe for children.

Wish I could encourage you all to buy the book but at $40, I can't blame anyone for giving it a miss. Still, I am pretty sure you'd enjoy it. It's easily the most thorough work I've written on movies. There's an e-book due out soon, and if I can get enough people interested, I will probably make an audio book.

So raise your hands anyone who'd like to buy an audio book, via the Net, for maybe $10? I'd say about 20 buyers would be enough to justify my time in doing it.

My, how the mighty have fallen.

All my time goes into SWEDA now, but maybe I'll start posting some of my personal journal stuff from there, here, just to keep this blog alive.

It's sort of confusing, not knowing who, or even where, my audience is anymore! Since I started doing SWEDA, it feels like my audience is getting smaller, not bigger. But also much closer! So that is probably the right way to be going.

2009-09-08T10:42:00.000-07:00

God's Channel

from Secret Life of Movies

Richard Kelly‘s Donnie Darko (2001) is about as rare an experience at the movies as finding a genuine psychic at a fun fair. It’s a celluloid vision. Donnie is a schizo with the power to see the future and thereby create it. As in Don’t Look Now, Donnie’s visions are self-fulfilling: it’s his terrible fear of what is going to happen (on October 30, 1988, at a precise minute and hour) that causes Donnie to act in just such a way as to ensure that it does. And yet, paradoxically (and Donnie Darko is not merely about paradoxes, it is a paradox unto itself), the knowledge he gains into the mysterious workings of time through his experience permits Donnie to rewrite his destiny, by turning the clock back. This he can only do at the cost of his own life.

Initially, Donnie is spared death due to his tendency to sleepwalk, which is one symptom of his schizo-visionary state and which causes Donnie to be out on the golf course when a passenger plane jet engine falls from the sky and crashes through his bedroom. Donnie was already strange before this, but the inexplicable event (no airline claims the severed engine) only serves to cement his dementia, his sense of strangeness. At the same time, it alerts the audience to the fact that we have entered into a world every bit as weird and incomprehensible as Donnie’s world must seem to him. We have entered the Twilight Zone.

Donnie Darko is the first of its type—the surrealist teen schizo angst comedy (Static, Repo Man, Heathers, Parents, etc)—to successfully pull all the elements together and forge them into a genuine work of art. It’s a bit slack in places (Gretchen’s death, for example), and it’s occasionally self-indulgent, or perhaps just self-conscious, but it’s all of a piece. Unlike the films mentioned above (Static excepted), it has depth both of meaning and of feeling; it comes from the heart and not just the head. Donnie Darko is teen comedy romance spliced with hallucinatory horror movie, and yet the splicing is seamless, invisible and impeccable. Except in the early high school scenes (which the director seems to be deliberately undermining by speeding up the images and drowning out the sound), there’s never a sense of watching a cross genre movie. In fact Donnie Darko doesn’t seem like a genre movie at all, principally because it isn’t. It’s closer to Blue Velvet than The Faculty: It’s a rite of passage, a mythological journey. Donnie Darko is a schizo movie about adolescence in which objective reality (so far as there is one, which is debatable) is even weirder than the subjective reality of the schizo himself. It’s not that Donnie is too weird and crazy to understand what’s happening to him, it’s that he’s just weird and crazy enough.

Richard Kelly, the writer-director, has an intuitive grasp of his material that marks him as a genuine visionary, which may be just what he is. What’s more, he has sufficient grasp of his ideas and a basic movie sense (and the technical know how) to do almost full justice to his vision. In the current, post-9/11 climate, this movie is practically a revelation: a work that takes place entirely “inside” the character’s (i.e., the filmmaker’s) head, and yet connects to the universal experience. I certainly know a few young folk, adolescents or post-adolescents, who see the world a lot like Donnie does. They may not see tubes of liquid light coming out of people’s chests, and they may not literally converse with giant rabbits or travel through time; but they have the same basic, shifting sense of reality, the feeling that neither time nor space—or anything at all—is what it seems to be. These kids intuit that something, maybe not “the end of the world,” but something equally awesome and indescribable, is just around the next corner, and even that all of this has something to do with “God,” or with whatever it is we have chosen to call God, in our all-too-human reaching after the intangible.

Donnie doesn’t believe in God until he sees It. I say “It,” because Donnie doesn’t have a religious experience of a Deity, as such; what he experiences is both more subtle and more profound. He perceives a force coming out of people’s bodies, looking like a sort of tentacle that extends forward through space. The opposite of the trail left by a snail, this tentacle doesn’t follow people but leads them; it seems to anticipate their movements, and so gives Donnie a glimpse into the future. At first it seems that these tubes or tentacles are simply that: Donnie’s fourth-dimensional view of reality, i.e., when time is also a perceivable dimension, people become like tubes that twist and turn throughout the spaces they inhabit as they come and go from one point to the next and back again. But when Donnie witnesses this force emerging from his own chest, he sees something else, as the liquid light—clearly a conscious “thing” unto itself—stops and turns and beckons Donnie to follow it. He does so, and it leads him into his parents’ bedroom and to the closet, where he finds the gun with which he will shoot the boy who runs over his lover Gretchen (Lena Malone), all at the designated hour. This same boy, dressed as a giant toothy rabbit, is “Frank,” the other-dimensional entity who has been leading Donnie through his visions to the inevitable apocalypse, or revelation: that Donnie is just a play thing in the hands of Fate. Yet in Donnie Darko, “Fate,” less oppressively but even more mysteriously, is a living Force that exists inside Donnie and within every other living creature.

Donnie admits to his shrink (Katherine Ross) that he has thought about the question of God, or more precisely whether or not he is “alone,” until it has lost all meaning. To Donnie, “the quest for God is absurd.” Yet despite this, or maybe because of it, Donnie finds God. When he witnesses this inexplicable phenomenon, he doesn’t have to think about it; there’s no two and two to put together here, he just knows. And when Donnie speaks with his science teacher, the latter can’t grok Donnie’s discovery as anything but a paradox. If you can see your future, he insists, then surely you have the option of altering it? Donnie has the privileged knowledge of the prophet: he hasn’t just heard about this “God,” he has seen it. “Not if you stay in God’s channel!” he says, or words to this effect. He’s speaking about Destiny vs. Fate.

What Donnie Darko is saying is that there is only one destiny for each of us (or rather, one destiny per person per universe), that this is our path, and that the only “free will” we have (the only way to escape from mere predestination) is to live out this destiny, to find and then stay within “God’s Channel.” The third alternative (never voiced) is to reject our destiny, to rebel, as Lucifer did, and sever our connection to the Universe, the Divine, and so fall out of the sacred groove, out of God’s Channel. Apparently Donnie’s experience, from his narrowly escaping death to his boldly embracing it by entering the time vortex (expressly in order to save Gretchen from the fate that should have been his), is solely for Donnie (and us) to learn this vital truth. The movie gives us the philosopher’s stone and holy grail of human endeavour, the truth that will reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable conundrum of destiny (God) and free will. Donnie didn’t fall out of God’s Channel by surviving, however; what he did (so far as I understand the movie) was to enter into a parallel universe, an alternate time stream in which he survived, and thereby got to see what would happen if he did live, and so understand the meaning of his death, the reason behind it. At the risk of being pat, the movie might be seen as Donnie’s dark and troubling dream, in the final moments before that jet engine lands on him and death takes him forever.

Like Run Lola Run, Donnie Darko adheres to a very old religious tradition, that of blood sacrifice. It suggests that when God, or Death, decides to take someone, He cannot be denied. If His intended prey somehow evades Him, by some unexpected miracle, He will simply take someone else, usually someone close to the original choice of victim. This is not just religious belief, however; it’s also something like physics. It’s as if Donnie’s unwritten escape creates the opposite of a vortex, a sort of excess of particles in the universe, and that this imbalance has to be corrected by the removal of someone else, preferably someone as similar to the intended “target” as possible. For this reason Gretchen is taken. Having seen all this, Donnie is given a choice. Like John Baxter in Don’t Look Now, Donnie has the all-too-rare gift of seeing God’s plan in action, His method, His modus operandi. Unlike Baxter, however, Donnie is smart (or crazy/open/adolescent) enough to understand what he sees and act upon it, to seize the opportunity of intervening and become co-designer of his destiny. He does indeed, as Gretchen has intuited, become a Super Hero. (Super Heroes have always been schizos; Donnie Darko gives us the first schizo to become a Super Hero.)

Recognizing that he only survived due to a glitch in space-time, Donnie uses the same glitch to repair the damage, and in the act sacrifices himself. The glitch, however, will always remain: there’s still that mysterious jet engine to contend with. Maybe the glitch is Donnie himself? Being on the verge of developing the power to see through the illusion of time and space, to see God Itself in action, Donnie is one of those freaks of nature (like the white-faced dynamo of Powder) who simply has to be removed (translated to a higher dimension) before his existence causes the whole universe to collapse. Donnie’s gift of magic allows him to escape his death, but then it forces him to see why his dearth was necessary, and so compels him (if he wants to stay in God’s Channel) to go back to meet it at the designated time. As a result, the world does not end. This time. But if people (and movies) like Donnie Darko are becoming more and more frequent phenomena, in a world where neither science nor religion is equipped to reconcile the awesome paradox of a magical reality run by God, then it’s only a matter of time. Like all good prophets, Donnie Darko warns us, in the most entertaining fashion, to get ready. The sky’s about to open.

2009-08-22T13:53:00.000-07:00

All Good Things...

...come to an end

Today I posted the last episode of the Shooting the Ghost series, in which I subjected Chris to the God Game treatment, and got him to expostulate on his philosophical beliefs and his knowing about life, death, devil and christ, whether God = intelligent Universe, how to follow the signs, and what, exactly we are doing here.

Chris also talks for the first time about the rush of power he experienced while terrorizing others through acts of violence, his remorse for the people he has hurt in the past, how he has wrestled to keep his inner devil from consuming him, and what he really thinks about Jesus!

So - it's been fun, hope you;ve enjoyed the ride, till we meet again. Let me know what you thought of these Podcasts, and whether you'd like to hear more of them, if and when I meet up with Chris again.

****

On a side-note: I was just informed by my publishers that THE SECRET LIFE OF MOVIES is going to be available as an audio book. This is good news for those of you (like me) who'd balk at throwing down $40 for a book. I'll provide a link as soon as it's available.

2009-08-15T11:42:00.000-07:00

A girl locked in a room, the prisoner of love.

An ex-stripper. She was desperate to take her child away from “the life.”

A Sicilian mobster. He would do anything to prevent his son from being taken from him.

The son: an innocent pawn caught in a tug of war between the forces of Light and Darkness!

(How dysfunctional can one family get?!)

The driver: he brought her food; he tried to mind his own business.

Just leave the food and go. Don’t talk to her. Don’t listen to her. Don’t look into her eyes.

“Help me,” she said. Two words were all it took.

He was a sociopath. A man without a conscience. When she turned to him for help, he couldn’t turn away.

He risked everything to help her.

He’s been on the run ever since.

This is the culminating true-life tale from nomad and ex-mob driver, Chris, in which we at last see his heroic side come fully to the fore. Is that you, John Wayne? The answer is yes.

It’s a tale out of a movie, hence the copy and title (taken from Chris’ favorite John Wayne film) for the latest episode of Shooting the Ghost.

Chris describes how he put his life on the line to try to help an ex-stripper and mobster’s wife get her child away from her husband and start a new life. It didn’t work, but he did what he could to make it happen. Why? Only Chris knows for sure. Some quality deep inside him, that cannot turn away from someone who needs his help; in this case, the archetypal “damsel in distress.”

In this particular scenario, few people could argue that Chris acted heroically. Based on this isolated incident, most of us would assume Chris to be a virtuous, even heroic character. Certainly anything but a “bad man.”

Yet we have already heard other, conflicting stories about Chris from his own mouth. We know he has been diagnosed as a sociopath devoid of human feeling or conscience, a man capable of torturing and maiming total strangers because of their debts to the mob. When asked how he felt about cutting people’s fingers off with garden shears, Chris replied, “It’s nothing personal.”

Most of us have a fairly standard view of what makes for virtue or depravity in a human being. We think we know what makes one man good, another bad. But such a perspective cannot encompass the mass of contradictions that Chris embodies. “By their fruit shall ye know them”? But how are we to know, or judge, a man who is as capable of acts of courage and selfless nobility as he is of savagery and base cruelty?

There doesn’t seem to be any way. It is probably futile to try. But suspending judgment is something that, as human beings, we have never learnt to do. Remaining neutral on such questions as good and evil, right and wrong, is as unthinkable to us as being impartial about what we eat, or our own pleasure and pain. The mere idea seems inhuman to us.

What if the reverse is the case? What if, in our rigid, socially imposed ideas about “good and evil,” humanity and inhumanity, we are forcing ourselves and others into a limited expression of the full spectrum of human possibilities? What if these very “moral” restrictions are what give rise to the distorted expressions of behavior we then label as “evil” and “sociopathic”?

It’s been a while since I quoted Nietzsche, but writing about Chris has led me into some old, dark waters that apparently I am not fully done with—perhaps because they are not done with us!

Here's the syphillitic one on his favorite subject, good and evil:

“One cannot be one without being the other . . . with every growth of man, his other side must grow too . . . That man must grow better and more evil is my formula for this inevitability. . . . With every increase of greatness and height in man, there is also an increase in depth and terribleness: one ought not to desire the one without the other—or, rather: the more radically one desires the one, the more radically one achieves precisely the other. . . Terribleness is part of greatness: let us not deceive ourselves.”

This piece is continued at our sister blog, the A.R.G.O.

2009-07-28T14:44:00.000-07:00

I was hoping to start up some occult text work on Chris' story here, provide some pointers on the archetypal narrative at play here; unfortunately life on the road (and another secret life) isn't giving me a moment to breathe. Meanwhile, here's an impromptu podcast for you all, part of a chat Chris and I had last night, about Brothers and stuff.

2009-07-14T10:14:00.000-07:00

Scars

(excerpt from chapter 3 of The Secret Life of Movies, on John Ford's The Searchers)

It’s not easy to like something you know nothing about.

—The Man with No Name, on “peace,” A Fistful of Dollars

The Western movie hero has generally been the American male’s idealized view of himself, and even to some extent the female’s idealized view of maleness. John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) was a rude reminder for terminally adolescent males of the implications of this fantasy ideal. Commonly viewed as the most influential—if not the greatest—Western ever made, the film exposes the Western hero as at best deeply troubled, at worst plain psychotic. Forty years before Unforgiven, John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards revealed the gunslinger as a lonely, embittered man, driven to do “what a man’s got to do” not by duty but by compulsion—by private the demons of rage, jealousy, and regret. Ethan Edwards is your classic split personality (even his name suggests this: the two Es implying twin egos). He is a man of the plains, a hunter, a warrior, a wanderer, a loner isolated by his chosen lifestyle and by his predilection for violence, who nonetheless yearns (against his better judgment) to belong.

Ethan has rejected the solace and companionship of family, while his brother Aaron has married and reared several children. At the start of the movie, Ethan arrives at Aaron’s ranch after three years of wandering. Ethan, we soon realize, is in love with Aaron’s wife, Martha, and we are given to understand (through Ford’s delicate and assured directorial touches) that Martha loves and desires Ethan. We can only presume that it is Ethan’s commitment to solitude, his refusal to be “reigned in,” that made Ethan and Martha (or Ethan and any woman) an impossible match, and that consequently drove Martha into the arms of Aaron, the family man. As a result of this, perhaps, Ethan secretly smolders with jealousy and resentment for his brother Aaron, possibly even harboring an unconscious desire to see him dead so that he might claim Martha for his own. If so, Aaron (Abel to Ethan’s Cain) is the first suggestion of Ethan’s dual-personality, the split in his psyche.

Aaron embodies (both symbolically and literally) the conflict between Ethan’s desire and (what he presumably sees as) his duty, a duty not only to his brother, but also to his true nature, that of solitary man. His jealousy reveals that Ethan is divided against himself, having denied his sexual (procreative) instincts. Perhaps he believes he does this out of loyalty to his brother, from a desire not to come between Aaron and Martha, but it seems doubtful if family duty alone would be enough to repress Ethan’s powerful desire for Martha. Aaron represents all that Ethan has denied in himself, and as such is a threat to his peace of mind as much as a comfort for his soul (by being with him he can experience Martha vicariously, as her brother-in-law). At the same time, by refusing to admit his jealousy and hostility for Aaron, even to himself, and by doing the decent thing and repressing his desire for Martha (remaining passive), his soul is oppressed by longing. Just being around the happy family is a source of anguish to him, as evidenced by what follows.

If Wayne himself claimed the role of Ethan to be his personal favorite, presumably this was above all because it afforded him with a rare opportunity to act. But, besides being a fair bit more brooding, moody, and obsessive than his other roles, Ethan is to all intents and appearances the same Wayne persona that audiences had come to know so well. For years, The Searchersis possible (or at least once was) to watch the film with only a cursory, peripheral awareness of the lead character’s psychotic tendencies, and to see Ethan as merely a more ruthless and unsympathetic version of the standard John Wayne figure. For this what he is. But The Searchers reveals the isolation, fragmentation, and self-loathing at the heart of the Western hero as created (primarily) by Wayne and Ford (though also Wayne and Hawks, Stewart and Mann, and so forth). In short, it reveals the schizophrenic nature of the whole American experience, of the national character. “How the West was won” might be rephrased “How the Other was kept at bay”—both being achieved by the same means, the systematic destruction of the Native American peoples. was taken by the majority of viewers as little more than a particularly dark entry in the ever-growing Wayne-Ford Western canon. It

As Ethan’s shadow, his doppelganger, Scar acts out his repressed nature. This is overtly suggested in the movie by details such as both men speaking the other’s language, and by matching shots of Ethan and Scar (at different times) standing over a submissive Debbie. Both men wish to “take her in,” both wish to possess her physically, even though Scar acts where Ethan forbears. It is significant that, unlike what the standard revenge format would normally demand, it is not Ethan himself who kills Scar, but Debbie’s half brother (and half-Indian at that), Marty. In fact, Ethan is not even present to witness it. There is no suggestion that Ethan is denied the pleasure of revenge, either. He seems primarily preoccupied with Debbie, and apparently it is enough that Scar die. Ethan does not need the satisfaction of killing him.

Ethan’s hatred of Scar is leavened by an awareness of their essential affinity, their sameness. Ethan does not hate Scar so much as what he stands for and, above all, what he has done. It is his acts that he reviles, above all because they reflect Ethan’s own secret desires. Ethan’s hatred of Scar for destroying what he held most sacred is mixed up with envy for not having done it himself, for not having had the freedom to do so. If Scar is wanton sexuality and unbridled savagery (absence of repression), Ethan is restrained desire. He is self-disciplined, but the fetters of civilization weigh heavy upon him. As such, neither man can exist without the other: without repression there can be no civilization, and without savagery (pure instinct), there is nothing to civilize, nothing to repress. As complementary forces, Ethan and Scar are equals on equal ground, and recognize one another as essentially complicit. They are both warriors, hunters, men of proud individuality. The key difference between them, besides the manner in which they treat dogs (Ethan is seen patting a dog and Scar throwing a stone at one), is that Scar (like Aaron) is a family man, ironically enough the one thing Ethan can never be. And what a bitter irony it is for Ethan to see that, for all the savagery of his soul, Scar has attained what he can only dream of: a sense of belonging.

There can be little doubt with all this in mind that Ethan feels a deep and tormenting (because inadmissible to his conscience) envy for Scar and his lifestyle, especially since he can never knuckle down to being a house-husband himself (like his brother Aaron). The polygamous arrangements of Scar, in which the husband has many (non-clinging) wives who raise his many kids while he gets to hunt and fight the white man, must be painfully appealing to Ethan. Such an arrangement could only seem like the perfect solution, if only he were not blinded by social conditioning and crippled by repression. This is the essence of the schizophrenic experience: the battle between reason and atavism, between repression and instinct, civilization and savagery. What is remarkable about The Searchers is that it parallels the external, dramatic conflict (that of cowboys and Indians) with an internal, psychological conflict at the heart of its protagonist: Ethan’s tormented psyche is seen to reflect, not just vaguely but precisely, the genocidal chaos taking place in the nation.

The final, famous shot of the film has Ethan framed in the doorway of the family home, seen from the inside, the open desert behind him. He pauses for a moment, as if deliberating, then turns and slopes off into the desert; the door closes and he is swallowed up in darkness. The image is one of the most poignant and eloquent in the history of movies, and sums up all the loneliness and longing of the Western hero. A man of violence cannot opt for peace, any more than a wild cat can live on daisies—without denying his very nature. He can respect it, admire it even, and fight to defend and uphold it. But he can never enjoy it.

2009-06-24T14:19:00.000-07:00

Notes on Brando and Nicholson (from The Secret Life of Movies)

During the period of his prime, from 1969 to 1976, Nicholson represented the outsider, the rebel outlaw/existential man, in revolt at the most mundane, restricted level. Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces, Buddusky in The Last Detail, David Locke of The Passenger, and finally MacMurphy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, are all ordinary men with extraordinary levels of energy and passion (albeit of the negative variety) who lack the insight or the imagination to express themselves in anything but petty, occasionally poetic but finally impotent acts of revolt. Above all their frustration takes the form of an absurd kind of posturing, what Pauline Kael called “a satirical approach to macho.”Kael was referring to Nicholson’s persona rather than that of his characters, and yet (as she also pointed out), the two often seem inseparable. It is the knowing manner in which Nicholson inhabits his roles, while at the same time staying outside of them, as if winking at the audience, that make so much of what he does a kind of “turn.” Nicholson mocks his characters’ frustration, their impotence, but he also gives them enough self-awareness to appear to be mocking themselves. The machismo of his characters is the machismo of a male too sophisticated not to know how hollow and childish such posturing really is. At the same time, they are too contemptuous of their own sophistication and awareness to do anything but mock and degrade it with empty acts of machismo.

Nicholson—whose “specialty is divided characters”—was the necessary counterculture hero who mixed the sensitivity and vulnerability of James Dean with the uncouthness, roughness, and virility of Brando, while adding something entirely his own to the mix—irony and satire. It is there in the devilish leer of his grin and the mischievous tilt of his eyebrows. At times, this deviltry was indistinguishable from mere clowning, the wild, unpredictable, possibly psychotic (definitely dangerous), but undeniably seductive mystique that made Nicholson the biggest star in the world (perhaps not in box office terms, but in terms of status as a movie actor). Of course, “mystique,” so far as any actor has such (and it’s what makes a mere star into a kind of legend, along the lines of Brando, Dean, and few others), is entirely particular to the method of the actor in question; above all, I think, it depends on the feeling that we are seeing only and exactly what the actor intends us to see. On the one hand, it’s the undisclosed depths—and early Nicholson suggested this as much as early Brando—on the other hand, it relates to the superficiality of what the actor is actually doing, the awareness that he is greater than the role, that the role is but a single facet of the actor’s total personality.

When we think of Brando we think of Terry Malloy and Stanley Kowalski, or we think of Don Vito, Paul from Last Tango in Paris, and of other, more peripheral performances that added body and texture to these personas (young and old Brando, respectively). Nicholson never really succeeded in creating a second, more mature persona after his ’70s peak, but during the seven years between Easy Rider and Cuckoo’s Nest, he attained a consistency and integrity of performance that perhaps no other movie star ever has before or since. All these portrayals—George Hanson, Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces, his less successful but still noteworthy turns in The King of Marvin Gardens and Carnal Knowledge, Buddusky from The Last Detail, David Locke in The Passenger, Jake Gittes in Chinatown, and finally MacMurphy of Cuckoo’s Nest—fuse into a single persona. Nicholson, in a sense, completed the work of Brando and Dean in bringing the once-untouchable male movie god into the everyday milieu of our lives. Via the “method performances,” and the sordid anti-romantic nature of the movies themselves (at least compared to old Hollywood product), Nicholson ensured that the aloof, superior perfection of Cooper, Gable, and Grant became forever a thing of the past. Those actors who upheld the more mythical or idealized image of the male—Newman, Eastwood, Redford, Beatty—may have had more commercial clout, but they lacked the authenticity and credibility of the new, post-Brando breed—Hoffman, De Niro, Pacino, Hackman, Duvall, et al.—none of whom were really “leading men” in the old Hollywood sense. Of this new breed of anti-heroes, it was Nicholson who was the closest to being conventionally handsome, and beyond doubt he was the most sheerly charismatic. One felt with Nicholson that, although he was certainly capable of the same depth and subtlety as these other performers, he tended to opt instead for the more theatrical “turn,” partly, one suspected, to draw attention to the illusory process of acting in which he was involved. To this extent, Nicholson, by both portraying and embodying a rejection of hypocrisy (lies and facades), spoke directly to his audience. He was the male in revolt, and what Nicholson communicated, once the excitement of revolt had died down and the sober reality of impotence had sunk in, was fatality, resignation, and despair.

Marlon Brando—for different reasons than Jack Nicholson—is a quintessentially schizoid actor. Nicholson reconciled himself to the absurd, unmanly posturing of his profession by taking a satirical approach to it: however brilliant he is, he almost never lets us forget that he is acting. In the end, he got so outside his performance—and filled it so full with knowing winks and conspiratorial leers—that he had become a clown, Hamlet playing the court jester. Brando spent a large chunk of his career playing the clown also, but in a very different fashion. Brando was the first movie star to bring the “method” to the general public, to make it fashionable, hip. When he exploded onto the screen with The Men, A Streetcar Named Desire, and On the Waterfront, there could be little doubt even among untutored viewers that they were seeing something unprecedented. If you’d have asked these viewers at the time what made Brando different, they might have said he was more “real,” that he represented them, the common man, in a way previous generations of movie actors had not (not Cagney or Tracy, and certainly not Gable or Wayne). All this came from Brando’s “method”—he dug into himself and found the living equivalent (the embodiment) of the character, he merged with the role. Yet he was not a character actor, his presence was too strong for that; Brando didn’t disappear into the role, he transformed it.

Following his heady peak, unable to sustain either his focus and commitment or the audience’s good will towards him, Brando began to take on ever more inappropriate roles, to get sucked into misguided projects until he became, not just the shadow of his former self, but a parody—a buffoon. Brando was the active agent in his own debasement, however, and at root was a basic insecurity, not as an actor but as a man making a living as an actor, by pretending. Not only was it “womanly,” it was (perhaps synonymous to Brando) duplicitous, deceitful, phony. It was fake: a pose. This doubt seems to have eaten away at Brando’s core of self-respect until the only way he could cover his embarrassment was by making a deliberate ass of himself, showing that he was above it all, that he was only in it for the money. A string of flops (Mutiny on the Bounty, The Ugly American, Bedtime Story, A Countess from Honk Kong, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Chase) ensured that by the time of The Godfather, Brando was all but washed up in his own profession.

Nicholson’s final and best role in this seven-year excursion into schizophrenia was the full expression of the actor’s preoccupation and the most complete realization of his talents to date. It has been thirty-five years since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and, with the exceptions of The Crossing Guard and The Pledge, the actor has never even come close to the degree of intensity, commitment, and depth which he showed in his earliest roles. In fact Nicholson’s career has been something of a travesty from this time onwards, almost as if the passivity of the schizophrenic roles which he embodied so superbly left him at the mercy of greater forces, helplessly swept away on a tide of mediocrity.

With Cuckoo’s Nest, Nicholson became for a brief moment more than a mere actor, he became an archetype, a symbol (specifically, the Nicholson seen on the movie poster, straining upward as he attempts to lift the marble shower unit). What this archetype symbolized was freedom, revolt, the undying will to prevail no matter the obstacles, and no matter how impotent the revolt may initially appear to be. (“At least I tried, goddamn it!”) Despite his grandstanding and rebelliousness, however, MacMurphy was also in a sense a passive character. He enters the lunatic asylum not on a mission but simply taking refuge from the hardships of prison life, expecting an “easy ride.” Once there, something takes over and he becomes, against his own better instincts (and certainly against his interests), a sort of schizophrenic crusader. Finally (as Kesey’s novel has it), he becomes a martyr. Nicholson/MacMurphy was the schizo trickster who unwittingly sacrificed himself for a cause he never believed in. It was something that Bobby Dupea had to head for Alaska to find, something that Buddusky and Gittes in their world-weariness lost sight of altogether. This “cause,” most simply encapsulated under the banner of “Freedom,” relates to the liberating allure of non-conformity, which finds its apotheosis in madness. It is more subtly and obliquely signified by the emblem of silence—the unconscious. In Cuckoo’s Nest this alternative, the possibility of freedom, is represented by the Chief, the Indian, the Other, who is for most of the movie passing himself off as a deaf-mute. The Chief abides in silence partially because he has nothing to say, but mostly because he knows whatever he says would be wasted on the world. He has taken refuge in the appearance of imbecility, and this is his greater wisdom. Knowing that in an insane world any sane man will be thought mad, he feigns insanity instead. But of course he gets locked up anyway, and this also is his refuge, the madhouse offering a more organized, peaceful kind of insanity than that of society at large. The Chief (read: unconscious) abides in silence until MacMurphy (the ego) comes along to stir his inner fire into life again, to reawaken his will to live, to partake in the madness rather than simply observe it passively from a safe distance. The chief, by biding his time, is also (as the film has it) gathering the power to act, while MacMurphy, for all his conscious striving, is impotent. But it is MacMurphy’s (the ego’s) powerlessness—or more precisely his struggling in spite of it (“At least I tried!”)—that serves as an example to the Chief and an inspiration, an incentive, to the unconscious to move. It’s MacMurphy’s insane bid to accomplish the impossible that inspires the Chief to act, and so (with the strength of silence behind him) make the impossible possible. This in turn stirs up the fires of revolt in the other inmates (though in the movie they stay safe in their incarceration, they at least cheer the Chief on his way), and, potentially at least, it starts a chain reaction by which (ego overrun by Id) the lunatics take over the asylum.

MacMurphy’s example is an unstoppable motion. What makes him an authentic martyr, and Cuckoo’s Nest a genuine parable of its time, is how he uses the (growingly collective) schizophrenic experience as a cover for his messianic (apocalyptic) pretensions. Society is a madhouse. The sane man is called mad, and crucified—or lobotomized—by such a society. This is ostensibly to suppress his message, but it also allows the other inmates to see for themselves the truth (that society is a madhouse), so that, potentially, this truth may set them free. When the Chief breaks out and returns to the wilderness, swallowed up by darkness, it’s the unconscious taking over again, the stirring of the Other, the awakening of the Id, by which the ego is inevitably and fatally smothered, and so finds release. Now the trickster’s mission has been accomplished, he is no longer of any use and must return whence he came: to non-existence.

It’s no wonder, perhaps, if Nicholson’s career seemed to be smothered in its cradle after this. As spokesman for the schizophrenic experience and avatar of impotent revolt, his work was done.

Perhaps this is the price that Nicholson paid for his earlier, phenomenal success, and for his at least partially realized Brechtian aspirations? After Cuckoo’s Nest, Nicholson moved steadily further into a kind of self-parodic style of acting which—much like Brando before him—helped to distance him from the paucity of his material but also consigned him to the reluctant, if not entirely unintentional, role of clown. Nicholson’s clowning was up there with most other actors’ sincerest efforts, however, and somehow he survived with his legend—if not integrity—more or less intact. It seems a given, however, that he will never again regain the kind of power, or artistic relevance, which he enjoyed in his heyday.

2009-05-30T19:17:00.000-07:00

I finally get to be a Western Hero, the day before on Clint Eastwood's birthday, no less.

Part Two of this exploration of male-bonding as it relates to Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch, with Phil Snyder, Bill and John Morrison. Part one includes a brief discussion of Bill and John’s father, his brutality and his wound, then of Jason’s father and the family business, and Jason’s inevitable rebellion. In part two, Jason and Phil discuss why “the boys want to be with the boys”—but only so far, how being among men allows our emasculation wounds to show; fear of obligation, performance anxiety, and Phil’s catastrophic family trip. In part three, Bill talks of Robert Bly’s description of mentors, the ritual of the sword, and how Bill never received his father’s blessing. In part four, Phil and Jason discuss the archetypal longing of The Wild Bunch, Sam’s “dog brothers” (James Coburn, L.Q. Jones, Warren Oates, Lee Marvin, et al.), “misfit culture” and how individuals are united in their common refusal to join society; Blue Velvet and Phil’s father’s cronies; men on a mission: the real purpose of bonding being the fusion of wills towards a single intent; the bunch’s integration through death, Angel as the higher conscience of the bunch, the soldier’s code, men out of time. In part five, Jason discusses with Bill and John the slaying of the king, how he disinherited his father’s fortune and rejected the legacy, the blood money of corporate business, and “the bad king.” In part six, Phil and Jason return to The Wild Bunch, speaking of death as destiny, the unconscious nobility of the killer, how the primal urges that make the bunch warriors finally make them heroes, and of the bloody wound that runs through Peckinpah’s films.

2009-05-26T19:31:00.000-07:00

Although we impact each other throughout our lives, real, meaningful change very rarely happens (after 20 years of "self-work," I speak from experience, alas!). Most of us die with the same patterns we developed in our first 7 years still firmly in place.

I'd say change never comes about through the willed intervention of another save in a negative fashion, by causing trauma. Of course there are overt ways that people change us - by saving our lives or giving us STD, or whatever; but even then these people are only agents of change who happen to cross our paths and so impact our lives. If it wasn't them, it would have been someone else.

Our idea of having some sort of say about the way our lives unfold is largely illusory. Think of it this way: the Universe is a larger organism that is operating intelligently according to its own "agenda," and we are microbes within that organism and so, inevitably, part of that unfolding agenda. Do we consider the cells in our bodies to have free will? Maybe when they develop cancer! Otherwise we consider them merely a part of the greater working, with no autonomy outside of mutiny, ie, "disease."

What I mean, maybe, is that - accepting that we can't help but influence those we interact with - we should never try to change another person, because to do so would be to impose our belief/value system upon them. We are invariably been driven by our own "patterns". Our motives are never clean.How many of us even know what's best for ourselves? If we did, would we be so tangled up in addiction, frustration, sexual obsession (aka "romantic love"), self-hatred, and all the rest? So then, where on Earth do we get the idea we know what's good for others?

It's a socially endorsed form of egomania, and it's very evident in the APC (alt. perc. comm) in the way people platform with their ideas under the assumption that it's "important" people know about them, when really, they are simply trying to get attention to validate their own beliefs. Myself included with this post!

2009-05-20T14:33:00.000-07:00

Versions of Reality

I: Kings of Reality

Everyone has their personal version of reality and everyone believes theirs is not only the best version, but the only one that really counts.

These versions of reality are cobbled together (usually in early adulthood) from what we see, hear, and read. The data gathered does not determine our version of reality, however; rather it’s our still-forming version of reality that dictates which items of data we choose to retain, to patch together our version of reality. The reason is that our version of reality is actually dependent on our physical, emotional, psychological imprinting as infants, and has little or nothing to do with conscious processes.

It never seems to occur to us, for example, that our version of reality is built up from material that comes directly from other people’s versions of reality (the books we read, people we respect, and so forth). Another way of saying this: our idea of objective reality arises from our agreement to agree that, if enough different subjective realities are patched together, this somehow constitutes “objective” reality. But logically, the reverse is the case: the more external points of view our version of reality draws upon, the more subjective it becomes.

We cling to our version of reality as if our life depends upon it. Maybe it does. Yet we know that any version of reality is incomplete, and never can be complete. Our insistence that it is “truth” is like the “suspension of disbelief” we perform while watching a movie—we trick ourselves in order to forget what we know, so that we can believe what we want to believe.

The way we view the world defines who we think we are, our constructed identity. We cannot see ourselves from the outside, except through the eyes of another.

We agree the sky is blue without ever wondering if we are seeing the same color, knowing only that we have agreed to give it the name “blue.” We cannot ever know what color the other is seeing, so it’s irrelevant to us. And yet, we still insist that others agree with us on the blueness of the sky.

We all desperately need others to agree with our version of reality, even while we insist that we are special and unique. Really, we want to uphold a version of reality in which we are King and everyone else will slavishly agree with us: a world of Yes-people. Boring and hellish as this would be, it’s the only version of reality in which we’d have complete control and therefore feel totally safe.

II: Reality as Defense System

We like people who see things the way we do. At the same time, we want the people we already like to see things that way too. We experience disturbance, anxiety, if we encounter people whom we admire who don’t agree with our view of things. Either we have to ignore the dissonance this creates or decide we don’t admire these people after all (or at least, not that particular aspect of them). A third option is to rethink our version of reality. This is the hardest path. Does anyone ever really upturn their version of reality in a way that is meaningful? It is akin to identity-suicide.

Our versions of reality are our defense systems, our armor, against an incomprehensible, and probably hostile, Universe. It began as a necessary survival response to those first childhood experiences, the ones which presented the original threat to our well-being, so shaping the identity-armor that was later fully consolidated as a version of reality.

Parents are the first to override our sense of reality by telling us that monsters do not exist and that our invisible friends are imaginary, that we are not hungry when we say we are, and so forth. Parents use their children as the supreme opportunity to strengthen and fortify their own versions of reality: by “recruiting” others to uphold it. Imposition of beliefs on others is the most effective way to assert and build up our identities. Since it is done to us from day one, we quickly learn to do it ourselves.

As children, we have two choices if we wish to maintain our well-being: either we must create a version of reality opposed to the one being imposed upon us; or, we create one that is compatible with it, in imitation of it. Either way, the result is the same: we have created a version of reality—a structured identity—as a direct reaction to, and against, the versions of reality that oppress and imprint us as infants.

III: : Worldview Warfare (weltanschauungskrieg)

Back to the central question: why do we care what anyone else believes?

We are looking for allies, most of all in our illusions. Complicity in denial. The rejection of conspiracy “theory” (a telling term, since it is often as fact-based as anything in the consensus realm) perhaps stems from our unconscious awareness that we are all conspiring, all of the time, to keep ourselves in the dark about this one, all-consuming fact: that we are the authors of our own beliefs.

“We are greater artists than we know.” Nietzsche.

Friendship is opposition. When worldviews, versions of reality, go to war, the potential for breakthrough is great.

When something or someone confronts our belief systems head-on, and we cannot simply dismiss or ignore it, we either have to let go of those beliefs, or watch them collapse, taking our precious identity-armor with them. A very real kind of death ensues.

Every version of reality is equally essential, equally “real,” to us; yet at the same time, it is equally constricting and oppressive, like heavy armor that protects us from events that have already happened, and that prevents us from being able to move freely through our present environment. All belief that is invested in personally, which includes disbelief, is a form of slavery, because we are obliged to constantly distort our perceptions and actions in order to stay within the comfortable confines of that belief.

What we believe to be real becomes real. We forget that we chose to believe a version of reality because we had to. It was a necessary illusion.

To challenge another’s version of reality should not be done lightly or for the wrong reasons. At the very least, it is extremely bad manners. At worst, it is offensive action.

On the other hand, if we question or deny the assertion of another, we validate it and make it stronger. We confirm that it is sufficiently threatening to our version of reality to need refuting. The moment we do so, we betray our own uncertainty.

2009-05-16T12:44:00.000-07:00

Shamans in Denial

How can a creature be both a bat and a bird at the same time? How can something that appears ugly, dirty and threatening actually be something that is delicate, beautiful, and harmless?

The answer may be found in what follows.

As is well known, shamans are also diviners who use a seemingly random arrangement of elements (tea leaves, goat entrails, raw egg in water, etc) to find a hidden narrative that will inform them as to the secret workings of Spirit, the design of power working through everything.

On this week’s “Shooting the Ghost,” I have attempted the same. Selecting fragments from roughly eight hours of conversation between myself, Balloon Man Bill Morrison, Phil Snyder, and Bill’s brother John, more or less at random, I have woven them together into an hour-long podcast. This was done based largely on the quality and “charge” of the clips, and with almost no eye, or ear, to how I might eventually tie them together. It was only once the show was completed, in fact, while listening back to it, that I was able to discern some sort of coherent narrative. It is many layered, so it would not be apparent to most listeners; hence my decision to provide these notes.

Listeners may prefer to discover the hidden narrative for themselves; but if not, here are some clues. Be warned, however: this is a point by point description of the show, and so is rife with “spoilers.”

Firstly: due to the ostensible cause that brought us together, the four players are here unconsciously acting out, embodying, different aspects of Sam Peckinpah’s psyche. Among these aspects are:

addiction;
rage;
hostility;
violence;
sensitivity;
creative expression;
ambition;
paranoia;
victimization of women;
ugliness;
disillusionment (with America);
guilt;
poetry;
the artistry and wisdom of storytelling

The podcast begins with Bill’s description of caring for a neighbor’s rabbits and all the “shit” (literally) he has to deal with to keep their cages clean. One basic function of the shaman is the handling of “unclean” psychic matter and waste. Connection to Nature (the animals) is essential to any shaman’s power. (Rabbits, however, are notoriously timid animals, and suggest powerlessness.)

Next up, Phil tells the story of how his rage manifested a weird bat creature in the basement of his parents’ house (read: ancestral unconscious), which he then killed with a pellet gun, afraid that it might be carrying rabies. Once it was dead, Phil realized it was “actually” a dust-covered baby bird, even though he had been sure it was a bat. He also suspected he had somehow materialized the being through his own anger—a living tulpa or thought form, made up of Phil’s disowned psychic energy.

The key to this story—which is a small mythic blueprint for the show’s theme of “shamans in denial”—is that Phil mistook the creature for a rabies-infected bat, when in fact it was a bird(?). Phil disowns his primal self (rage) and simultaneously projects onto what is delicate and new, something ugly and threatening, thereby turning a baby bird into a diseased bat.

Phil and John then discuss their anger-management problems, with an aside from myself on the subject of tulpas, and a dubious musical interlude.

Bill talks of his admiration for “crazy, ugly people,” with their stories of violence, as being “the stuff heroes are made of.” He talks of his work as a (relatively) honest car salesman, and of a 72-year-old reformed killer and rapist in his neighborhood (Hollywood). He asks the question: “When do we get rehabilitated?” and speaks of the predatory structure of society, as well as his own, more balanced upbringing.

We then move into a brief discussion of Sam Peckinpah, his relationship with his father and his choice to go into theater and television rather than law. Of Sam being a man out of time, struggling unconsciously to reconnect to the ancestors, while consciously making movies to express his alienation and despair. How his movies testify to that inner struggle, and as such are secondary artifacts: the real story is hidden behind the seemingly random elements of his various movies.

I then tell a story of having my guitar stolen on my birthday, of getting it back the following day, turning the situation around so that the thieves became allies. This story relates to a shaman owning his power (self-expression and music) through a mixture of surrender and will, and getting that disowned tulpa energy to work for him (rather than simply killing it!).

Bill and John then share their night-dreams of being successful performers, revealing a desire for power and influence, and how their dreams are possibly compensating for a lack of worldly recognition. This is the very inverse of shamanic use of dreaming, which finds otherworldly power through dreams, and relinquishes all desire for other forms of “success.” (This was also the trap Peckinpah fell into.) Phil describes how, in similar dreams, he is always watching on the sidelines, aware he is supposed to learn something. The same appears true here on this podcast—after his initial story which sets the ball rolling and provides the theme for the show, Phil stays mostly on the sidelines, observing.

There follows a discussion on the macrocosmic narrative, that of America and the realization in the late ‘60s (through movies such as Easy Rider and Wild Bunch and events such as the Manson murders and Altamont) that the American dream was, and always had been, a Lie, being founded on the murder of the Native peoples. The Native American represents the Other, the disowned Shadow of the White Man, his primal side, and also the denied shaman within. To the Whiteman, the Native American is like Phil’s bat-bird: it is perceived as a threat, when actually it is something else entirely.

Bill then gives a short speech on the need for America to be exposed and to confess, “right back to the Indians.” I describe the US Nation as “Dorian Gray,” corrupt beyond all possibility of redemption, Bill speaks of the ugliness of Americans. The bat-bird again, having become what it beheld, America (like Phil) perceives its inner self as ugly and diseased. Bill speaks of his own comfort and complacency, and the pressure that builds within us all, the feeling we could simply explode one day and go on a mad killing spree. The disowned primal speaks. Psychopaths are acting out shamanic urges for transformation, unconsciously.

We then discuss politics as an extension of religion and the modern-day “serfdom” that has surrendered its responsibility to the elite; the Magna Carta and the Masonic sorcerers. The development of comfort and convenience of the modern world, is it detrimental to spiritual growth? Do we have a richer inner life now than 500 years ago?

John and Phil talk of their home entertainment systems, Phil describes his basement theater as both a shrine and a tomb, hinting at a desire to hide away in the unconscious realms, to return to infantilism. John’s cites his three marriages and his HUD apartment, then describes how the homeless (mostly from California) are getting violent in his neighborhood and mugging people who won’t give them money. He mentions how many of them have pit pulls— these “dog brothers” are also distorted shamans, demanding payment. They represent John’s disowned primal—his “tulpas”—and as such, they are a necessary compensation for the denied shadow side of his middle-class white neighborhood: the archetypal “return of the repressed.” John’s increased desire to watch TV and stay off the streets is the “normal” (i.e., non-shamanic) response to this pressure.

We discuss entertainment as being increasingly inadequate as a distraction: as life’s challenges become ever greater, more and more energy is needed for our denial to be effective. As we reach a turning point for the species, recycling ancient myths until all the variations are used up, there arises a need for new myths. But there are no longer any shaman-storytellers to create them.

I then describe myth and reality as being interconnected, the story of Christ, the ultimate shaman, who’s person embodied cosmic forces, and so became a living myth.

We discuss the function of myth, both for survival and for gnosis, the mutation of the species through sharing of knowledge and experience, “around the fire.” John cites early myths of hunting an killing, a la Phil’s story of the bird—a distorted myth-story for this mini-tribe of shamans, caught in varying levels of denial.

After a brief reference to the vitality of mystery, as something to be explored, John points out how Bill’s squeaky chair is causing John’s bird to talk—joking that there is a “relationship” between the two. John’s bird echo’s Phil’s “bat-bird” (representing Phil’s hidden soul nature). It is interfacing with Bill’s un-oiled chair (throne), i.e., Bill’s unconscious power? Is Phil’s inner poetic nature trying to reach out to Bill, and finding only a squeaky chair?

Bill then talks of his alcoholism and addiction to marijuana, as his best means to access “the other world,” thereby fully completing the reflected image of Sam Peckinpah’s fractured psyche: a man who smoke and drank himself to death rather than allow himself to open to the ancestors, and to his own grief and wounding, thereby tapping his hidden shamanic potential.

Are you still with me?

2009-05-11T17:17:00.000-07:00

Rediscovering Fire

Is there anything in this world more beautiful than male wisdom in action?

Is there anything rarer?

When was the last time you saw it?

A Gathering of Men.

2009-05-07T18:08:00.000-07:00

Ghost of a Life

Balloon Man Bill Morrison’s Perfect World

“It’s a marvelously gloriously great ghost of a life.” Bill Morrison

Somewhere in some recondite and under-explored wavelength of your television transmission (free cable), there’s a show with Promethean potential and diabolic disregard for the rules of entertainment that verges on Nietzschean hubris in aspiring to a new plateau of aesthetics, one that is verily “beyond good and mediocrity.” Is Bill “Balloonman” Morrison good at what he does? Resoundingly, and beyond any question, yes. He is a master at what he does. But what is it that he does? This is a question I would venture that even Mr. Morrison could not, or at least would not, answer (at least not intelligibly).

When Mr. Morrison faces the camera, his eyes do not seek refuge in self-justifying internal reassurance. He is a man beyond shame, and whatever it is he is doing, like Mitchum acting, he makes damn sure never to get caught doing it. Often inspired by his own free-associative virtuosity, but just as often not, he seems to care not a wit either way, and remains unflinching in his incoherence. But Mr. Morrison is also inspiring, most of all in his willingness to play the Ape of Thoth so consummately, and with so little regard for his own apishness. By such brazen nonchalance, Mr. Morrison at times transcends the self-imposed role of monkey and dimly, dimly, begins to resemble a god. A TV god, for sure, the deity of a petty domain, which is free cable after all, and not even a national network; but his confinement to so lowly a circle of US media hell reflects less upon Mr. Morrison’s talents—which appear to be prodigious beyond even his own (or especially his own) capacity to comprehend or fully harness—than it does upon a paltriness intrinsic to the medium itself. Mr. Morrison has opted to remain a very large fish, possibly even a shark, in a tiny pond.

Put bluntly, Mr. Morrison is the David Letterman for a brave new world that will never (we pray) come into being. For in such a world, one that Mr. Morrison’s demented armchair ravings obscurely and extremely indirectly herald—a world perfect in its total embracing of all imperfections—there would be no talk show hosts, no TV dinners, no TV at all, and so no Bill Morrison persona. Life would be far too interesting and bizarre to require such dubious means for killing time.

To be fair to him, Mr. Morrison’s solipsism is at times wearisome, to the viewer as much as it is (evidently) to Mr. Morrison himself. The “show,” if he’ll allow me to refer to it as such, would certainly benefit from a little structure, some kind of framework in which the host’s freewheeling poetry of molecular irrelevance and impotent grandeur would be able to come more fully into its own. Perhaps he should invite guests to inflict with his almost superhuman poise and irrationalism, the occasional straight man for him to loose his tongue upon? In a word, this man’s talents—it may even be a kind of genius, though it’s hard to say for sure—may never come fully to bloom (as both the man and the medium so sorely deserve) until they find the right soil—necessary context—in which to do so.

It’s too bad that Mr. Morrison’s giftedness is inseparable—even maybe contingent on—his obscurity. Neither Letterman nor Leno, nor any self-respecting high priest of the television airwaves, is ever going to have Mr. Morrison on their show. For obvious reasons. The moment Dave or Jay lets Bill on their show, it will be painfully plain to everyone watching that their ilk have been superseded, by a new and unstoppable mutant strain. Mr. Morrison may never be the talk show host he deserves to be, but if so that’s because, at heart, he is no host but a virus. The moment mainstream TV allowed him through its doors of perception and into the sleeping mind of the masses, it would spell the end of mainstream TV.

Until that time, Bill Morrison will remain perhaps what he most aspires to be: a marvelously, gloriously great ghost of a guy.

Jason Horsley, 2006.

2009-05-04T10:12:00.001-07:00

For anyone wondering about divinevirus.com and where it is, truth is I am behind on server payments and can't be bothered to get the site back up right now - feels like ancient history, and who needs a website these daze anyway?

But here's a direct link to the archives here (older version of the main page but most of the rest of the material hasn't been updated for years anyway)

2009-05-01T22:10:00.000-07:00

Interview with Aeolus Kephas

2009-04-24T11:41:00.000-07:00

What's It All About?

OK, another God Game (Nobody's Army) is up so it's about time I reintroduced anyone out there to the concepts behind it - what exactly IS this God Game thing anyway?

What follows is the original God Game Treatment. This was back when I intended to make a feature film, with 24 different "subjects" all woven together. That didn't happen, because the project took an unexpected turn (more on which anon), and instead I wound up with 6 separate episodes, featuring 6 of the chosen individuals, each one 24 minutes long (except Nobody's, which is 32 mins). So here's how I initially concieved it.

“God doesn’t play dice with the universe. He just plays hide and seek.”
—Woody Allen, Husbands and Wives

The God Game is a sui generis work, that is, a genre unto itself. I call it “surrealist documentary,” a documentary on the fantasy we call life. The objective is to assemble a fantasy feature film from documentary footage, to get the actors to write the script, as it were, and then to assemble the plot in the editing room. Of course the themes will take precedence over the narrative, as in any documentary, but the form and flow of the film will be closer in feel to Buñuel than Mike Leigh. Imagine a cross between The Thin Blue Line and The Matrix, a work of cinema verité about the illusory nature of reality.

Twenty-four humans of all ages and backgrounds have been recruited. Each one will be interviewed intensively for a single day, and talk about his or her beliefs, philosophy, life experiences, dreams, goals, and views on society and religion and “the greater picture.” They will undergo imaginative exercises by which they can recreate themselves in specific ways, i.e., as a religious leader, a terrorist, an animal, and so forth. They will have the opportunity to imagine themselves as a different person altogether, living a different life. And they will each contribute to their own personal recreation of the Afterlife, depicting their view of existence beyond the body and the self, and their thoughts on how life looks to them from this new, transpersonal perspective. The film will set out to portray each of these very distinct, charismatic humans as but masks or windows onto the gestalt Human: a single, unified and collective consciousness, of which we all are but fleeting manifestations. The idea of death, then, is used not as a morbid dampener on the life experience but, on the contrary, as what drives us and inspires us to attain ever higher states of consciousness in our brief time as individual beings. It is what finally unites all these separate entities into a single, continuous energy or Life Force.

To clarify this point: the acceptance of the movie is that in death, the illusion of selfness is shed, along with the body or “skin,” and consciousness “returns” to the primordial, formless energy from which it emerged. Whether this once individual consciousness is then dispersed into the Universe, recycled into a new form, or something else altogether, is entirely up to the individual, and depends on just how far s/he has developed his/her awareness, knowledge, and imagination, while alive.

The God Game will consider the possibility that in death we are hurled into Eternity and there left to create our own reality. It will posit the notion that, if so, this is also the case in life: that we are each one of us creating our own reality through the acts of perception and interpretation, but that we have gotten lost in details. When death comes to tap us, the curtains close, the angels and demons and unborn and dead souls applaud, and we realize that this world was but a stage, our life but a performance, of such verisimilitude that we were wholly lost therein. At that point the Grand Director says, “OK, lovely, let’s try it one more time,” or, “Perfect! That’s a wrap!” or any number of alternatives we can imagine (including that there is no Director besides ourself).

The question the film will ask is, If in death we find that our world and reality is but an extension of ourselves, and the creation of our own consciousness, might it not be possible to realize this in life?

The God Game is about perception. It’s about illusion, identity, and the masks we wear to hide from the terrible, wonderful truth of ourselves: that we are the sole creators of our reality. Imagine, then, twenty-four players, twenty-four lives, interwoven into a single Tapestry. Imagine razor-fine editing that will create a musical cadence to the images, until each life/personality merges with the next and all are revealed as sharing a common Identity, an Identity which is accessed by us all through death, but might equally be accessed in life, through sex, madness, or other methods. This Identity is what we have called, in our confusion and our isolation, “God.” It is Who were really are.

The film will be an intricately woven quilt, a magik carpet, a collage or montage of moments, scenes, images, ideas, descriptions, words. The twenty-four players (plus assorted supporting players) will come and go throughout the film. They will not be showcased in separate segments, nor will they be named until the final moments. They will stand out only through their physical attributes and individual characteristics, their charisma, their ability to shine. If there is to be a structure to the film, it will be based not on individual persons but rather on specific themes or subjects. For example, there will be titles throughout, say, “Sex,” in large white letters on black screen, followed by ten or fifteen minutes of images, thoughts, and impressions upon the subject, all woven into one another. Depending on the footage we get, I expect that most spoken word sequences will not continue for longer than 20 or 30 seconds, and some for no more than 2 or 3 seconds. The players’ thoughts will be woven together thus as part of some strange, telepathic template. For example, one player begins a sentence, another continues it, a third finishes it. Or one player begins a story, another takes over telling a different but similar story, and so on, finally back to the first player. This way, various stories are being told simultaneously, and all are connected by the final “realization” shared by all. (For example, a paranormal experience which convinces us that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in our philosophy.)

The film will take the form of a Map of the Hologrammatic Universe, the “Body of God,” and present the argument that Reality is made of Language. Each Player or Soul will be a path or doorway on this Map, a character within the Myth, or Game. The humans and objects and symbols presented within this context will be as it were the thread of pearls by which we navigate the Labyrinth. The interview questions will be designed to help the Player define him or herself in such archetypal, mythical (not quite personal) terms, for example, asking them to imagine themselves as an animal, a color, a body part, a planet, a natural disaster, and so forth, and juxtaposing the various responses. The God Game will proceed like so, as a partially obscure, largely surreal, wholly mysterious and absorbing stream of consciousness movie. Moving from one subject to another, returning to the same faces again and again, we will gradually come to know the players, even as they become more and more mysterious and enigmatic to us. Towards the end of the movie, perhaps in the last third, we will begin to segue into the death sequences. These will be visually distinguishable from the life stuff, either by being in black and white or else via digital effects, to create the sense of being in another world. In this world, the death world, Eternity, all is energy, all is perception. Each monad soul creates its own reality. The only limits are those of the Imagination. Everything is intensified here to a maddening degree. A grain of dust is infinite, a moment lasts forever.

To recapitulate, The God Game will consist of the following basic ingredients:

1) Players talking in their home environment, in close-ups, medium shots, long shots, from a varying assortment of angles. This will be intercut with (often using voice over):

2) Players in motion, on the street, their place of work or at play, in the pub, public transport, dancing, and so forth, basically out and about, living their lives. Some of these images will be overlaid with the actors talking; on other occasions, the player will be talking to the camera while in the scene, in the style of certain movies (Alfie, for example).

3) Abstract shots of articles, objects, and things from the player’s home and life environment, shot in extreme close ups so as to be unrecognizable, at least initially. These objects represent extensions of the Player’s personality, the things they cannot take with them. “I surround myself with things that look like me,” as the Michael Gira song goes. As such they will form part of the individual tapestry of each player’s persona/soul/universe.

4) Shots of things, objects, animals, events, relevant to a given monologue. E.g., shot of a bird flying for “I felt as free as a bird.” Beyond such rather obvious inserts (which will be used in the fast, almost subliminal editing style which Oliver Stone employed for Natural Born Killers), there will be more subtle, free-associative images, the meaning of which will be more obscure (e.g., person talking about frustration, shot of a hamster on a wheel or a man trying to get a chair up some stairs; for these shots we will go to stock footage from TV, anything in the public domain)

5) Digital effects. Impressionistic images and scenes from the Afterlife.

6) Titles. Since The God Game is to be an extremely impressionistic, free-flowing, non-liner, “right-brain” work, in order not to overly confuse or alienate the viewer there will be sporadically placed title cards, white letters on black screen, stating subjects to be covered; we will also be inserting relevant quotes, from the Bible, philosophers, and so forth (rather as in Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog). These may even be read aloud by the players, who will be asked to come up with some of their favorite quotes. This technique will provide relief whenever the viewer is starting to feel swept away in the rising tide of images, ideas, and associations.

7) Graphic images depicting specific symbols, such as the Arcana Mayor from the Tarot, the sephiroth of the Tree of Life (Kabbalah), astrological signs, sacred geometry, chakras, and other occult and/or religious iconography by which we give structure to the formless.

The desired effect of The God Game will be to create a sense of vertigo at the overwhelming nature of the human experience, the myriad, mutating points of view that make up the collective human experience and our multi-faceted, only partially consensus perception of “reality.” This reality, we will show, is by no means as fixed and final as we are inclined (and programmed) to believe. The film will strive to create an affinity between the audience and the Players, since we are all sharing a common experience, that of “the ship-wrecked,” hopelessly (if happily) lost in this sea of free associations. It will illustrate the manner in which each of us assembles and holds fast to his own meanings, her own truths, and that these truths are always relative, never absolute. They are like stepping stones that shift whenever we tread upon them. Finally, it will be seen that the personal search for “identity” is impossible until one accepts that there is no identity outside of this search. The fool rode his ox in search of oxen. The means for seeking and the thing that is sought are one and the same. Who, at last, is seeking this elusive “self”? God hides, and God seeks.

The Quest is all.

2009-04-23T12:29:00.000-07:00

Finally, after seven years procrastinating, The God Game series is going to be viewable online. Here's part one of Part One, "The Rebel Within "(with special thanks to an aeolian psychonaut, or two!). Alternatively you can watch all three parts in widescreen here

2009-04-20T21:08:00.000-07:00

Fragmented Self

Here's a recent interview I did as part of a Guardian project with the artist Mark Titchner

It covers various subjects, including schizophrenia, the environmental crisis, multiple personality disorder as relating to our moods, the personal self as Frankenstein's monster, Matrix Warrior, Fight Club, the primal self, mythic narratives of moden movies, and other juicy titbits.

2009-04-02T12:42:00.000-07:00

Agents of Chaos: Alan Moore's Alchemical Workshop, and an Authentic Miracle of a Movie

Warning: the following review is likely to be somewhat “biased”: When I first read Watchmen in my early twenties, it affected me as deeply as any work of fiction ever had—it changed my life. So my responses to the movie—as described below—are going to be more than a little colored by a highly personal connection to the source material.

Watchmen, the movie, directed by Zack Snyder and adapted by David Hayter and Alex Tze, sticks remarkably close to the source material, the ground-breaking graphic novel written by visionary author Alan Moore (whose name isn’t on the film) and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. Moore is a self-confessed magician and uncontested genius of comic books, and his twelve issue, 300+ page superhero epic is a stupendously ambitious work, not merely one of the great accomplishments of comic book writing, but an outstanding work of fiction in any field. (It made Time magazine’s 100 greatest novels—what more do you need to know?!)

When I first heard about the Watchmen movie, I was skeptical—to put it mildly. In fact, I was indifferent. And when I saw the first stills from the movie, I knew, absolutely knew, it was a bust, that they were turning it into something gaudy and noisy and messy and dumb—what Hollywood does best. Beyond all doubt, “the visionary director of 300”—a mind-numbingly vacuous live-action cartoon cum commercial for Spartan warfare—would debase the material by catering to the lowest sensibilities of the mass audience.

But within ten minutes or less of the movie, it’s clear that something else is happening. The film, like the graphic novel, starts with the murder of the Comedian. The perfect pre-credit sequence, it sums up the delicate resonance of the story by both keeping to genre conventions (for an opening action set-piece and plot-starting murder) while adding a whole new layer of emotional nuance and poignancy. The Comedian’s weary acceptance of his fate speaks volumes. He has been waiting for this moment, and he’s secretly relieved that it’s finally come. If he puts up a token resistance, it’s only because he doesn’t know how not to. He keeps up his end of the mythic narrative to the bitter end.

This is followed by the lovely, eerie frozen images of the credits, by which flesh and blood becomes comic book image, or vice versa. The credit sequence is inspired: both delightful—enchanting—and wryly amusing, it lets us know that we are in good hands and can settle back to enjoy the most fully satisfying and morally complex superhero enactment in the history of movies. Watchmen is an authentic miracle of a movie—the best of its kind (the philosophical action fantasy) since The Matrix came out ten years ago. (Plot wise, Watchmen is less ingenious than The Matrix, but morally it’s far more sophisticated.)

What’s really astonishing about this movie is that, in under three hours, it manages to capture not only the spirit of the novel but the full, epic breadth of its storyline. I’ve read the comic book at least a dozen times and yet I couldn’t even say which parts the movie misses out (except for the obvious, the parallel story within a story of “Tales of the Black Freighter”). The odds against a big budget Hollywood adaptation of a fiction masterpiece being almost 100% faithful, and at the same time managing to translate it whole into a new medium, are truly phantasmagorical.

Yet therein may be a problem: Watchmen is so completely true to its source that anyone not already enamored of the comic book may be unable to fully grok it. The storyline is straightforward enough, but the peculiar blend of social realism with the pulp roots of comics, and the idiosyncratic, poetic, magical genius of its creator, make Watchmen utterly unlike any superhero movie, or any movie, we've ever seen before. It’s a freak in the best sense of the word: a creature of unfathomable beauty so unique that some people may mistake it for ugliness. It creates its own aesthetic.

What’s perhaps most unusual about the film is its complete moral ambiguity, the way in which it steps entirely outside of the usual mythic paradigm of good and evil, spins off a parallel reality, and weaves its very own mythic narrative. Just as the graphic novel did within the comics field, Watchmen creates a new paradigm for the superhero movie. It’s a paradigm which I highly doubt other filmmakers will be willing, or able, to match, much less develop. There are no heroes in Watchmen, and no villains either. There are rather extraordinary (and extraordinarily flawed) human beings, struggling to make sense of a world in chaos, wrestling with their own complicity in that chaos. These are easily the richest and most affecting characters to ever grace what is ostensibly a fantasy movie. They are not just functions of the plot, as Neo and Morpheus are functions of the plot. As in all great writing, Watchmen’s story develops out of the characters and not vice versa. And these characters are nothing if not ambiguous.

The most dislikeable of the characters, Ozymandias, is driven by a seemingly pathological, philanthropist desire to save the world, and this he succeeds in doing. But we don’t admire him for it—we can’t admire him, because no end could justify these means. He’s an elitist, driven by intellect and a sense of his innate superiority, but devoid of heart. On the other hand, there is much to admire in the murderous vigilante Rorschach—who is all heart. His code of no compromise, his ruthless implacability, his deranged sense of justice, beneath which is a strange tenderness and a deeply wounded soul. Rorschach simply cares too much not to cause mayhem. Like Travis Bickle, his pain, rage and confusion spills out into the world—and he matches it atrocity for atrocity.

Dr. Manhattan, on the other hand, cares little for humanity’s plight: he’s moved beyond that. Was ever a god this chillingly disconnected, a superhero this utterly disaffected? Yet, as Billy Crudup (the only recognizable face in the movie) plays him, Dr. Manhattan is deeply touching. He’s human despite himself, and in his way he’s as lost a soul as the rest of these characters, because he is so utterly, completely alone. As written by Moore, Dr. Manhattan is the first fully believable depiction of a superhuman being—a god—in movies.

On the face of it, the Comedian is the most sheerly unpleasant of the characters: a rapist and child killer, the puppet of the military industrial complex (in a beautiful twist added by the moviemakers, he’s also JFK’s actual assassin). Yet, loathsome as his actions are, he doesn’t ever become hateful to us. None of the characters are defined—or limited— by their actions; they are far too alive for that. Moore’s genius is that he uses the very limited and limiting genre of the superhero comic as an arena—a sort of child’s playground, but also an alchemical workshop—to work through his philosophical themes and develop flesh and blood characters—like forging gold from lead. With Watchmen, he created a kind of feedback loop that expands the story from genre melodrama, into infinity—the realm of archetypes, of true myth. Paradoxically, by turning superhero archetypes into ordinary, believable human beings, ordinary beings are transformed into something extraordinary, something magical, transcendent.

Moore creates a world of impossible possibilities, and the movie recreates that world with breathtaking fidelity—the kind of loyalty and integrity that seems unimaginable in Hollywood, but that has somehow come to pass. Admittedly, the film does fail in one crucial area: that of mapping the endless series of synchronicities between images, words, events, that form the texture of the graphic novel, and that in a sense are what it’s really about. More than the story, or even the characters, Watchmen describes the texture and flow of mystery that living in a quantum universe entails, and what’s lacking in the film is the necessary plethora of fine details, of recurring motifs and themes. Besides that smiley face, I didn’t notice any repeating phenomena, and so the scenes aren’t woven together at this subtler, more esoteric level. The result, for those who aren’t familiar with the original story, may seem to be an almost straightforward, though complex, action movie; they may well miss the finer undercurrents moving beneath the gloriously gaudy surface.

There are other minor flaws: the sex scene to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is something we could certainly have done without; perhaps more seriously, the extreme violence seems out of place here, largely gratuitous—it doesn’t add anything and may even detract from the dreamlike quality of the story (though with the Rorschach scenes a degree of savagery is probably intrinsic to the material). And sometimes what works in the graphic novel can seem mannered and contrived on screen (such as Night Owl’s question, “Whatever happened to the American Dream?”). Moore’s dialogue is often self-consciously clever, loaded, and this works better when we can hear it in our heads and give it our own inflexion. Actors can be all at sea with these multi-layered lines. There are also areas, such as Rorschach’s revealing the abyss of his soul to the liberal-minded psychiatrist, that need more time to be developed, that are rushed and hence diminished, and the film would probably have worked better, been less choppy and more textured, if it had been allowed an additional ten or twenty minutes of screen time.

But despite these flaws, the sheer joy and originality of the source material fills every frame. It animates every performance with an exuberance, audacity, and poetry, that is unique to the genre. I haven’t even begun to analyze the schizophrenic subtext of this film—perhaps another day?—but I can honestly say that, in thirty years of movie-going, I have never been so pleasantly surprised by a movie. Watchmen has every imaginable reason to crash and burn. Yet somehow, against impossible odds, it takes flight.

Footnote: perusing some of the other reactions to this movie, it seems fair to say that it was made expressly for people who have read and loved the graphic novel, and to hell with everyone else. Right there is the real miracle

But - if you haven't read the source material, it may not work for you.

2009-03-15T19:20:00.000-07:00

2nd part of an excerpt from The Blood Poets, Chapter 6, "Crime & Censorship."

Let’s open those neural floodgates!
—Nicki Brand, Videodrome

Joan Smith writes, in “Speaking Up for Corpses,” “There are men for whom female terror, experienced at a safe distance, carries an erotic charge.” As one of these men myself, I would—for obvious reasons—feel more comfortable amending the above statement, and saying that there are men who are aware of the erotic charge that results from vicariously experiencing (or causing) female terror. And then, there are those men who, through denial, ignorance, fear or saintly purity (this last seems the least likely) are blissfully unaware of this sadistic streak in themselves. Then, among those of us (men) who are aware of this streak, and don’t mind admitting it, there are varying degrees to which we accept it, fight it, strive to understand or overcome it, indulge it or, God forbid, act upon it. Personally, while I’m in my confessional mode, I can say that I have never in my life come that close to striking a woman, much less terrorizing or brutalizing one, and I can honestly add that (be it virtue or sentimentality) I am incapable of killing an insect—one that’s minding its own business at least—without feeling pangs of regret. So—am I a violent person? Am I an evil, sick, depraved, and aberrant man? The moral majority and legions of decency would say, Yes, and resoundingly. But am I to be judged for my thoughts or by my actions? And if judged I am to be—who exactly is to judge me? Who among us is fit to cast the first stone?

I have come to accept, over the years, that imagination is not action, and that the rules and laws are different for thought than for deed, and that those who would most quickly judge another (either for his fanstasies or his acts) are generally those most reluctant to judge themselves, or even to look too closely at their own feelings—for fear of what they might find there. The easiest way to deal with the unpleasant truths about our society is to condemn them as “evil.” The easiest way to live with unpleasant truths about oneself is simply to ignore them, to whitewash them over with positive affirmations about decency and goodliness. Both these “methods” are based on cowardice—they depend on avoidance of the issue through self-deception, and in fact, they serve to reinforce the problem. The more “evil” the other guy is, the safer we can feel about our own souls (we’re pure enough to judge other people, obviously); the more decent and wholesome we pretend to be, on the other hand, the more we can puff ourselves up and point our fingers at the corruption around us. Society—decent, god-fearing society, that is—is made up of such fakers: it’s very maintenance depends upon fraudulence and facades. And so there’s nothing more terrifying, more dangerous, more “immoral,” to these pseudo-saints, these self-appointed guardians of the good and the right, than the possibility of evil being something common to us all. The slightest doubt in the immaculacy of their moral front and the whole thing collapses. And so the notions of compassion, of understanding, of tolerance, charity towards “sinners,” and the moral freedom which such charity implies, become unthinkable. And yet these qualities or virtues or concepts are the blood and soul—and the vocation—of every artist worthy of his station. To enhance our awareness as to the nature of life means being human, which is being fallible, which is succumbing to temptation once in a while, which is sin—the whole, murky question of evil.

A film that causes us, or at least helps us, to identify with a killer—whether to increase our compassion for evil or merely to diminish our pity for the victims—is not an immoral work, but a deeply moral one. For it forces us to assume responsibility for this evil (instead of simply feeling pity for the victim), which is the first, essential step towards understanding it, and perhaps, in time, correcting it. At the very least, it may force us to question our eagerness to judge and condemn what we cannot understand; and maybe, just maybe, it will cause us to pause in our moral outrage for a moment, and lay down our stones.

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.
—David Cronenberg, Cronenberg on Cronenberg

In the above interview from Chris Rodley’s book, Cronenberg continues:

Suppressing everything one might think of as potentially dangerous, explosive or provocative would not prevent a true psychotic from finding something that will trigger his own particular psychosis. For those of us who are normal, and who understand the difference between reality and fantasy, play, illusion—as most children do—there is enough distance and balance. It’s innate. . . . It’s an endless struggle between those who are basically fearful and mistrustful of human nature—and they have ample proof that their version of humanity is right—and those who feel that a truly free society is possible, somewhere. It’s conceivable that in the near future there won’t be anything approaching a free society anywhere. That’s more than possible. Which is why I resist, in any small way I can, any attempts . . . to increase censorship.

Marx wrote somewhere that the fight against capitalism begins with “the weapons of criticism and the criticism of weapons.” If so, then the triumph of totalitarianism begins with the censorship of crime and the crime of censorship. One wonders about the mass hysteria of the so-called “moral majority” over the “dangers” of violent movies and their effects on children; how they cry out to protect the little ones from “exposure” to such evil, corrupting material, such vile and pernicious images. Where is all this hysteria leading? Is it really motivated by a simple—if misguided—urge to protect the innocent; or is it that old wolf in sheep’s clothing again, crying “wolf,” in order to distract the sheep’s attention from its own lascivious designs? To blame the world’s ills and the corruption of our children on a handful of “nasty” movies seems to me to go beyond mere idiocy, and to approach dangerously close to totalitarian thinking.

Obviously you can’t stop crime by censorship, all you can do is limit the public’s exposure to it, and by extension, its awareness of it. In which case—seeing as how awareness is the only defense we have against crime, and seeing as how aberrational activity (or “evil”) is notoriously wont to thrive and bloom—like fungus—in the darkness of ignorance and denial, then this “protection” policy is worse than useless—it’s downright deadly. Censorship is crime, then, of the most pernicious and indefensible kind—crime against freedom, against truth, and our right to possess it, no matter how “harmful” it may be (and, as every poet knows, truth that’s worth its “salt” is the most dangerous thing there is).

It is impossible to protect children from certain cultural artifacts without, on the one hand, restricting and censoring the culture itself, and, on the other hand, restricting the behaviour—the freedom—not only of children but of adults as well. To go to such plainly fascistic extremes on the off-chance that a movie once in a while causes a crime would strike me as criminally insane, if it wasn’t part of an apparently all-too-sanely-motivated “madness” (though nonetheless criminal for that). How is it that these irate and indignant persons can get so worked up about a few bloody videos—or even a few savage crimes—and be apparently indifferent to the war, starvation and encroaching social tyranny which are an instrinsic part of this very order which they are striving to protect? Never mind that their measures look set to make such ideas as free speech and right-of-choice just faded memories of the past; how is it that these spokespeople can pretend to know, beyond any doubt, what no psychologist or social scientist in the field has been able to establish: namely, the exact manner and degree to which violence in the arts encourages, or even causes, real violence? And why is the question never raised as to the possibility of actual violence—as mediated through the news and other documentary programs—also having such effects? Or children’s cartoons; or Budweiser commercials? How come no one suggests banning TV itself, and going straight to the root of the problem?

The “video nasty” is the bugaboo beloved of the kind of partiarchal, literal-minded petty tyrants that thrive on expressions of moral outrage and the feelings of self-importance which they derive from them. It’s another scapegoat, and the skapegoat is like the patsy—it really doesn’t matter what it is, or does, or says, so long as it is there, available, for the sacrifice. It seems to me that those who “do battle with the devil” are really doing the devil’s work—pouring gasoline on the blaze, as it were. The indignation, the audacity, and the degree of arrogance which this interfering mob displays strikes me as a kind of violence itself, equally as reprehensible and as corrupting as the kind they claim to be opposing, as well as being every bit as “nasty.” In its own way it’s even nastier, because it hides its meanness and small-mindedness behind false smiles and troubled frowns, and words like “decency” and “innocence” and “morality.”

When a film like Child’s Play III or Natural Born Killers is somehow found—however tenuously and spuriously—to have some fleeting connection to a real-life crime, the media, like one single rabid beast, pounces upon the chosen scapegoat and proceeds to tear it to shreds, with all the slavering, sadistic relish of Hannibal Lecter. But when a film like The Lion King is established, more or less conclusively, to have incited, or at least inspired, a child to commit suicide, this same beast barely stirs from its slumber. The boy in question (the case is described in Karl French’s Screen Violence) was Imtiaz Ahmed, and wrote in his farewell note: “I am going to die because I want to be a Lion King. Mom and Dad please put The Lion King film in my grave with me.” He was found hanging from a tree near his home in Stoke on Trent, England; the parents honored his last wish. It doesn’t matter whether or not The Lion King really did drive a boy to kill himself (I’m every bit as inclined to doubt this as all the other claims)—the point is that the evidence here was far stronger than the evidence for any video nasty-related crime, but seeing as the proverbial scapegoat was not involved, and it would be pretty hard for the moral majority to get all puffed up and indignant over a Disney film without looking exactly like the facile dunderheads that they are, the mob kept quiet, and waited patiently for the next scapegoat to come along.

The hysteria over video nasties and movie violence in general is the worst kind of false alarm—it’s not only crying wolf (because when an actual case does come along, who will believe it?), but a deliberate attempt to blind the public to the true dangers facing them, dangers represented not by the forces of anarchy or artistic irresponsibilty, but by the forces of censorship and control. The “mob” wants to rule not only our actions and our decisions, but our thoughts and feelings and our desires also. They want to protect our own children from us, and in turn protect us from ourselves, from our own negligence or faulty judgment or bad taste, or whatever is they consider us guilty of.

The obvious question here is—who asked them to? The worst kind of tyrant is the tyrant that elects itself to rule. And the majority that declares itself to be moral simply because it is legion, the people’s own consensus of tyranny, amounts to nothing less than the rule of the mob.

2009-03-11T10:07:00.000-07:00

Schizo Cover

Just got this cover image from the publishers, for the new book, quite happy with it, mercifully. It's a poignant image from a great schizo movie, and probably Willis' best performance. Something very touching about the image of this great world-saving action hero in such a childlike pose - fully caught up in the schizophrenic journey, way over his head but still standing tall!

Kind of how I've been feeling of late, actually.

2009-02-09T19:02:00.000-08:00

The Secret Life of Movies (Schizo Cinema)

Here's an interview I did for the upcoming book.

What prompted you to write The Secret Life of Movies?

I started the book back in 2000, and I wanted to write a follow up to The Blood Poets, which was about savagery and violence in American movies. The reason I wrote about violence was simple: I wanted a thesis that would include all my favorite movies, and I soon realized that the common thread running through them was violence, destruction. As I set about writing the book, I found out a lot about why I liked certain movies, and about the basic appeal of vicariously experiencing, via movies, things we would otherwise be careful to avoid in real life. If you narrowed it down to one thing, it would be “intensity.” Movies provide the kind of intensity which we would only experience in real life if we were in crisis, when such experiences tend to be traumatic; but in movies, as in Greek tragedy, they are potentially cathartic. During the process of writing The Blood Poets, then, I discovered a lot about the movies I liked and why I liked them, and therefore about my own psyche. These were movies I had seen many times, and in the process of writing about them, looking for ways to develop my thesis, it opened up a Pandora’s Box. I found out that, by writing about movies, I was able to go into realms of the psyche and of society that I normally wouldn’t have gone into. This gave me a clue: movies were like windows onto the collective psyche. The things I liked about movies at a conscious level were a lot less revealing than what appealed to me at an unconscious level.

That gave me the idea of the occult text. A lot of movies seem to be about fictional scenarios, but actually they are archetypal. Like myths, they allow us to uncover and map areas of the psyche that are otherwise hidden from us. If we scratch the surface of a sci-fi movie or a horror movie, for example, we find that they are using the same archetypes as ancient myths, and that they serve as a kind of psychological blueprint. But movies are unlike myths, in the sense that they are superficially much more sophisticated, more “realistic.” Even sci-fi or horror movies are more realistic than ancient myths, which often aren’t populated by human beings at all, and which are full of impossible possibilities. Even fantasy movies attempt to be realistic, and when they aren’t they are either considered to be kids’ movies or just bad ones. The realism of popular entertainment means that the mythic function of movies is more hidden, it gets suppressed through the process of conceiving and making the movie, to the point that even the filmmakers usually aren’t aware of it. Mythmakers were generally aware of what they were doing, of giving coded information in the form of a narrative so that the average person could enjoy the story, while “initiates” could read it in a more abstract way, as a mythic blueprint. But movies are different.

Movies are like myths at a different stage in our society, a stage when we are more ego-developed beings, when we have a sense of identity that is more rigid, and so our sense of reality is also more rigid. So we require our myths to be more realistic as well. We have disconnected from our subconscious, basically, and so movies have to be more covert in their mythic unfolding. It was only by analyzing movies for The Blood Poets that I found out about this occult text. It intrigued me, because it was like movies themselves had an unconscious. The filmmakers obviously had an unconscious, but unlike mythmakers they were not working from it—to some extent, perhaps, but not entirely. They might be aware of the subtext or they might not, but even if they were aware of it, there would be a still deeper subtext, and that was where the real juice was. Essentially, I was drawn then to look at movies not only that had hidden texts (all movies do), but that dealt with the unconscious in an overt fashion, and with the conflict between the conscious and unconscious mind of the protagonist. That drew me naturally to the idea of madness, and specifically schizophrenia: the idea that there could be a conflict between one’s perception of self and one’s reality, between what one consciously believed was real and what one unconsciously felt was true. Schizophrenia is to do with a splitting of the self from the environment, so that the self doesn’t feel a part of environment. You could even say that the more the ego develops, the deeper schizophrenia becomes; in which case, those diagnosed as schizophrenics and who experience a loss of identity are in a sense less schizophrenic than the rest of us—because they are more acutely aware of their condition. As I looked into the subject more, or rather as I was writing about it, I realized that this state paralleled the act of watching a movie itself: a disconnection from the reality we are seeing (on the screen), as well as from our immediate environment (the theater or living room). That’s the pleasure of movies – to be emotionally involved in a surrogate reality without having to take part in it. So the pleasure of movies—and the reason violent or tragic movies are often cathartic— relates to the schizophrenic nature of watching movies, the possibility of observing our environment without being a part of it. This is the schizophrenic experience: through the act of watching movies, one ceases to exist as a self.

Isn’t there a mystic tradition similar to this idea, that of dissociating from objective experience to view one’s life from the outside, i.e., “as a movie”?

That was also what I was looking for, the shamanic dimension of movies, that they shape our perception, which is a shamanic method. And also the parallels between schizophrenia and experiences of other realities. This idea brings it back to myth again, to ancient myths. They all tie in. The violence in a sense related to the symptoms: in Blood Poets, I was analyzing the symptoms and following them to the condition, which led me to a diagnosis, that of schizophrenia, the cut-off of the mind/identity from the physical world, which is schizophrenia in its most basic form. You could say that, having described the symptoms, I wanted to describe the condition itself, and even if possible to find a cure. That became The Secret Life of Movies. It was an attempt to use movies more deliberately, as a way to diagnose a culture. Movies are made by a collective of individuals to meet the demands of a whole population, so what we are seeing is not informed by an individual’s unconscious but by the collective unconscious. Movies are being shaped by collective dreams through the plastic medium of film. They are a shamanic tool that’s being used unconsciously, at least at this time. (There are cases where this tool is being used consciously, films like The Matrix or Fight Club that actually become shamanic experiences because the unconscious and conscious minds of the filmmakers are working together, and so text and subtext are intertwined rather than at odds.) What writing this book entailed, then, was allowing movies their occult function as collective dreams, dreams that, if analyzed, provide information in symbolic form as to the condition of society and of the species. It’s rather like taking a blood sample, a psychic blood sample from the collective unconscious. By looking at movies, we can find out what condition the system, our culture and society, is in.

So your book presumably draws on the work of Carl Jung?

Not directly no, but it’s certainly informed by it. Jung was a psychologist as a shaman, or vice versa. He entered the field of psychology realizing that it was actually the same field that shamans had worked in for thousands of years. Psychology is a science in that it follows and maps principals, conditions, that to a certain extend are empirical, universal. The shadow, the anima and animus, and suchlike, these are principals that apply to absolutely everyone on the planet, so far as we know at least. So it’s a science, and it can be used like a science; but since it’s the science of the psyche, it’s not a hard science but a soft one. It requires imagination and creativity, both to understand and to apply it. Jung was an alchemist who described his practices in the terms of a budding new science called psychology.

So although the basic idea of this book can be compared to psychology and dream analysis, that’s really just a way to update it into terms the modern, rational person can understand. A more primitive or “superstitious” mindset could understand this book’s premise more easily, since the “superstitious” mindset is also more open to the realities of the psyche, for example, to the idea that our whole culture could be a sort of collective dream, “the imagination of God,” say, or the perspective of an animistic universe, a living conscious system. These ideas are acceptable to a primitive understanding without resorting to psychological terms. Within that frame of reference, then, what I’m doing predates psychology: it’s a form of scrying, based on the understanding that nothing in nature is random. Whether it’s goat’s entrails, tea leaves floating in a cup, an egg in a glass of water, or whatever, the patterns these things create is a coded language that can be deciphered, according to the present moment, to find out whatever the shaman wants to find out. This is what myths are, except that myths are consciously designed in this way by sorcerers or shamans so that others of their kind will recognize them. Movies are both less and more pure than that. Being shaped by the unconscious makes them more pure, but they are also being shaped by conscious agendas of commerce, propaganda, popular taste, and so forth, agendas which overlay the work, rather like a person who edits their dreams to make them more “wholesome” or entertaining. Movies have been heavily edited and filtered, but the basic components still come from the unconscious , because everything does. So as long as you can sift through the noise and get to the signal, you can still use them to diagnose; and even the noise can be diagnosed, too, because we can see the ways in which we are blocking out our unconscious.

So in writing this book you are acting in the manner of a contemporary shaman?

Well, it’s an armchair shaman, isn’t it, because I’m just watching movies and writing books. So far as I apply what I write to my own life, that would be shamanic.

But presumably one of the functions of the shaman is to steer the community into healthier, more integrated directions?

I don’t know if that’s one of their functions. Shamans tend to live on the outskirts of town and work one-on-one with sick people. I don’t think they tend to go and preach to the community. They might give them guidance if there was a catastrophe or some such, but I think that they are generally marginalized even by the culture that depends on them for healing. I would say that they only have the influence that you are referring to when people are desperate enough to actively seek them out, and the same probably applies to what I’m doing.

So how do you prevent your subjective perception of films from interfering with your objective analysis of the culture?

I don’t. The more wholly subjective you can be, the more objective you are.

That seems counter-intuitive.

It’s counter-rational, perhaps, but not counter-intuitive. But it would be impossible to explain rationally without going into shamanic terms, or at least Jungian psychology, which academics are not generally open to.

But surely filmmakers are?

Some of them perhaps. If you think of a collective unconscious, by definition it is shared, so that means our own unconscious is part of the collective. So anything that communicates from the unconscious, even though in the process of writing a book or making a film it passes through the conscious mind and is shaped by it, it is still sourced in the collective unconscious. This means it has a dimension, an under layer, of universal or so-called “objective” reality. So if we allow ourselves to be fully in our subjective experience, both of reality and of ourselves, then we are not blocking it to the same extent with futile attempts to be “objective.” We are dropping into the unconscious state, and so objectifying the subjective, as it were. By allowing our subjective experience of conscious reality to deepen, we are allowing it to overlap with our unconscious, which is collectively subjective, let’s say, and therefore is “objective.”

Like a herd of cats?

There’s no such thing as a herd of cats.

Exactly.

Yes, well. The idea is to surrender one’s subjective point of view rather than surrendering to it. But to surrender it, you have to surrender to it first of all. But it must be consciously. If it's done unconsciously, it leads to ego inflation. Consciously surrendering to the subjective experience is alchemy, Jung’s individuation, which is recognizing that one’s conscious mind is only a small, superficial aspect of one’s whole psyche. If you consciously surrender to your subjective view of things, it’s like going into dream while awake, like lucid dreaming. In ordinary dreams, you forget you are dreaming and your dream takes over, your whole environment becomes you and you become your environment, there’s no split-off. Again, it’s schizophrenia, loss of self. In lucid dreaming, you enter your environment consciously so you are aware there’s a separation, and yet it’s not like ordinary consensus because you are aware that you are creating your reality. At that point, you can take responsibility for it and start to read the images, the symbols of your dream life, and to use them alchemically, for individuation. If you are unconsciously surrendering, then you don’t have that option.

So what you’ve done is you’ve viewed these films in the manner of lucid dreaming?

Well, the dreams are somebody else’s dreams, so I can’t do that. I view the films as a Jungian analyst would listen to a patient’s dreams. The lucid dreaming element comes in when I am using the information of these collective dreams—the movies— in my own daily life.

So if you continue on this course, ultimately you will arrive at a project that would be more or less incomprehensible to the rational mind?

Like James Joyce? I hope not. (pause) Life as theatre is the end to which we are evolving, at which point we would become playwrights and play actors and directors in our own lives, alchemists. We will become that, we will turn ourselves into fiction. It’s inevitable. We will eventually allow ourselves to realize ourselves as narratives, seeing as that is what we already are, and cease to cling to the illusion of being a leading player in the narrative. It’s a paradox, but by insisting on being the lead player, we become puppets. By allowing ourselves to become the story, we can attain a level of surrender and begin co-authoring our stories. In our present culture, this is a religious or mystical perspective, and hasn’t evolved into one that is scientific or shamanic, and therefore practicable. It can only be talked about under the rather flimsy guise of “faith.”

We are stories, that’s all we are. Every narrative that we are not surrendered to as a co-creator, that hasn’t been specifically shaped by our perception, or that hasn’t shaped who we are from birth, all of these narratives must be discarded. That means every narrative save our own. Everything that has come from elsewhere, our social, cultural, racial and religious conditioning, is just crust, other people’s imposed narratives. Unless we can turn these other narratives into an element of our own narrative, an integral part of it just as our mother and father are an integral part of it, unless we can live the truth rather than simply pay lip service to it, these external narratives are all equally worthless to us.

© Michelle Fornasier

2009-02-04T16:00:00.000-08:00

Sex, War, and TV Advertising

Part One of an excerpt from The Blood Poets, Chapter 6, "Crime & Censorship," about the Cronenberg film Videodrome. (Just to keep this blog happening, while i organize the next project--watch this space!)

Sex and death have commingled—one inseparable impulse. Risk feeds sensation—sensation makes risk acceptable. We’re headed towards . . . something we’d perhaps do better to avoid.
—Frank Black, in the understatement of the “Millennium”

In his essay, “Hollywood’s Four Big Lies,”29 Michael Medved cites “Epidemiologist Brando Centerwall of the University of Washington,” and his “exhaustive studies for the American Medical Association,” which assert that “without TV there would be 10,000 fewer murders per year in the U.S., 70,000 fewer rapes and 700,000 fewer assaults.” Medved is an old-style hysteria-monger with little respect for the finer points of debate, but I am personally inclined to accept the implications of these figures (if not the figures themselves, which are obviously impossible to gauge). The basic claim seems perfectly feasible to me, if not actually certain. The statement states, however, “without TV,” and not “without TV violence,” and my inclination—or intuition—is to accept that TV itself, as a psychological tool for social control, has a profound effect upon the individual, and on society at large. It may be, then, that part of this effect includes an augmentation of aggressive behaviour and antisocial activity (in a word, violence). As to whether a “Faces of Death” documentary, an episode of “Millennium,” or a thirty-second commercial for Budweiser is more or less responsible for this “effect,” that is something that is more open to question. My feeling is that TV itself—simply by being switched on (but most especially when the material emitted is by nature numbing, repetitive, and of such a low standard of intelligence and artistry that it serves as little more than an insult to the individual)—creates in the viewer a kind of funk, a trancelike state, which in turn makes him or her susceptible to all kinds of conditioning; such conditioning may include conditioning towards aggressive or violent behavior. Hence, scenes of murder, rape, mutilation etc, may indeed have a harmful effect upon the TV viewer, but only because they are part of a general conditioning process performed by television itself.

It seems to me that viewing violence, per se, even the crude, exploitative violence of TV shows or Hollywood action pictures, does not actually cause the viewer to become worked up or in any way more aggressive. On the contrary, it is likely to serve vicariously as a release or outlet for his or her feelings of anger and aggression.30 On the other hand, asinine commercials that deliberately arouse the viewer’s sexual desires simply in order to sell some worthless product or another, simultaneously frustrate these desires (after all we can’t, like Max Renn in Videodrome, fuck the TV) while causing the viewer to feel inadequate or impotent for lacking the various products that would make us attractive to the opposite sex. All this I think is almost bound to have a negative effect upon the viewer. Feelings of frustration, resentment, contempt, hostility, and outright rage, are likely to be aroused in us for being so ruthlessly and cynically manipulated. If this viewer is then bombarded with images of rape and torture and what-have-you, then it becomes altogether less fanciful to imagine that he might just (if already somewhat inclined in this direction) put two and two together and come up with five, begin to get “ideas”—ideas that, like poor Max’s “hallucinations,” do not originate in his own head.

Joseph Natoli writes—in his study of postmodernism and the movies Speeding to the Millennium (p. 96)—how, “in a culture working hard to link personal identity with consumption, people will enact this connection by any means, fair or foul.” He argues that, seeing as the greater part of the populace is, and must be, incapable of attaining the consumer dream dangled under their noses, at least a portion of them will inevitably resort to any means at all to make a grab for their rightful piece of the pie. “Frustrated, with violence looming, an anger sets in that is itself without mind. . . That undiagnosed anger . . . is there to be directed, to be given a ‘mind.’. . . Under this light, we are all distracted to the staging of nightmares of depravity.”
With slightly less of an alarmist tone, over thirty years earlier, Norman Mailer discussed the subject with Playboy magazine (December 1961, “Petty Notes on Some Sex in America”):

There’s a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business word is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements. . . . I think this bad “art” that one gets in the mass media, on television, in the movies, does the nation far more harm than if one were to remove all controls from pornogrpahy and obscenity. Being half excited and half frustrated leads to violence. Whenever one is aroused sexually and doesn’t find a consummation, the sex in one’s veins turns literally to violence.

The links between sex and violence have been more or less established I think, and anyone who has ever lived in a big city knows that late Saturday night is not generally a good time to be out and about on your own. Drunken kids coming home without a “score” will express their libidinous frustration any way they can, and violence, in such circumtances, is clearly an “alternative” means of expression to sex. If pornography—and especially soft-porn advertising—arouses primal desires (latent energy) in young men who have no way to satisfy these desires, then there’s a good chance this latent energy will find some other way of getting out. So, it stands to reason that excess exposure to pornography, and to sexually provocative imagery in advertising and the like, without the corresponding outlet being available, can only engender sexual frustration. And in the era of AIDS the gulf between demand and supply is growing ever wider: You can look but you can’t touch is the message on the hot lips of most every “babe” whose luscious form adorns subway walls and billboards throughout the urban world. All this false stimulation leads inevitably to an excess of undirected, hence frustrated, male sexual energy. And what do you do with all that energy? You go to war.

All this is of course an unpardonable diversion from the basic point, which is that certain imagery has a powerful capacity to invoke emotions in the viewer, and that once these emotions are invoked, subsequent imagery might serve to direct the release of these emotions (and they will be released: one way or another boiling water has to let off steam). And although it’s far-fetched to say that this movie or that TV show caused that crime or this tragedy, I don’t think it’s far-fetched to suggest that TV in general, and a large majority of factory-line movies—is of such execrably low quality that it does invoke a feeling of anger and disgust in the public, however unconscious such feelings may be. This disgust and contempt and unacknowledged hostility may even be directly (if only partially) related to the ever-increasing demand for more screen violence, such violence being the only way to satisfy—or release—this growing sense of hostility against the medium itself.

Everybody knows that TV is addictive; few people bother to ask just why, considering that it is also practically unwatchable. Obviously the standard of TV programs has nothing to do with their popularity—it’s not the programs that are addictive (even people who watch a lot of TV will often admit to feeling contempt it), it is the act of watching itself that somehow hooks us. The reason is—I believe—that TV quite literally casts a kind of spell upon us.33 And if watching television (and, to a lesser extent, movies) is roughly equivalent to falling into a hypnotic trance, it begins to make a scary kind of sense—TV is the ultimate drug (or penultimate perhaps, with virtual reality just around the corner) to which we are all hooked. It sucks us into its world and makes us forget about everything else outside it, and as such, TV (as Gus van Sant’s To Die For satirizes) has indeed become a new kind of reality for us. And in the world of TV, which is after all a make-believe world (not myth- but kitsch-making)—anything goes. Sensation is the only real requisite, and even there the sensation doesn’t necessarily have to be ours: if the laughtrack is loud enough, we may not even notice that we’re not laughing ourselves (or else, we laugh despite ourselves, even though nothing funny is going on). If TV tells us rape and mutilation is “cool,” the latest thing—hell, that’s OK! It’s only entertainment. Our responses are becoming as much a part of the “package” as everything else; we’re lost on a laugh-track, running on an infinity loop to nowhere. So when Max Renn gets hooked on the snuff torture movies coming out of his TV set, he’s no different from the rest of us. He’s curious to know where they’re coming from, sure, but only so he can buy shares in the business. He is ready and eager to be seduced, because the TV he’s been getting just can’t cut it for him anymore—he needs a new sensation: we all need a new sensation. “Millennium” has answered this demand to some extent, just as “Twin Peaks” did before it, and “The X-Files,” but the thing about sensation for sensation’s sake—it’s a desensitizing process. We need always a little more just to feel anything at all.

Max Renn is too jaded to question the moral implications of what he’s getting into—he knows he’s going too deep, but he doesn’t care. Humanity’s lost its allure anyhow, so he doesn’t really have anything else to lose. And when “the new flesh” takes over (and he becomes an organic video recorder), it’s like reverse possession—the machine is in the beast, and a new race of TV babies is already in the can. It might be something we’d have done better to avoid.

2008-12-15T11:13:00.000-08:00

What Price Civilization? (From Schizo Cinema)

In A Prisoner of Sex, Norman Mailer wrote that paranoia was nothing less than belief in the devil. If so, then Religion, as collectively embraced by the masses, is faith that God is better, bigger, and stronger than the devil. It functions as a sop and a comfort for our ever-encroaching terror and despair in the face of the world, a tonic for that sinking feeling that the devil has gotten the upper hand. Seen in this light, movies serve a dual purpose. They may disclose unpalatable truths to us indirectly and thereby allow our unconscious necessary expression. But they may also cover up these truths, placating us with skillfully fabricated lies designed to create the very opposite impression: that everything is fine, that nothing has really changed, that all this madness is just a passing phase and love will conquer in the end. (It ought to be noted that the conclusion of these saccharine movies need not be false, only the means by which they arrive at it.) The sap-headed affirmations of these old, long-outmoded values (of sentimental Hollywood of the ’80s and ’90s), as well as the cynical brutalism of action movies, served to suppress and divert the growing sense of paranoia and schizophrenia in society. The fact that 90% of these movies are not only dubious vehicles for propaganda but thoroughly lousy movies only confirms this suspicion.

Since the schizophrenic experience has always been, now more than ever, the closest equivalent to the artistic one—that of the creative individual in an increasingly machine-like world—it follows that interesting and challenging movies are invariably also subversive ones, ones that address, and effectively partake of (with the awareness of the artist), the madness in which we live. This doesn’t mean they can’t have a religious or life-affirming dimension; one of the best of these recent movies (The Matrix) owes much of its appeal precisely to such a dimension. But as a general rule, the schizophrenic movie, like the schizophrenic individual, is driven into a corner by the overwhelming nature of its impressions, and takes refuge in societal rules based, above all, on a denial of soul. What better way for the schizo to protect his soul than to deny he has one, that such an idea even exists? The schizophrenic is tormented only secondarily by the world in which he lives; what torments him first and foremost is his own psyche. By rejecting the one—the world—he effectively is left with the other—his soul. Finding this to be the true source of his torment, he naturally rejects this also. As a result, the religion of our time—a schizophrenic time in which few values can be seen to have value—is nihilism. This is the chosen belief system of the younger generation: to reject all beliefs whatsoever. It is the ultimate expression of the postmodern, fragmented, schizophrenic experience, of paranoia beyond paranoia: to deny everything as not only worthless and meaningless, but as unreal. With movies like The Matrix and Fight Club, the schizophrenic experience has come into its own.

If 1999 was the watershed year for schizo cinema (Being John Malkovich, Bringing Out the Dead, Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty, Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, The Insider, Ghost Dog, The Sixth Sense, Sleepy Hollow, Run Lola Run, Boys Don’t Cry, Man on the Moon), the years since have also afforded a surprising wealth of movies that describe, to varying degrees of success, the schizophrenic experience. Memento, Requiem for a Dream, Gladiator, Waking Life, Mulholland Drive, The Pledge, Prozac Nation, Julian Donkeyboy, A Beautiful Mind, Insomnia, Adaptation, In America, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Punch-Drunk Love, 21 Grams, The Mothman Prophecies, The Others, Matchstick Men, Mystic River, United States of Leland, The Corporation, The Singing Detective, Around the Bend, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Aviator, I Heart Huckabees, Closer, Sin City, The Libertine, Matador, Mirrormask, Down in the Valley, Harsh Times, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Edmund, V for Vendetta, Capote, A Scanner Darkly, Alpha Dog, The Fountain, Stranger Than Fiction, The Departed, The Hoax, Inland Empire, Michael Clayton, You Kill Me, Reign Over Me, Lars and the Real Girl, There Will Be Blood, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Synecdoche New York, The Changeling, Choke, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, even silly dreck like Mr. Brooks and Awake or mainstream pulp like X2, Dark Knight, and Watchmen, are all doing their best to represent the ever-deepening split in the collective psyche between haves and have-nots, sane and insane, disempowered mass and super-powered elite, young and old, believer and non-believer, ignorant and informed, deluded and disillusioned, paranoid and complacent. They may not be offering up a cure, but they are doing an excellent job of deepening the diagnosis.

If, as Freud taught us, Civilization = Repression, there are three questions we may wish to ask.

First: Repression of What?

Second: Repression How?

Third: What Price Civilization?

The first consideration is crucial, since there are inarguably things that need to be repressed, if only for the time being (while other, more pressing things are acknowledged), and at least if civilization is to continue existing at all (a question which will be addressed subsequently). Ergo, some repression is worse than others. The urge to kill our fellow men when they annoy us, it might be argued, is something that needs to be repressed. Which brings us to the second question: How?

This is precisely where (and why) the arts come in, be they fine or base, blessed vision or damned advertising. The arts, and the various bastard media technologies they have spawned (devil’s tools all, from the printing press to virtual reality), possess an authority in our lives that we rarely, if ever, become aware of (they work best when they work surreptitiously). In the beginning was the word, and the word was a command (though today it is more of a subliminal suggestion). Thou shalt not kill, for starters. In movies, it’s clearly a different affair; in movies, killing is not only acceptable, it’s the best way to get ahead. This is not a million miles away from the Law of the Jungle: “kill or be killed.”

If movies “help” us to repress our (now outmoded) killing instinct, they do so at a price. No instinct can be repressed without being rechanneled. There is always a safety valve, and in the last forty years, movies have served as a safety valve for the violence in civilized man’s soul probably more than any other single factor save sports. What is really being suppressed is not the killing but the sexual impulse, however. That is really all there is—in animal man—to be suppressed. Presumably this accounts for why our violent fantasies have become so twisted, our sexual fantasies so violent. Schizophrenia is the price of cutting ourselves off from our life force. By such a reckoning, civilization comes to be seen as the primary blight upon the schizophrenic (would-be shamanic) mind. Which brings us to the third question.

The product of repressing humans’ (animal) sexual nature was civilization. The price of civilization, for the animal man, is schizophrenia: a splitting off from the reality of our sexuality. The only sane conclusion for the schizophrenic, at this point, is that civilization itself is unreal. As in The Matrix and Fight Club, such a realization banishes all inhibitions, for better or for worse, for sorcery or savagery. The schizo is released from bondage, to become One, in the precise moment that civilization collapses around him. That is the solution, but it is also the price. Where we go from here is anyone’s guess.

2008-12-14T17:02:00.000-08:00

See Humatons in Action: Derren Brown at the Shopping Mall

If you ever doubted how the matrix gets us to "raise our hands" and vote for slavery, here's the living proof.

2008-12-10T23:32:00.000-08:00

I will be posting also at this blog here, currently an excerpt from The Blood Poets

2008-12-09T14:13:00.001-08:00

If anyone is still visiting this blog, apologies for going AWOL, it's a long story and i won't bore you with it. Bottom line is my blogging activities have been suspended due mostly to real-world demands taking over. However, there are a couple of things to mention. I completed a film this year, called Being the One: Document of a Delusion about my daze as "the One" back in 2002/3, before, during, and after writing Matrix Warrior. The film was submitted to Sundance and Slamdance as a full, 99 min feature, but since then I have edited it down to 44 minutes. Both festivals have recently rejected the movie, but it is in the process of being included at IMDB.com (International Movie Database) as a legitimate movie, so that's something I guess.

Actually, I was in two minds about submitting this pseudo-documentary about the time when I pretended to believe that I was the one in order to make a movie and get to believe that i was only pretending to be the One (??)... so it was with relief more than disappointment that I received the rejection.

As any followers of my writings know, the Matrix sequels shattered whatever true illusions I had, and the movie is a document of the time before the bubble burst and the penny dropped (if everyone is the One, no one is the One). I don't know if Being the One will be viewable online anytime soon, much less find a distributor, but I thought I'd let y'all know - that is if there's anyone out there listening still.

The other news is that I am publishing a new book next year, my "long-awaited" (ho ho) follow-up to Blood Poets, which I actually wrote back in 2000 but which has taken this long to find a publisher (McFarlane Press). It was orginally called Schizo Cinema: The Occult Text in American Movies, then became The Secret Life of Movies, and now looks to be something like Schizophrenic & Shamanic Journeys in American Cinema. More about that later, but it should be coming out around Autumn of 2009, so watch this space for updates.

Finally, a pleasant little development which is the ostensible inspiration for my re-emergence here: today I was contacted by Susan Marie Kovalinksy, who found out about my work through Anthony Peake's blog (mentioned at a previous post). Susan was researching material for her own blog, Musing in Obama's America (see here), and happened upon some political blog in which, apparently, I was quoted by someone (on Phil K. Dick). This led to her finding out about The Blood Poets and inviting me to write at her blog, specifically about that work, which she thinks may be relevant to her own analyses of current US culture & politics.

That's all. If anyone's out there, let me know.

2008-06-12T08:41:00.000-07:00

Earth Mercy
How I Survived the Mountains of Navarra

(This is from old journal, April 1997, when I spent a couple of weeks living in the mountains of Navrra, Spain, with my cat Gobelina.)

Up above the world, having reached Pyramid Point, as it shall henceforth be known. Having spotted a couple of “UFOs” (I couldn’t identify them), I lay down for some circle breathing. Sun at the zenith now.

It seems to me, after much contemplation, that the most succinct description of the meaning or purpose of life is this: to prepare for death. Preparing for death can mean only one thing: to learn what it is like to die. This can be done through various techniques, most commonly sex, drugs, trance dreaming, and extreme fright or danger (also of course illness, despair, crisis, and so forth). Note that we have already covered most of the major preoccupations (positive and negative) of the average person during his or her eighty odd years of existence. The problem is that none of these things, taken by themselves as ends in and of themselves, have any meaning or purpose. Hence they become either distractions to be indulged in, or afflictions to be endured. As preparations for the ultimate act of dying, however, they are equally valid, and positive or negative only so far as we use them, or not, to break down our resistance to the inevitable, and come to embrace it. For only by embracing death can we endeavor to dance past it.

I walked down the Northern trail to begin with, then mounted the bank to wander through familiar forestry and find a place for breakfast. Couldn’t quite settle on anywhere, so presently I returned to the path. Spotted a perfect place on the left bank, a grassy seat beside a pine tree, climbed up to it and ate my orange. Stared for a time at a sliver of orange light on a single strand of cobweb, which looked like a dancing light in the sky. Read book (Castaneda).

I took the left trail, then climbed over a fence to take the next left fork down into the valley. I felt a strange melancholy for which I could not account. Forced myself to sing a few bars of “Hi ho,” just to assert my existence to myself. This consolidated my sadness somehow. I have become a shadow to myself.

Trail led down to a familiar spot—how green is the valley—for which I have a predilection. I walked a time in the Sun, stopping only to remove my heavy shirt and thread it through my bag strap. After ten or fifteen minutes, I was struck by the sight of a rock peak to my left, far above me. It was the shape of a pyramid and seemed at once to draw me to it. As I was staring at it, a crow (whose call I’d heard moments before) flew to the rock face, as if to land on it (it didn’t), then glided slowly past. This was all the confirmation I needed—I headed up the mountain.

It was a hard slog. I made a stop early on, by a tree where I found a sort of stone seat, almost perfect for sitting on. I answered the crow’s calls a while, read some more, ate half a banana and set off again. Very heavy going, a steep climb. Rested a couple more times, then ended up straying from the main trail (a wide, red-dirt path cut by a machine) onto a foot path and into the mountain forestry. I knew it was a risk, but it was one I was prepared to take. The path actually led me first of all to a familiar spot, then up into the thick of it, directly below the rock face. I ended up having to rock climb, putting Tyr (my magik wand) through a belt loop, and scrambling up and over. I ended up then in a rather tight spot: the only way was to go on, but it was quite a sheer climb and I wasn’t sure I could manage it. If I fell, I would fall back even further down the rocks I’d just climbed. It wouldn’t have been fatal, but then again, I might easily have broken a leg and been unable to move, in which case I would have certainly died there, barring some miracle. (These were thoughts I had only later.)

I made a vague attempt at it but lacked the nerve to really try. For a moment, I really felt like I couldn’t do it, that my nerve would fail me, that my fear was an insurmountable barrier. I felt myself shaking. I was really afraid, so I admitted this to myself, out loud, then questioned myself. What was I afraid of? (It wasn’t death exactly). I took off my bag and hat and Tyr, and placed them up on the ledge which I was hoping to reach myself. I took hold of a plant with each hand (on the right there was only a spiky one) and pulled myself up. As soon as I began to pull, the shaking in my leg stopped and the fear seemed to pass. I entered I think into the mood of the warrior and abandoned myself to the task—do or die. Not that it was such a momentous achievement, and it would have looked pretty tame in an action movie. But from my point of view, it was a triumph, and a huge relief to get up there safely. From here on it was easy. Though there was lots of rock scrambling, there were no really risky endeavors. I rested a brief moment then finished the climb.

I felt great elevation to arrive here, and let out an appropriate shout. Up above the world. I went to the edge and looked over the sheer drop. I could see from here the path I had taken, and the very spot from which I had first seen the pyramid formation. It was an eerie moment, almost like being in two places at once, the two places joined by my own attention, as it were. It was as if I could leap back and forth in a moment, like opening one eye and closing the other. Of course, I’m here now and with no doubt another fair struggle before me to get down, though not of course the way I came (that would be unthinkable). Also had a crap while up here, and wrote all of the above. Thirsty for lack of water.

What followed was a truly hellish experience in the wilds of nature. This was what I wanted: to experience again, at least once on this excursion, what it is like to be entirely at the mercy of the Earth. It occurred to me, during the ordeal, that getting to know the Earth is rather like getting to know an ordinary woman. One must fight tooth and nail to get close to her, and to extricate oneself from her clutches; but her caresses are all the sweeter for the wounds she first inflicts.

I don’t know if I have the energy to describe the whole encounter. Writing tires me out now and seems very unappealing. This sort of thing is especially difficult to describe. But here goes.

I found a path early on and thought that it would lead me eventually to some familiar spot. I was wrong—it led to one abandoned stone shack and then to another, before petering out entirely (either that or I lost it). This left me with a dangerous feeling of uncertainty about which direction to take. I followed my instincts anyway, heading in what I took to be more or less the direction I had come from (though without returning on my path). I very quickly got tangled up in the forest, and made an effort to avoid this by staying at the very edge/top of the mountain, clambering from one rock face to the next. This worked for a time, until I reached such a huge and impressive rock that I actually felt I was in the presence of a sort of god, a presiding deity. I acted with the appropriate respect. Shortly after this, as the struggle began to get to me, I fell down once, then a second time, landing right on my arse. I sat for a few minutes to “center” myself. This turned out to be a good idea, as immediately after I got stuck climbing over rocks and found I had to go back. It was a precarious situation and quite frightening, but nothing compared to the despair I felt when I found that I simply could not go on any further. It was clear I could not go back either (that was out of the question anyway—a warrior never retraces his steps!). I had only one option: to fight my way down the side of the mountain.

I set off with a heart heavy, for my previous experiences of such endeavors had left indelible impressions. I was trusting that the valley floor I could see from there was the same valley I had originally climbed out of (I was reasonably sure it was), but I had no way of knowing if it would even be possible to fight my way through the bramble and bushes, without breaking my neck in the process. There is something supremely awful about being trapped in the forest. It struck me that it is something akin to being surrounded on all sides by enemy soldiers, yet without even the vague consolation of some human camaraderie, and the possibility of dying with honor.

As it turned out, by this time the worst was already over, because very swiftly, after sliding down for a distance on my arse, I came upon a path which led me, after an excruciating period of staggering and stumbling, back onto the original trail which I had so rashly left (in search of transcendent points of view). I fell over one last time on the last stretch, and for a moment felt the whole world come to a stop. Assuredly the last time I was this beaten down and exhausted was—the last time I got lost in the mountains of Navarra!

Once I was back on the path, I staggered zombie-like towards where I knew water would be. (My thirst had been so terrible that even the option of stopping for a rest had been out of the question, meaning my whole battle had been constant and without respite.) In fact, I found a still-running stream a few yards nearer than the fountain, and sat down and with great gratitude drank, soaked my poor feet a while, before trudging on to the fountain, where I drank some more, stripped, splashed myself, and lay in the Sun. I felt an excruciating sense of pleasure and relief. I had the thought that Hell and Paradise are both here, one and the same—it all depends on your predicament. I ate my banana and read a while, then struggled back up the hill and finally made it home.

Home. A sweet concept indeed.

2008-06-09T13:34:00.000-07:00

Anthony Peake, the English scientific researcher and author of Is There Life After Death? and The Daemon, contacted me last year, having read Matrix Warrior. We exchanged emails but I am embarrassed to admit it's taken me this long to get around to looking at his work (sorry Tony!).

Tony is probably the first person in the scientific community to take Matrix Warrior seriously. He was kind enough to call it "an absolute masterpiece," and has suggested that "Is There Life After Death? and Matrix Warrier are like the theory and the practical manual - reflecting each other perfectly." Having looked into his theories, I have to say I concur with him 100%. (Yes - It's Red Pill Time again!)

Needless to say, this is an exciting vindication for me - and better late than never! (Too bad MW is now out of print. ) So I invite you all to check out Tony's Youtube lecture, in 9 parts: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=anthony+peake&search_type

I have also joined Tony's blogsite: http://cheatingtheferryman.blogspot.com/ and will be posting there regularly as of now.

This is absolutely astounding work that Tony is doing, ignore it at your peril!

2008-05-05T11:33:00.000-07:00

The House of the Dead
Visit to Homeless Shelter, Clermont Ferrant, France, Dec. 1993

I am sitting at an octagonal table under a color TV, waiting to be attended, having already been reassured there is a place to sleep. Ah! That “Ah” could fast turn into an AARGHH, however, because apparently I have checked into a total madhouse. As ever, being a magnet for madmen, this leaves me with no peace whatsoever. Even the couple of guys in charge seem half nuts, though in a perfectly agreeable way. Our “interview” went on interminably, due to their endless digressions. When the older man in charge asked my profession, I pointed at my notebook and he wanted to know about the seal of Solomon which I just yesterday drew on the cover, and why it had the circle in the middle. He started talking about “pantacles” then, and drew one on a scrap of paper, the hexagram surrounded by stars and stuff, obviously a talisman. When I mentioned my stay with the Buddhists, denying it was a personal affiliation by saying “all religions are the same,” he told me he was a Templar Knight! This was an unsettling, if amusing, coincidence.

I told them I’d be staying no more than three days (seven is the maximum), that I had no money, “really,” just a little for traveling. The worst part about this place is that, after 8:30 pm, there’s no getting out until morning. In many ways it seems like a prison, not least for the “inmates,” who all seem like they’ve been here forever and forgotten why they came. There are only ten or so of them, yet they are all to a greater or lesser degree deranged. Some gently so, some rather more violently.

Having boiled myself some water for an instant soup and made my own bed - the bottom bunk by the wall and the last in a line of six beds - I got to meet the inmates one by one. A small guy with black hair and a plaid shirt came and introduced himself first, saying, “I hope you don’t snore!” He was only joking, however, because he added quickly that it didn’t bother him really. I refrained from telling him that it did bother me. He offered me some bread, and I took some butter from the fridge (with another nut’s blessing), thinking I was well set. Another crazy, with a broken nose, long greasy hair, and tattoos on every visible part of his body (including a cross between his eyes), came over then and asked me if I wanted some cheese. I rather rashly said OK, and he invited me to their table. The small guy got up and offered me his seat, acting like I was royalty. It was typical, I thought, that when I finally get some recognition, it's not with the Benedictines or the Buddhists but, as ever, with the bums.

A fight broke out between the small guy and the tattooed wing nut, who took out his knife and handed it to me for safe-keeping before he entered the fray, as if he didn’t trust himself with it. Although the argument didn’t get physical, it was quite violent emotionally. They were disagreeing over God knows what, and I sat buttering my bread, trying not to be involved. Finally the two guys in charge came over to break it up, trying to calm down the little guy, even though he was the least in need of calming. Probably they were too scared of the other guy to even attempt to calm him down.

There’s one woman here, and of course she’s cooking the food. She saw my cross and told me she used to believe, but not anymore. The wing nut leaned towards me then and turned the cross over, to obscure the Christ. I turned it back once he’d looked away. (Later, I took it off and laid it on my bed.) The wing nut began to berate me for eating bread and butter, insisting that I would eat with them, that I was “on the road,” just like they were, and that this was the proper way to do it, and so on. I certainly didn’t object to being fed, but his endless barrage finally drove me to my bed to await the meal’s preparation in safety.

While I was there the boss—who’s very friendly towards me—came and asked about my writing. He told me that he did dream interpretation, and asked me some questions about my dreams: colors, if I dreamed of water, was it clear and clean or dark and dirty, and faces (were they clear?), fish, children, and so on. His interpretations were very simplistic, pretty obvious in fact, which is probably why I’ve never bothered my head with interpretations. (I have enough trouble making sense of “reality.”) He showed me one of his “pantacles,” with writing around it, which I mistook for Hebrew but which was in fact (according to him) Gaelic. The lady dragged me off for food and I ate heartily, despite the fact it was frozen pork and canned vegetables. Hunger took care of my reservations. After the meal, in order to escape the wing nut, I feigned interest in a card game opposite until, unable to fathom the rules, I slipped off back to my bed, where I now lie, weary from the day’s struggle.

Later on, I was driven from my room by the noisy conversation that ensued once the beds were occupied. The noise woke me and I lay there in growing exasperation, until finally I gave up and went out to read. Since I'd turned on the light, however, the proprietor got up and told me “lights out.” I didn’t want to “rat” on the others, but I had to explain that I couldn’t sleep; he went into the room and told them to be quiet, and after that, I didn’t dare go directly back to bed. I also thought it was unlikely they would heed the command, so I asked the man if I could sleep in the other dorm. He showed me in, then pointed to the toilet, which was lit, thinking I still wanted to read. I insisted again that I only wanted to sleep. He showed me a bed, and I climbed in.

The room was full of sleeping people, so there was no chatter; instead there was a hideous cacophony of snores and groans and irregular breathing. It sounded exactly like a pig sty - the House of the Dead. I slept finally with the pillow over my head. It was more than noise that troubled me, however. The thought of merging my astral awareness with such a troupe of decaying and deranged zombies gave me cause for concern—rightly, as it happened. I dreamt all night that my health had collapsed again; in the dreams, I couldn’t understand why, and was railing against this development, though there was little I could do but accept it. I had no doubt that I was dreaming of being ill because I was ill, and was quite pleasantly surprised to find my condition somewhat less severe on waking.

I was woken by horrible groans and coughing as the shadowy figures came to life and began to wander about in a ghostly fashion. One guy sat down right opposite me and lit a cigarette, giving me the resolve to get up and flee at once, back to my first bed. As I’d deduced, all was peace and quiet here, and I crawled into bed to return to sleep. Just as I neared it, an old creep began coughing endlessly and letting out long, loud farts. I considered grabbing him by the throat and throwing his smelly arse out of there, but instead covered my head again, and presently returned to sleep. People began to rise up, I slept on until the proprietor came and shook my foot, telling me to get up. I wondered why, he came back shouting that they closed at 8 and it was already 7:30.

I got up and had a shower, put on my clothes, cross, poncho, left my things under the bed, and headed out into the early light.

2008-05-05T11:28:00.000-07:00

Reason for the Blog Name Change

I have decided to retire as a film critic, at least for now, hence the change of my blog name. Expect instead of film reviews, various pieces taken from my old journals, relating to my adventures navigating the globe. Guess you could say I am tired of writing about other people's work, and tired also of my Hollywood fixation and my endless immersion in make-believe worlds. These excerpts will be very rough (I won't take the time to polish them into a novelistic form), but they will be all absolutely true, without embellishments, while hopefully, also of some small entertainment value.

2008-03-25T07:40:00.000-07:00

A Gem & A Guilty Pleasure

Lars and the Real Girl & Awake

In a hundred years of cinema, there’s never been anything quite like Lars and the Real Girl, the new film from director Craig Gillespie and writer Nancy Oliver (Six Feet Under). Lars (Ryan Gosling) is not quite right in the head; he keeps to himself, he can’t bear to be touched, and he resists the efforts of his sister-in-law Karin (Emily Mortimer) to draw him out of his self-imposed solitude. Then one day, he asks Karin and his brother Gus (Paul Schneider) if he can bring over a friend. They are delighted, until Lars’ friends turns out to be an “anatomically correct” silicon love doll named Bianca. Lars informs them that Bianca is Brazilian/Danish, that she’s shy and doesn’t talk much, and that, being deeply religious, she doesn’t feel comfortable sleeping alone with Lars (in the garage where he lives). So Karen and Dave agree to put Bianca up in their place and, convinced Lars has lost his marbles, they suggest that Bianca visit the local G.P, Dr. Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson) for a check-up, hoping to put Lars under observation. After meeting Bianca, Dr. Dagmar suggests that, for the time being, they go along with Lars’ fantasy and see what happens. Before long the whole town has agreed to treat Bianca as real: she attends church, has her hair done, and eventually gets accepted on the local school board.

Funny as it is, Lars and the Real Girl isn’t really a comedy; and although it’s an exquisitely tender-hearted film, it’s never sentimental (having a silicon sex-doll at its center pretty much makes sure of that). Like Lars himself, the movie doesn’t allow itself to be categorized. It’s a lovable oddity in a felicitous “tradition” of flukes that includes Harold and Maude, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Donnie Darko, Harvey, and United States of Leland (also with Gosling), movies that by all rights shouldn’t work but somehow do. Lars and the Real Girl takes us into unexplored realms of humor and pathos, areas of experience that—outside of real life—probably only these oddball empathic American movies can provide.

As played by Gosling, Lars is a prodigy as well as a freak; he’s impossible to get a handle on. How much does he believe Bianca is real? We never know for sure. Lars has a sweetness and vulnerability that’s both heartbreaking and heartening, but there’s a solidness to him too, a determination and directness. He’s a survivor, and though he may be delusional, he’s not solipsist. He stays true to his delusions, his fantasy world has a life it its own (he fights with Bianca when he feels she is becoming too independent). Before we know it, the plastic Bianca begins to seem real to us, too.

In interviews, Gosling has remarked upon the similarity between Lars’ peculiar affection for Bianca and the love children feel for stuffed toys (Gosling observes how the love children feel for their toys is genuine even though it is never returned). This similarity is made explicit in the movie when Lars gives mouth-to-mouth to a co-worker’s teddy bear (Margo, played by Kelli Garner, in a lovely, soulful performance). Like a child, Lars loves from both sides, and by the end of the movie his weird delusion has come to seem almost enlightened, like saintly, unconditional love. (What could be more selfless than loving someone who can never love us back?)

Lars learns how to relate to others by finding the soul in an inanimate object, and by finding his own capacity to love, he discovers his own soul. And the whole town learns by his example. Lars’ delusion has the power of vision: it transforms reality into something better than it was before. With its kooky, off-kilter wisdom and its dead-on portrait of small-town Americana (where everyone’s a freak on the inside), Lars and the Real Girl is enough to restore your faith in human nature. It’s a goddamned miracle.

Awake, the new thriller by first-time director Joby Harold, takes off from a grisly real-life phenomenon called “anesthetic awareness.” This is when patients are unaccountably left fully conscious—and physically paralyzed—during surgery, and Harold (who also wrote the script) has spun a preposterously entertaining yarn from this grisly germ of an idea, and manages to hold us in a vice-like grip for pretty much the entire film. How often can you say of a Hollywood thriller that you don’t have a clue what’s going to happen next? Awake is brazenly indifferent to plausibility, but you can’t help but admire the film’s audacity. Along with fantastic plot twists, Harold throws Hitchcockian flourishes and elements of Greek tragedy into the mix like a crazed chef. In lesser hands, Awake would have been a tawdry melodrama, but Harold believes in his material so fervently (in a way a more seasoned professional never could) that the film works on several levels at once. Ingenious as it is, it’s not mechanical—it has soul.

Harold brings such energy and focus to the scenes that he transcends the subject matter and gives it an almost surreal intensity, and the performances are strong enough to keep the film’s nuttiness from capsizing it. Jessica Alba is suitably luscious and beguiling (her role gives new meaning to the term “heartbreaker”), and Lena Olin and Terence Howard are both in fine form. As the unfortunate victim of anesthetic awareness, Hayden Christensen comes into his own as a performer (having mercifully managed to escape the Mark Hammil curse: that of being horribly miscast by George Lucas). Christensen has an unusually expressive face (the camera takes to him), and he can convey emotion without ever appearing to do much—fortunately, because the film hinges around his internal struggle, and on our feelings of empathy for him.

Awake is a white-knuckle movie experience if ever there was one (it even carries a viewer warning), with some of the most sheerly visceral scenes of horror ever committed to celluloid. Watching someone undergoing open-heart surgery while fully conscious (and able to feel the incision) is enough to frazzle the nerves of the most hardened horror veterans, and this film is certainly not for the squeamish. Too bad the loopy plot (and the melodramatic character revelations, which are really just tired genre conventions) finally stretches our credibility to breaking point. As a result, Awake lacks a strong climax, and as a rollercoaster ride it doesn’t have enough emotional depth to be fully satisfying (its shallowness is at odds with its rather contrived attempts at pathos). But for most of its length it’s close to a pop classic, and probably the best metaphysical thriller since The Sixth Sense (a film I didn’t much care for). In fact, Harold better watch out or he may wind up as the next M. Night Shyamalan. Awake has so many twists it makes you dizzy.

2008-03-17T08:26:00.000-07:00

Fame Kills
Heath Ledger & the Twilight of the Gods

According to Freud, the two motivating forces pertaining to the life of the ego are power and pleasure, and the one generally leads to the other: once the ego has enough power to feel secure, it naturally looks for ways to enjoy it. These two drives are nowhere more evident than in Hollywood, where the quest for fame is everything and where “success” is measured solely in terms of recognition and influence. Nor is there any such thing as enough, for unless you are Jack Nicholson or Tom Cruise, there is always further up the ladder to ascend.

In our blind admiration and envy of movies stars, we assume there can be no greater happiness—no greater glory or satisfaction—than the power and pleasures of fame. Such an illusion satisfies a need in both parties: it serves the stars to be worshipped—since their power and influence depends on it—and allows the general public to vicariously enjoy the perks of the rich and famous. Such is the complicity of fantasy between the chosen few and the faceless masses.

The awe with which we regard movie personalities is religious worship in a debased form, and the debasement runs both ways. The public derives power from the act of adoration exactly as primitive man does from worshipping his deities. It is a form of voluntary and mutual bondage, a pact by which the god as much as the worshipper is bound. In the past, however, primitive man—and this holds true for the religious person today—remained largely unconscious of the process of creating gods through the act of worship, and the impersonal forces he bowed down to were superhuman beings beyond mortal ken. However much they may be imbued with supernatural beauty, charisma, talent, and good fortune, at the end of the day movie stars are still mortal, and all-too-human. Abstract, elemental principles like the Sun, Moon and planets could of course handle the process of deification, since they had no egos to be inflated. The worshippers were likewise empowered by serving a force greater than themselves: by succumbing to the divine and relinquishing their autonomy, they could be relieved of their fears, doubts, and limitations as mortals. In return, they received the blessings of the gods.

Naturally, by worshipping material success in the guise of celebrities, as if they were a higher life form, the public is drastically reduced in status and self-respect. And given a power and status previously only granted the forces of nature, is it any wonder if our human “gods” suffer from almost pathological ego inflation? The inevitable result of such inflation is a corresponding enlargement of fears and doubts: since they can’t possibly live up to the process of deification, they are oppressed and tormented by it. All the human neuroses and flaws still pertain to them, and such negative qualities can only be intensified by the strain of having to uphold an illusion of perfection in the public eye. Cary Grant once quipped that even he wanted to be Cary Grant.

Since movie stars—by choice, but not always consciously—become living receptacles for all the public’s hopes, dreams, fantasies and aspirations, there is inevitably a dark side to this process. The split between a star’s public persona and their innermost, private self is a shadowy realm, a twilight world in which movie stars spend most of their lives. They can’t possibly maintain an idealized image, but how can they simply be “themselves” in the face of an endless stream of awe, envy, admiration, resentment, greed, desire, hatred, adoration and terror? Since no one is interested in seeing them as ordinary people, stars must create a shadow-persona by which to relate to a world increasingly made up of shadows.

Movie stars are often said to be insufferable prima donnas, but how could they be anything but insufferable? It’s not that they are only human; it’s that their human side (the neurotic, fucked up side in common with the rest of us) has been magnified to grotesque proportions by the reflecting surface which the world holds up to them and forces them to gaze into. In order to be successful, stars must balance these two extremes: the shimmering public image to be worshipped—the magisterial play of light—and the shadow side which must be hidden from view at all costs.

The tension becomes even more severe if we consider the qualities necessary for a star to achieve—and maintain—worldly success: the overweening ambition, absolute self-assurance and drive, and almost pathological self-absorption (their persona is their “product,” after all), all of which precludes any preoccupation with inner growth or development, which would only interfere with their focus and impede their upward trajectory. Who has time for inner values in Hollywood? So far as they exist at all, they are simply items on the agenda. Success is everything, and relates entirely to status. It is wholly outer-directed, measured in worldly achievements, and divorced of any deeper, personal meaning.

Since movie stars project the best part of themselves into the world, in order to be loved and rewarded for it, they run the risk of being left with nothing for themselves. At which point, they have little choice but to take refuge inside their own shadows simply in order to survive; in the end, such rootlessness is likely to turn them into shadows. The pressures of a life of high fame must be unimaginable, yet most of us are too busy envying the “perks” to consider the price paid to attain them. We are in awe of the Wizard; but draw back the curtain and we will find a shabby old man, frantically pulling levers.

There is nothing more terrifying or despair-inducing than loss of contact with reality; but what could be more unreal than the life of a movie star? The price of becoming the receptacle for the worlds’ dreams and longings is that stars are forced into a strange kind of isolation, estranged not only from everyone around them but from their own selves. To survive such isolation takes either an unusually strong sense of identity or a scary kind of vapidity (i.e., not much of a “self” to lose). One must either be made of the stuff of heroes, or such a shallow soul that there is little chance of drowning in the depths.

Heath Ledger’s sad and untimely death—intentional or not—is all the proof we need that being a movie star is no party. The relentless drive for power leaves little room for pleasure, and it is usually the sensitive souls who—under the relentless pressure to become deified commodities—wind up as sacrifices on the bloody altar of “success” instead. Since Ledger was neither a hero nor a vapid non-entity—neither a Nicholson nor a Cruise—he was dragged under by a wave of success which he lacked the strength—or ruthlessness—to surf. In Hollywood, it’s the nature of the beast to devour and spit out tender souls without mercy or compunction.

2008-03-03T05:34:00.000-08:00

All for a Shiver, or a Smile?

Untraceable & The Cottage, Notes on Mutating Trends in Movie Violence

What new wine can be poured into the cracked old bottles of the serial killer movie? Although the subgenre is less than twenty years old (kicking off with Silence of the Lambs and peaking with David Fincher’s Seven), during this period it has quite literally been done to death. Yet public appetite remains unabated, and Hollywood continues to cater to the bloodlust, with one homicide thriller after another (more often than not with a female lead doubling as both dragon-slayer and damsel-in-distress). The latest offering in this tawdry lineage is Untraceable, directed by Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear, Fracture) and starring Diane Lane as FBI agent Jennifer Walsh. Walsh specializes in Internet crimes, and during her cyber-patrol, she stumbles upon a mysterious snuff website. At “Killwithme.com”, murders are being streamed live, with an ingenious twist: victims are rigged to a series of grisly death traps, and the more hits the site gets, the faster they die. Besides this queasy twist, Untraceable is strictly filmmaking-by-numbers; it offers few surprises and only barely scrapes by as an evening’s morbid divertissement. Shot in the metallic, washed-out colors of a cinema commercial, with performances and dialogue only slightly above the level of TV melodrama, there is absolutely no reason (besides financial gain) for the film to have been made. Probably the best that can be said about Untraceable is that it’s not boring, and never actually insults its audience. Instead, it glumly serves up the goods, catering to an increasingly dubious demand for sadistic enactments of murder under the guise of entertainment, which is the very thing the film purports to be denouncing.

There is an inescapable problem with the serial killer flick. Since by now we have pretty much seen it all before, the only way for a new movie to distinguish itself is to come up with sufficiently ingenious and nasty new forms of murder for the audience to thrill to. What this amounts to is that the filmmakers, and hence the audience—wherever their ostensible sympathies may lie—are obliged to identify with the killer and not the victims. In consequence, it’s hard not to think of these films, potentially at least, as providing inspiration for any aspiring serial killers out there; and since this kind of movie can’t help but glamorize the “trade” (that of ingenious and nasty variations upon homicide), if only by giving so much attention to it, presumably more and more rootless, single, white males are going to be drawn towards murder fantasies?

Untraceable appears to be denouncing a world in which people are callous and jaded enough to log on to a website and watch someone being murdered, even knowing that by doing so they are actually ensuring the victim dies (as one character puts it, “We are the murder weapon.”). But the film is intent on having its cake and eating it, and the only possible raison d’être of this kind of movie is to titillate audiences with a sense of horror at the various acts of murder. The effect, over time, may only be to reconcile audiences to their own sadistic impulses: they can feel reassured that this is the way the world is, and since everyone else is doing it, why feel bad about it? What difference does one more visitor to Killwithme.com make, when it takes the combined indifference of millions to actually do the dirty deed? The parcel of moral responsibility continues to get passed.

The black irony of Untraceable is that it caters to the same moral emptiness which it pretends to be exposing. Its premise, and the murders it shows us, are just ingenious and nasty enough to save it from complete redundancy, but the film uses moral horror to spice up and enliven its own tired genre. It provides the audience with a grimly satisfying sense of outrage at how depraved our world has become, a sense of horror laced with uneasy, half-formed awareness of our own complicity. But since the film is only disturbing at a visceral and not an emotional level, since none of the characters are real enough for us to care about their deaths, we can tell ourselves it was all just another bit of (dodgy) Hollywood entertainment. After all, there’s a world of difference between logging onto a website to watch someone being murdered, and paying to see the latest Hollywood serial killer flick. Isn’t there?

The Cottage
The art of the horror comedy is in juxtaposing terror with humor until both are intensified into hysteria. (Examples: American Werewolf in London, Evil Dead 2, Scream.) The Cottage, Paul Andrew Williams’ follow-up to his debut 2006 feature, London to Brighton, is neither funny nor especially frightening, and it sure as hell isn’t art. In fact, it’s not even good trash. Williams has taken the staples of the low-budget slasher movie—small cast, limited locations, minimum plot, lots of gore—and given them a supposedly “post-modernist” spin of grisly absurdity. The story involves the bungled kidnapping of a crime boss’ daughter (Jennifer Ellison) by two brothers (Andy Serkis and Reece Shearsmith), who hide away in a lonely cottage in the forest and run afoul of a seriously disfigured serial killer. The Cottage isn’t Grand Guignol slapstick like Evil Dead 2, or sly genre deconstruction like Scream, and it’s certainly not a harmless spoof like Scary Movie. It’s basically a well-constructed B-movie, complete with (extremely realistic) scenes of brutality and dismemberment which are unaccountably played for laughs. Apparently Williams (who also wrote the script, what there is of it) thinks seeing people writhing in agony is somehow amusing in and of itself. Since he hasn’t provided much by way of jokes, so as far as I can tell the violence is meant to be funny simply because it’s not meant to be taken seriously. And if seeing a big-breasted blonde having her face sliced in half with a shovel is your idea of a smile, by all means go and see The Cottage. London to Brighton was a thoughtful, disturbing work on the repercussions of violence. The Cottage seems to have been made by someone with the sensibilities of Ted Bundy.

2008-02-25T03:04:00.000-08:00

Ghost of a Legend

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is an elegy of futility, an exquisite scorched earth of a movie. Its themes creep up on you and seep into your bones. A tale of friendship and betrayal, it’s also a portrait of rootlessness, of violent men who kill because they don’t know what else men are supposed to do, and it has some of the grizzled, melancholic grandeur of Sam Peckinpah’s Westerns. Yet there’s nothing generic about this film, and nothing melodramatic either; it’s closer to lyric realism. Written and directed by Andrew Dominik (Chopper) from a novel by Ron Hansen, the film is an epic poem, a primordial vision. With its dreamlike landscapes and its delicate piano and violin score, The Assassination of Jesse James owes a clear debt to the early films of Terence Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven), and there are images here that are among the most beautiful and haunting I have ever seen in a movie. Yet the visuals are never made to compensate for a lack of story (as with Malick’s later films), and they aren’t hypnotic for their own sake. Dominik uses them sparingly, poetically, like a master painter. The film is almost three hours long, but it doesn’t meander and it never seems indulgent. Dominik shows a loving attention to detail, a sense of the ebb and flow of his scenes, that is reminiscent of Coppola’s first two Godfather films. Assassination isn’t quite on that level (its characters aren’t that rich or alive, and the story, though poignant, isn’t full-blown tragedy), but how many films can be compared to The Godfather? I think it’s the finest Western film since McCabe and Mrs. Miller (it has a similar delicate pathos and poetic intensity), and never mind the Oscars: it’s easily the best film of 2007.

At first, Brad Pitt might seem somewhat lacking in the central role. Pitt is a problematic actor: when he has a role that allows him to get out of himself and let rip (such as Twelve Monkeys or Fight Club), he can be a riveting, electrifying presence; but like Jack Nicholson, he can also be lazy and coast on star appeal. He does a little of that here: his Jesse seems only partly rendered, a sketch, and as a result the film at times lacks for a stronger center. But Pitt’s Jesse grows on you. This is an extremely tricky performance and in the end I think he pulls it off and does some of his best work. Pitt makes Jesse both menacing and oddly affecting, lost and almost childlike, a figure of pathos. And although we never really come to know him, there are moments when Pitt suggests that Jesse is an enigma even to himself. (When he talks about counting the stars, for example: a confederate says he isn’t even sure what stars are, and Jesse replies, “Your body knows; your mind just forgot, that’s all.”)

There are plenty of performances to watch here: Jeremy Renner as Wood, Sam Shepard as Frank James, and especially Paul Schneider (from All the Real Girls), as Dick Liddil. Kailin See, as a sexually frustrated house-wife Dick allows to seduce him, gives the only outstanding female performance. (Despite her high billing, Mary-Louise Parker, as Jesse’s loving wife Zee, barely appears in the film except to look loving and to bemoan Jesse’s death). And although he has a major role as Charlie Ford, the usually mesmerizing Sam Rockwell isn’t given enough to do here. You’d never guess how talented he is from this role, but he’s a welcome presence anyway.

The outstanding performance comes from Casey Affleck (Ben’s younger brother), whose creepy Bob Ford is one of the most original characters ever created for the screen. From his first moments, Affleck puts us on guard: there’s something not quite right about Bob, yet we can’t put our finger on it. (By the end of the film we still don’t know; Shepard’s Frank states it for us, however, in the very first scene: “I don’t know what it is about you, but the more you talk, the more you give me the willies.”) Bob’s worship of Jesse prefigures the slavish, faintly psychotic devotion of modern-day celebrity hounds like King of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin; when Bob smiles, he sets his small teeth on edge and we can feel the hostility lurking inside him, waiting to come out. (It may be buried so deep even he is unaware of it.) In the end, the film is as much about Bob as it is about Jesse (who is never quite real to us), and maybe more so. The amorphous spell of melancholy which the film casts upon us comes as much from our feelings for Bob as for Jesse. Creepy as he is, we never hate Bob; by the end, we may feel almost unbearable pity for him.

It may be facile to say that The Assassination of Jesse James is about lost souls and false heroes; the film is so deftly, instinctively made, so light of touch, that it never pushes its meanings. But they are there, and the exquisite beauty of the film, the ghostlike images, the long silences, the open spaces it allows to exist both inside and between the scenes, combine to create a haunted, otherworldly quality, and a sense of unglimpsed depths. There’s a moment, towards the end of the film, when the Ford brothers leave the James house where they are staying (and where Bob will assassinate Jesse), and we are allowed to see the surrounding countryside, and the skeletal town that is growing up in it. The image comes as a shock, because until now the intimacy of the film has kept our focus closely bound to the characters; despite its epic scope, there seemed no need to recreate the greater world in which they exist (or for the film’s budget to include such elaborate sets). The image is all the more breathtaking for coming so unexpected, and we may be struck by how much care has gone into creating this world, seemingly for its own sake, independent of the story. At such a late stage, letting us see the fruit of this work seems almost an afterthought. Dominik may be so intensely inside his vision that he is indifferent to whether or not we experience it—the process of creation is enough. He has the focus and immersion of a true alchemist.

This is an almost perfect film (the ungainly title and the absence of women characters notwithstanding; even Nick Cave’s improbable cameo is forgivable—he co-wrote the gorgeous score with Warren Ellis). Yet it’s an elusive work, and definitely not for everyone. A lot of people will miss its ineffable, alchemical grace, and mistake it for a rather long, lugubrious Western. Like Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Dominik is not interested in genre conventions, not even enough to subvert them. He’s inventing a whole new genre in order for this one work to be exactly what it needs to be. (There’s very little action in the film, yet it’s full of suspense; and the occasional violence is never what we expect, it’s never not disturbing.) At times, the effects Dominik gets are so unique, so inspired, that they seem faintly mysterious. He’s a major, major talent. The Assassination of Jesse James is both an epic about the process by which legends are made and a tender, intimate love story between two antagonists so utterly dissimilar they might come from two different worlds. Yet they do have one thing in common: both men are so lost to themselves that at times the film seems almost like a ghost story. In a way, that’s what it is.

2008-02-21T03:09:00.000-08:00

There Will Be Blood: The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Being a huge fan of Paul Thomas Anderson, my expectations were high for this flick, but alas, it did not deliver. Brilliantly directed by Anderson, with a phenomenal central performance by Daniel Day Lewis, I think the problem with the film is at a fundamental and conceptual level. The work is ambitiously themed, but Anderson hasn’t taken the time—or perhaps didn’t have the desire—to draw us into the story or the characters. Magnolia was an epic, ambitious work also, but it was on a human scale, and Anderson never seemed to be reaching for his effects. There Will Be Blood is another matter: it’s all reaching, but it comes back empty-handed. Based on Upton Sinclair’s novel, the film tells the tale of oil man Daniel Plainview, a man without substance, and apparently without heart or soul, driven by mysterious forces (forces that are never revealed), whose only passion is for oil. Plainview doesn’t appear to be all that interested in profit, even, and although he is a ruthless businessman, the impression the film gives is that this is more a point of principle than actual greed. We are never given a clue as to what might be behind such a principle, however, or behind the character’s stubborn, almost inhuman drive.

The trouble with There Will Be Blood is that, if you place a hollow man at the center of your movie, you are likely to wind up with a hollow movie. Daniel Day Lewis carries the film on his sinewy shoulders, and he keeps us gripped by the sheer magnetism of his presence; but the script doesn’t provide much context for his performance, and the character seems to be almost entirely the actor’s creation. Long as the film is (158 minutes), Anderson doesn’t use the time to establish his characters, or appear to care about building suspense. He seems to consider such conventions beneath him, and the result is fuzzy, muted, shapeless and meandering. Individual scenes are often strong—the film is gorgeously photographed—and there’s certainly a dark poetry and lyricism to the film; but because there’s no central thread to tie the scenes together, and without much narrative or character drive, the various episodes just hang in a void. Since we have no clue as to what drives the central character, there is nothing to drive the scenes forward either. Violent confrontations—between Plainview and the preacher, Ely, between Ely and his father, and the final murder—should be intensely disturbing but somehow fail to move us. Anderson doesn’t make us feel the tensions that lead up to these scenes, so they appear to come out of nowhere; they seem overwrought, faintly ludicrous. Inside such a dramatic vacuum, Lewis’ performance—intense as it is—often becomes blackly amusing: Plainview seems not only psychotic but absurd. Yet we can’t tell if he’s meant to seem that way or not.

For such a bleak and violent work, Blood is almost devoid of tension. And for all the care that has gone into the film’s look, and despite the central performance, it’s rather slack, even tedious. It’s clear Anderson is aiming for something big, but I think the ambitiousness of his concepts has undone him (though this is presumably why the film is being praised so extravagantly). He’s trying to paint the portrait of a soulless man, driven by greed or unfathomable obsession, whose complete lack of feeling for anyone or anything besides oil turns him, by steady degrees, into a psychopath. And he’s probably aiming at a parable for our times, in which insane corporate greed strips the Earth of its blood and man of his soul. But the film may be too finely conceived: Anderson has forgotten to take the trouble to draw us into the story and make it dramatic, meaningful, and what’s on the screen are his lofty intentions, but not much of a movie.

There Will Be Blood left me entirely cold. I felt nothing for the characters, and besides Plainview there are no characters, really. There is the preacher Ely, who is faintly despicable but otherwise less than substantial, and Plainview’s son, who barely says a dozen words throughout the film. The rest are shadows, and Anderson seems to have intended it this way (he has cast the film almost entirely with unknowns). And although Daniel Day Lewis is mesmerizing throughout, there is only one scene which gives us a glimpse of what is going on inside Plainview and allows us to see him as a human being (the scene when he admits to hating people). Mostly, he is like some relentless force of nature, a golem, driven by sheer hatred. But there’s nothing to account for this hatred: like everything else in the film, it seems to exist in a void.

There Will Be Blood is a tale told by a genius, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Critics may beg to differ, but if so, I suspect they are responding to the film’s intentions more than what it actually achieves. Since Anderson’s film appears to be about something, even though it never connects with us emotionally, it’s being treated with awe and reverence (with repeat comparisons to Citizen Kane). But I think this is Anderson’s weakest film, and except for one or two scenes (such as when Plainview’s son is deafened in a rigging accident), it’s almost entirely lacking in the compassion, the humanity, which made his previous films so remarkable. There Will Be Blood appears to be a case of a filmmaker getting carried away by the grandiosity of his vision, being too busy mapping the forest to remember to plant the trees. It’s the sound of one hand clapping.

2008-02-01T10:28:00.001-08:00

To the Lions with the Liberals: Why I Am Not a Political Animal

My rant for the day, in response to a friend’s email, as follows:

(quote)
There is a huge cultural divide in the United States categorized by a marked difference in value systems. To put it most simply its liberal versus conservative and its seems the rift, which has always existed, has become most prominent these last seven years under Bush. Her seems to have brought out the most base instincts amongst his voting block. They are anti gay(against gay marriage), anti science(against stem cell research), or to just put it simply anti progress. Its really just the old versus the new. Its interesting that things really get started around our 2008 elections which are going to prove to be interesting. A change is badly needed but there is the fear that this other half of the nation will try force us back the other way allowing yet another rich white man to run the country the way its been run for far too long.
(end quote)

I don't think liberals represent the "new" any more than conservatives do. Liberals are every bit as small-minded, just in different ways. Few people really analyze how a predominantly liberal mindset actually serves to consolidate conservative policies, such as for example the "politically correct," humanistic approach which liberals adopt, which is, as John Gray points out, basically Christianity with God and Jesus taken out (at which point, Man becomes the only measure and the entire Universe is stripped of consciousness or life or meaning save that imposed on it by humans). Think about the liberal attitude to immigration, which has absolutely nothing to do with basic social/biological reality but is so narrow and dogmatic that if you voice the slightest reservation about letting a bunch of foreigners live off the state, or about how white people are getting outnumbered, you are automatically viewed as being a right-wing racist. Enforced blind liberal tolerance of unlimited immigrants basically breeds racism by blocking any natural and healthy expression for it (and face it, racism is natural, it's in the genes and territoriality is one of the most basic instincts there is, but so far as humanists are concerned, we are not animals so we can ignore all that!). So the frustration caused by these ridiculous liberal ideas, which are basically lies (such as the Big Lie of "progress," the blind faith in technology and modern medicine, or the idea that allowing gays to marry is a significant advancement for the species!), paves the way for more extreme "right-wing" policies to get through, because right wing- fanaticism actually starts to seem like a breath of fresh air after such madness. Both sides work together whether they know it or not.

2008-01-26T03:29:00.000-08:00

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (& Sweeney Todd)

Although well directed and a great story, in the end i found this less than overwhelming, which it really demanded to be. Considering the subject matter, it left me largely cold, the reason being, i think, that none of the characters was especially well drawn; they seemed two-dimensional, perhaps not by thriller standards, but by the standards it aspired to, which were those of tragedy. Since we were never given a sense of why we should care about any of them, besides feeling a certain amount of pity for the Ethan Hawke character, there was never much at stake to my mind. It was just a bunch of rather sordid people making a mess of their lives. Had it worked better as a thriller, this wouldn't have mattered, but it wasn't exciting enough to be a thriller. And what was that opening graphic sex scene all about? Sure, Marisa Tomei looks great for her age (43), and she doesn't mind showing her assets, bless her. But it really had no reason whatsoever to be there. I couldn't help wondering: is this how an 83-year-old film director gets his jollies?

Sweeney Todd gets better the more i think back on it, stays in the memory like a magikal dream. i confess not to respond to the music especially, more to the lyrics, so i doubt i would have enjoyed it much on stage. But Burton's staging and the pairing of HBC and JD are wondrous to behold.

2008-01-24T12:22:00.000-08:00

Heath Ledger, Hollywood Martyr, Sacrificed to Pluto

tomorrow, Jan 25th, the planet Pluto, Lord of the Underworld, enters the sign of Capricorn, where He will be for the next 16 years, until 2024. Among other things, Sagittarius relates to media and celebrity, while Capricorn to ambition and material success (and physical livelihood!). Heath Ledger's tragic ending has been a timely one indeed: an early sacrifice to the Lord of Hades, and a warning of things to come.

May his death be not wholly in vain.

I have culled some comments about this big shift off the Net, in case you are interested in prepping for the years ahead.

Pluto has been traveling through Sagittarius since 1995, bringing with it wars (Pluto) over religion and ideology (Sagittarius), as well as "culture wars" and the growing divide between groups that think differently, all Sagittarius archetypes. Sagittarius rules the media and entertainment, and the rise of a new compulsivity in celebrity journalism has grown up since Pluto entered Sagittarius, with the internet spawning a huge new gossip market. Sagittarius carries with it a nearly relentless optimism.

When Pluto goes through Capricorn we can expect the transformation of all things ruled by that sign - such as our religious institutions, halls of government and political structures. Pluto will be in Capricorn until 2024, a time when our Capricornian structures are ripe for transformation. Industry (Capricorn) in developed and developing countries as become a major source of carbon emissions which threaten the survival of life on earth. The Catholic Church (Capricorn), rocked by sex scandals, is struggling for survival. The very way we do business (Capricorn) is being forever changed by the globalization of politics and the economy.

In Sagittarius, Pluto has been compulsively expansive and optimistic, intensifying religious fervor. In Capricorn, Pluto seeks to contract and solidify and build solid structures for society. In the process, the structures that already exist are broken down and irrevocably transformed. Once Pluto is firmly entrenched in Capricorn, beginning in December 2008, we will begin to really see it at work. (US presidential election in November 2008.) Pluto seeks to focus and intensify as well as break down and regenerate. The structures of our world keep societies in order and functioning: churches, governments, buildings - all of these are ruled by Capricorn. But so are bridges and tunnels, and the entire infrastructure upon which we live, particularly in urban areas, are likely to experience a severe breakdown while Pluto travels through Capricorn. Underground transportation, under the domain of the god of the underworld, could become a battleground as Pluto often brings warfare or death in the areas of the sign through which it passes (such as September 11th during Pluto in Sagittarius, where air travel became a conveyance of death and total world transformation).

During the passage of Pluto, we see extremes and compulsions in the area of life associated with the sign through which Pluto travels, and with the Capricornian association with governments and government buildings, expect a worldwide attempt to solidify a global government and minimize individual liberties. Pluto's reach will extend beyond governments, however. Capricorn also rules the elderly and end of life issues, and Pluto's passage through Capricorn could transform the way we view the entire process of death and dying.

Pluto in Capricorn will also bring out secrets (Pluto) of governments and other political entities (Cap).

Also:

a massive amount of scandals become visible as Pluto begins to rumble and spew forth the hidden motives, ethics and values used while Pluto has been in Sagittarius. This rumbling started March 30, 2007 as Pluto turned retrograde, and around September 8, 2007, this rumbling again began. This long, extended stay of Pluto in Capricorn (2008 - 2023) will completely revise the power issues and issues of authority. The last time Pluto was in Capricorn was from 1762 to 1779, which included the founding of the US to gain the freedom against the oppression from the King of England. We will find ourselves in the same boat of addressing the oppressive and corrupt power issues that have been used against people. Whatever we have created during Pluto's time in Sagittarius will become the road that we find as Pluto moves into Capricorn. For many who have misused their power, their road will end. For many who have fought valiantly against such mis-use of power by growing inner qualities, the ground will swell with heightening values to find a different advantage.

2007-12-09T10:30:00.000-08:00

Ethan Hawke’s Confessional: The Hottest State

“Love consists of this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”
—Rilke

Written and directed by Ethan Hawke, and based on Hawke’s (I presume) autobiographical novel of the same name, The Hottest State is an intensely personal movie. Yet unlike, say, Woody Allen’s autobiographical films (Annie Hall, Stardust Memories, Husbands and Wives), Hawke’s personality doesn’t flood his material. Hawke is quite casual about baring his soul to us, and audiences may not be aware how deeply he takes them into his psyche. But he holds nothing back. The film recounts a brief, magical love affair between 20-year-old William (Mark Webber), a Texan living in New York, and Sara (Catalina Sandino Moreno), a beautiful Mexican who has moved to the city to pursue her singing career. Working closely with his actors and crew, Hawke uses simple, unassuming brush strokes to communicate the joy and misery—and the complexities—of romantic love. The film unfolds with an easy spontaneity that is both engaging and faintly ominous (we know where it’s heading because William informs us in voice-over). William’s trouble is that he has fallen in love—as my own attempt at autobiographical romance had it—with “a force of evil,” with unfathomable femininity.

In fact, The Hottest State is everything I wanted Beauty Fool to be but wasn’t. It shows the futility of romantic desire without ever opting for self-pity or easy cynicism. Hawke imbues the film with the wisdom and acceptance of a broken heart made stronger and freer by the breakage.

The film has weaknesses. The way Sara makes explicit the lessons she hopes William will learn—as a result of her breaking up with him—makes her seems shallow, callous, but also slightly unbelievable as a character. Sara is beautiful and elusive; she is destructive and cruel to William without even trying, simply by being herself. Unattainable, unpredictable, utterly unknowable, she is everything a woman is obliged by her nature to be. But we are never given any real clue as to why she turns cold on William, and when she tells him that their time together was the best of her life, it’s hard to believe it, because the remark flies so utterly in the face of her decision to cruelly dump him. Yet clearly Hawke means for us to believe her, and we have seen how blissfully happy William and Sara were together in Mexico. But why it all went wrong is never made clear, and because of this, Sara seems less than fully realized as a character. We get a one-sided view of her, created perhaps by someone who never really understood why she had to leave. To his credit, Hawke couldn’t or didn’t want to invent a reason, so he leaves it open, vague, and to this extent the film may almost be too honest, too painful, for viewers.

For my part, the film opened wounds I didn’t especially want opened. Maybe that was because Hawke’s experience of heartbreak is unusually similar to my own, but I think it’s more because the film is so faithful to his own experience that it gets at something universal, it cuts all the way to the bone. As a result, it may stir feelings we’d rather not have to deal with, ones we’d hoped we’d put to rest. I can’t think of another romantic film that manages to be this painful, this heartfelt, without being sentimental. Partly this is because Hawke focuses less on the sadness of watching a great love die than on the horror and incomprehensibility of it.

The film is a little soft around the edges. Some of the dialogue (particularly between William and his mother, played by Laura Linney, and in the crucial scene with William’s father, played by Hawke) may be a little too pat. We’re aware of Hawke’s limitations as a writer here, of his putting words into the characters’ mouths instead of letting them speak for themselves (which is the problem with Sara’s last few scenes). But considering what Hawke is attempting here—adapting his own novel, directing it, and playing a key role—it’s an astonishingly assured work. Although it’s raw and almost nakedly personal, there’s nothing amateurish about it. Hawke’s handling of his actors is superb, and just about every scene resonates, rings bells of recognition. In scene after scene, Hawke seems to get precisely what he is after. His use of the soundtrack (with songs written by Jesse Harris), the free-form editing, overlapping scenes, voice-over, the rich, sensuous colors and his knack for placing the camera just where it needs to be, is all remarkably assured, making this probably the most auspicious debut from a writer-director since Sean Penn’s Indian Runner. The Hottest State is a wonderful film and I felt richer for having seen it; it deserves a wider audience, because so far as I know it did little business and got luke-warm notices—it looks unlikely to find a distributor, in fact, meaning besides film festivals, the only place you’ll see it is at your local DVD store. Another precious gem slips under the radar. With all the dreck we get inflicted upon us as “entertainment,” it’s doubly tragic—and infuriating—when we are denied the real quality stuff out there. It’s enough for a filmmaker to want to find another line of business.

Like Penn, Hawke possesses an authentic artistic sensibility, and with any luck he could become a major filmmaker. He’s so confident of getting to the truth of a scene that he evokes emotions without even trying. The film has a raw honesty to it, and yet it never seems self-indulgent or narcissistic. It’s confessional in the best sense, as if getting these experiences down (in the novel, which I haven’t read, and by making the film) was essential to Hawke, for his own peace of mind. It comes from the place that all works of art come from: by sharing his pain and confusion with us, Hawke appears to be coming to terms with his past, reducing its hold over him. The film has urgency and poignancy, it feels essential, torn from the heart. I can’t think of another film that conveys the agony of heartbreak and the rite of passage it entails as completely and as powerfully as this. It has its very own ache. Hawke’s not just a gifted filmmaker, he’s a natural-born poet.

Jake Horsley, © 2007

2007-12-05T04:39:00.001-08:00

Why Film Criticism is So Bad

I’m generally the last person to talk about how they don’t make movies like they used to. Yet this is the second time this year that I’m about to do so (the last time was after seeing Face in the Crowd and Splendor in the Grass). By and large it’s like anything else: whether or not progress is really just a fancy word for decay, the fact remains that the past is past, and whatever movies are being made today—and whatever else you can say about them—they are of their time and so speak more directly of it (more fully represent it) than do old movies, no matter how great. This is true only up to a point, however. Who can argue that King Lear is more relevant today than, say, Dan in Real Life (a sweet enough film which I will review here soon)? Or that Metropolis speaks more acutely of our times than Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium—or The Brothers Karamazov than Southland Tales? Art will out, and however timely trash may be, it is still, at the end of the day, trash—to be forgotten almost as quickly as it is devoured.

I just saw All About Eve, which is currently enjoying a revival in London. I was swept away by the film. It gripped me in a way that no recent works, not even the best (Into the Wild, Atonement), have managed to, drawing me into its world and holding me in a way that generally only great novels do. Pauline Kael called it “one of the most enjoyable movies ever made”; it is certainly that, but it’s also more. With its scathing yet balanced depiction of (what was then) “the modern world” of show business, and its chilling portrait (in Eve, who is really Lilith) of the pathological drive to success running through it like a slow poison, it hasn’t dated one bit. If anything, it may be more insightful and “relevant” today than ever.

The film holds up far better than Citizen Kane, which is to say, better than just about any other American movie from the period (1950). It’s an incredibly sophisticated work, and although stylistically it’s perhaps not in Kane’s class, in terms of story, character, and dialogue, it’s light years ahead of Welles’ film. But let’s face it, though Citizen Kane is a brilliant film, it’s not a work of much depth. Do we ever really care about Kane as a person? Has anyone but movie buffs ever cried at the movie? I doubt it. All About Eve does more than move us—it moves us and then it reveals that we have been deceived (as much as the characters have) to have been moved; and then it moves us again, only this time genuinely. It is I think a work of genius (the genius being Joseph L. Mankiewicz, whose brother Herman co-wrote Kane.)

The reason Citizen Kane is so highly regarded, perhaps, is that it is both a cerebral and ostentatious work, filled with playfulness and ingenuity but not much heart or soul. Critics, being generally deficient in the areas of heart and soul, tend to approve of such works. Welles’ stylistic flourishes and his somewhat detached insights into human nature appeal to the predominantly intellectual bent of critics, and since it is critics who “decide” which works get to be called great, naturally the movies that appeal to the critical sensibility (i.e., the overly intellectual mind-set) are the ones that rank highest. All About Eve is also considered a great work, but nowhere near the stature of Kane. Yet it is by far the more heartfelt and affecting work.

Pauline Kael once wrote an essay entitled: “Is there a cure for film criticism?” The answer I’m afraid is no, there is not. Power corrupts, and the paltry power which critics have to impose their tastes (i.e., egos) on their readers seems to be what drives many journalists to the field of movie criticism. What clearly does not drive most of these critics is a simple love of movies, a love which Pauline Kael possessed in abundance, and which characterizes even the most scathing of her pieces.

Since I have been writing for The List I have been attending press screenings, and as a result have begun to believe that film critics aren’t really as interested in movies as they are in expressing their opinions about them. At the last film I saw (Dan in Real Life), sitting on either side of me were two (male) critics, both with pen and notepad in their hands, scribbling away throughout the movie. It’s true that, during Southland Tales, I was so bored by the movie that I wrote my review in the theater while the film was still playing. But this was expressly because the film was so bad that I needed something, anything, to relieve the boredom. It’s also true that, occasionally, very occasionally, I might jot down a quote or a thought during a movie, in order not to forget it. But these two critics were constantly jotting things down, and they spent half the time with their noses in their notepads instead of looking at the screen. After a while, I began to wonder if they were seeing the movie at all—they seemed to be too busy analyzing it. Instead of thinking about what was happening on the screen, they were already thinking about what they were going to say about it—in other words, about themselves.

It strikes me as rather pitiful that someone could be so immersed in their “station” as a film critic—and take it so seriously—that they would forsake the basic pleasures of watching a movie. Is it any wonder there is so much shoddy, petty, and mean-spirited film criticism, or why critics are by and large such obtuse and unimaginative creatures?

On the other hand, perhaps related to this, there is another fact to consider. Critics seem to be all too easily corrupted by the perks of power which their office provides. Such power is twofold: the public need critics to help them decide whether a movie is worth seeing or not, and moviemakers and distributors (to some extent at least) also rely on critics to create a positive “buzz.” So a critic may perceive an almost slavish dependency on his or her services on both sides. It’s a paltry sort of power, all told (with rare exceptions, no movie was ever saved or sunk by critics); but then again, if it interferes with the purity of the critical process (by creating self-interest), any power is too much.

There is such a thing as critical consensus, and the public have been known to go along with it: some truly mediocre films have somehow attained the consensus of greatness, either as a result of critical or public opinion or both (e.g., Silence of the Lambs, The Exorcist, Dances with Wolves, The Shawshank Redemption, Little Miss Sunshine, the list goes on and on). In theory, one critic can turn the tide if enough other critics (for whatever reason) fall in line, whereupon the public obediently follows suit. There are even occasional upsides to this normally depressing process, such as when Kael single-handedly created a reevaluation and re-release of Bonnie and Clyde. But mostly, it is simply a case of the rot settling in.

The desire for social influence comes from basic lack of self-esteem or personal power—in a word, an insecure ego. Naturally, such insecurity is assuaged by the feeling of self-importance that having some influence over other people’s opinions brings. This is most commonly seen in religious fanatics who attempt to convert anyone and everyone to their beliefs—ostensibly out of religious zeal (to save souls), but really only to prop up their own precarious belief system by getting others to invest in it. Even more fundamentally, it is a means of increasing their sense of self-worth by “helping” other people to “see the light.”

In our modern world, the average sophisticated person hasn’t much by way either of a religious or a moral system to adhere to, much less advocate. In its place (since nature abhors a vacuum) we have a modern value system that pertains more to matters of taste and style (though also political conviction), so that today, it is not so much what we believe as what we “like” that defines us. Most of us become uncomfortable if a close friend doesn’t agree with us about a movie we especially love (or hate); either secretly or openly, we want somehow to “set them straight” and convince them they are wrong. In more or less the same way, zealots attempt to convince sinners of the error of their ways, albeit with considerably more zeal and moral arrogance, the basic motive being the same. In our present culture of entertainment, journalists and critics are the equivalent of preachers—high priests in the case of the more influential ones—and just as in religion and politics, the field attracts a disproportionate number of scoundrels and rogues, insecure and unscrupulous individuals who will do just about anything to consolidate their petty sphere of influence.

Apropos of this, I recently saw that both Film Comment and Sight and Sound gave glowing notices to Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. In both cases, it was the same critic doing the praising (Amy Taubin, who compared Kelly’s film to Citizen Kane). I couldn’t help but wonder—in the light of such a brazen travesty of critical judgment—what was in it for these magazines. Kelly’s film is so indefensibly awful that it seemed destined for the kind of critical and popular reception that every filmmaker dreads. If such bizarre critical favoritism helps save Kelly from oblivion, fair enough: bad as Southland Tales is, Kelly doesn’t deserve to be barred from making future films. However, I can’t believe that either Film Comment or Sight & Sound commissioned Taubin to praise the film out of sympathy for Kelly (and even less out of admiration for the film). Yet there remains the distinctly odd coincidence of the only two “serious” and widely distributed film magazines praising what must be the worst auteur movie of the year, or of the last few years for that matter. The only explanation left—besides simple chance—is that the company behind the film (Sony) has been offering out bribes as a means of damage control, to prevent the movie from being a total disaster.

It’s a simple enough procedure for a magazine, having been “encouraged” by a major corporation to praise a film, to seek out one of its writers who actually liked the film and then give the commission to them. Editors (in this case Gavin Smith and Nick James) can tell themselves there’s nothing “unethical” about such a procedure, since after all, a review is always only one person’s opinion anyway. But the fact remains that corporate agenda is dictating the magazine’s policy.

Whether specifically true in this case or not, there’s no doubt that this is becoming more and more the case. There is more and more evidence that, even when individual sensibilities are expressed through the media, they tend to be almost deliberately perverse and completely out of whack with anything resembling good sense or critical judgment. Such aberrational “exceptions” are probably serving the machine in ways that may not at first be obvious. Southland Tales is supposedly a subversive film, even an apocalyptic one; but it is so utterly dismal a work that I can only imagine the forces which it appears to be denouncing and exposing will be perfectly happy for it to reach audiences, since it can only serve to deaden their brains even more than they are already. (It strikes me as a very cynical film, because there is nothing behind the “subversive” ideas save a rather self-indulgent desire to wallow in them.)

All about Eve, on the other hand, is a truly subversive and inspired work. It does exactly what the consensus of politicians, journalists, film critics, and all the rest of the intellectualized bellwethers to the secret elite—as well as the lobotomized masses they take delight in controlling—seem intent on avoiding at all costs: it stirs the depths of the soul. Watching it is not just entertaining, it’s enlightening. It brings us to a higher, more finely attuned state of consciousness, one of compassion, understanding, and empathy. This is what characterizes all true works of art, and what the rest of the world appears to be increasingly intent upon suppressing at any cost: intensity of feeling.

2007-11-30T09:05:00.000-08:00

You Kill Me, Southland Tales & Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium

You Kill Me
Every once in a while a movie comes along in which the filmmakers know exactly what they’re doing, which is precisely how I felt within the first few moments of You Kill Me, a razor-sharp comedy directed by John Dahl from a script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, starring Ben Kingsley as an alcoholic hitman, Frank. When Frank falls asleep on the job and the target gets away, Roman, his Mafioso brother (Philip Baker Hall), orders him to join the AA and clean up his act. The rest of the plot (involving Dennis Farina as a rival mob boss muscling in on Roman’s turf) is at best functional, but with a premise like this—hit-man forced to quit drinking so he can carry on killing—who cares? The casting of Kingsley as Frank is inspired, and Dahl returns to form as a director, his last film of note being Rounders, back in 1998. The film delivers on its giddy promise pretty much all the way, and unlike most other nihilistic-comedies-about-lovable-hitmen, there’s nothing mean-spirited about it. It doesn’t glorify Frank’s work, but it never holds it against him either. It’s dark, but it has heart.

Since playing Gandhi in 1982, Kingsley has steadily evolved from an accomplished, rather dull actor into a sneaky, playful presence; he seems especially at home playing heavies, and Frank may be his best role to date. Tea Leoni, Bill Pullman, Luke Wilson, and Marcus Thomas all bring a special flourish to their work, and make up a motley bunch of endearing, slightly off-the-wall characters (the exceptions are Farina and Hall, who have played these roles too many times before). The film rather fizzles out towards the end—it badly needs an ingenious twist or action sequence to round it off—but for most of its length it’s a real gem: diamond hard and razor-sharp. Frank takes pride in being good at his job, but he has a conscience. He doesn’t regret killing people, just the kills that weren’t “clean.” The film is gleefully morbid. It’s death-affirming.

Southland Tales
Richard Kelly’s long-awaited follow-up to 2001’s Donnie Darko arrives on a wave of bad press after its 2006 screening at Cannes, and alas, reports were not exaggerated. Southland Tales is painfully sophomoric and entirely devoid of the wit, intelligence and pathos that made Donnie Darko such a unique experience. Aspiring to be a sci-fi epic, the film was shot on a tiny budget in only thirty days, and the film looks (and sounds) like an “avant-garde” American TV show, with performances (a bland cast lead by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Sarah Michelle Geller) on about the same level. Everything about Southland Tales is horribly botched; it even manages to make Miranda Richardson look like a bad actress, a major feat in itself.

Whatever Kelly’s vision was, it was hopelessly scrambled on the way to the screen. What’s left is an undisciplined mishmash of ill-conceived, poorly executed scenes going nowhere and a lot of slapstick violence and smug, “surrealist” jokes reminiscent of David Lynch on a bad day. Kelly is insanely ambitious and he throws just about everything into the mix—Biblical prophecies, teenage porn, corporate conspiracies, rigged elections, time travel, world war three—everything except believable characters, engaging dialogue, or a plot that makes any sense. When Kelly’s not aping Lynch he’s coat-tailing Kubrick (he makes his inspirations plain with the soundtrack, probably the most enjoyable thing in the film), but he has sacrificed his own sensibility on the altar of his movie idols. In the process of realizing his grandiose satiric-apocalyptic vision of “Life on Earth,” he short-circuited his talent. Without narrative framework or coherent vision, Southland Tales is all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium
Written and directed by Zach Helm (who wrote last year’s underrated Stranger Than Fiction), Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium tells the tale of a 243-year-old toy shop proprietor (Dustin Hoffman) and his faithful store manager Molly (Natalie Portman). When Magorium decides his time to depart has come, he chooses Molly as his heir, but Molly doubts her ability to fill her mentor’s magical shoes. Helm is aiming for a kind of archetypal fairy tale complete with Tim Burton-style carnival antics, but nothing seems to come naturally to him. He’s straining for effects and the strings are showing, and most of the time he relies on a soaring orchestral score do his work for him. The music lets us know when we’re supposed to be moved, and audiences may go along with the film simply because it works so hard at being liked. But besides the irresistible high of seeing Natalie Portman finding her witchcraft, nothing has much resonance here. It’s all bright surfaces with nothing behind them. Where Stranger Than Fiction achieved a magical realism, combining a sharp psychological edge with Capra-esque sweetness, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium is all sweetness and no edge. It’s cotton candy, and without nuances or depth, the result is as flat and inconsequential as a cartoon show. We might at least have hoped for an inventive star turn from Hoffman, but he comes off as a mincing, cloying presence. The whole film is cloying, in fact. Magic that isn’t anchored in reality is just confetti to distract from the fact that nothing is really going on. The film is kid’s stuff, a likeable trifle. Considering the talent involved, it’s a major disappointment.

2007-11-19T02:49:00.000-08:00

Reign Over Me: The Healing Power of Tears

I seem to be doing a lot of sobbing at the movies these days. Maybe it’s me—it’s been a rough year, and if sadness makes the heart grow tender, then a tender heart feels sadness all the more acutely (it’s a bittersweet circle). The business of living day to day tends to get in the way of processing the sorrow of being alive—who has time to get through it all?! Thank God for the movies. With all that sorrow banked up inside us, just waiting to break on through, all it takes is the right kind of shove for the flood gates to come crashing open. At least, that’s how it is for me.

I admit I am a sucker for sad movies (and sad songs, hell, sad anything); I even shed a tear at Titanic, much to my shame. But what the hell: if a little artfully (or trashily) rendered heartache allows us to tap into the all-too-real sadness locked up inside us, why not? It’s great therapy. (This is probably why I prefer to see movies alone, or at least with someone as “sensitive” as I am.) But there’s a difference between a mawkish tear sheepishly shed in response to the shameless manipulations of Hollywood, and the kind of out and out sobbing of which I am now talking.

First there was Atonement, a film that built to a crescendo of sadness and seemed to tap into a universal sorrow, a cosmic melancholy that had nothing to do, finally, with the specific story or the characters, and everything to do with a basic human regret for what might have been, and the longing for what can never be. Such regret and longing seems to be what being in love—which is the defining experience of being human—is all about, and Atonement captured something indefatigable and mysterious about the human condition. Is this why they say love hurts? Not because it goes awry (though it usually does), but because the act of loving opens us up in such a way—tenderizes us—so that everything hurts? To feel such tenderness for one’s beloved is to feel empathy for all creatures everywhere, and yes, it hurts terribly. But it’s a joyful sorrow, because we know that only through feeling such empathy are we really alive.

Into the Wild also had me blubbing almost uncontrollably by the end. I could hear people in the audience shifting in their seats and sense their resistance to the power of the movie, the awful pain of loss which it was trying to communicate, but that they’d rather rationalize away than have to experience, even in a movie. People are frightened of that kind of intensity, and they resent and reject movies that stir such deeper feelings in them. As a result, they miss out on the most valuable thing that art has to offer: true catharsis. Me, I love it. What could be better than working through one’s grief and sadness in the safety and comfort of a movie experience—weeping not for one’s own losses but for those of other people—people who (some of the time, at least, though not in the case of Into the Wild) don’t even exist? If we can come out of a movie feeling like a loved one just died or like our hearts have been torn to shreds by forces beyond our control or understanding, then we know we just saw something. We have had a taste of what living is all about: intensity of feeling. (Other films that left me feeling this way: Blue Velvet, Casualties of War, A Midnight Clear, United States of Leland.)

The latest movie to do me in is not quite in this class, but it’s well worth a look. It’s called Reign Over Me, with Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle, two wonderful actors who do some terrific work here. Sandler is especially good, as Charlie Fineman, a father and husband whose family is killed in a plane crash on 9/11, and who retreats into a foggy fantasy world, safe from the reach of other people and from his own unbearable grief, until Cheadle comes along and draws him back to reality. This is basically the same or similar story to The Fisher King, but Reign Over Me is not a fantastic or mythical tale, it’s a more straightforward drama, and I had my doubts about the film before seeing it. It’s written and directed by Mike Binder, who did The Upside of Anger, an enjoyable and intelligent film (Binder’s an actor also and he has a role in Reign as Charlie’s obnoxious lawyer). Using a personal 9/11 tragedy sounded like a dangerously sentimental and earnest departure point for a movie, and I was expecting the kind of “healing” feel-good fluff that Hollywood does so poorly. But Reign Over Me is a wonderful movie, unpretentious and not in the least bit pious. It’s light on its feet but it packs a real wallop. Admittedly, it sticks fairly close to a feel-good formula and it’s a very slick package, all told, so you’d be forgiven for dismissing it as just another Hollywood product. Binder’s film doesn’t take any major risks; it’s the kind of film you could take your grandparents to—a film for everyone—not something that can ever be said about a genuine work of art. But if it’s not a work of art, it’s a beautifully rendered tale with a smart, heartfelt script, and whatever shortcomings the film has, Adam Sandler transcends them all. With Sandler’s remarkable performance at its center, the film has a big and tender heart, and a true sense of pathos; it may be the fullest, most satisfying depiction of grief I’ve ever seen in a movie. Reign Over Me sneaks up on you; it starts off gentle and funny and unassuming, but if you succumb to its unusual blend of sharpness and tenderness, by the end it will have rent your heart in two. Reign Over Me argues for the healing power of tears. It sure persuaded me.

2007-11-16T01:59:00.000-08:00

Into the Wild: Snapshots of the Heart

Based on Jon Krakauer’s book about the true story of Chris McCandless, Sean Penn’s Into the Wild is a powerful movie. As a writer-director, Penn has a way of cutting to the bone of his subject—he has an eye and ear that is almost unique in American movies, and he manages to be soulful without a trace of sentimentality (he gets away with lines that would turn to mush in anyone else’s hands). There’s a core of pathos to his film which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before.

This may be personal prejudice: the story of a young post-graduate student who gives up his inheritance and abandons a cozy life to wander across the US without a word to his family, and who ends up dying alone in the wilderness of Alaska, has special resonance for me because I did something similar, at almost the same age as McCandless. I didn’t go to the wilds of Alaska and live in a bus—I went to Morocco and lived hand-to-mouth on the streets of Tangier—but the intent was the same: to get free from the suffocating context (and comforts) of a life that had defined me, and see what remained.

Chris McCandless is played by Emile Hirsch, last seen as the despicable Johnny Truelove in Alpha Dog, and it’s hard to imagine two more different roles. Hirsch has just the right qualities of strength and guilelessness here, the innocence and stubbornness that characterized McCandless. Chris is only interested in getting to the truth, whatever the cost in suffering (starting with his own: since his heart was broken, he has no qualms about breaking anyone else’s). By the end of his journey (we know this because he kept a journal), he realizes that whatever truth or happiness he finds in the wild is meaningless without someone to share it with. His desire to connect to Nature and so come to know his own truth is incomplete without a connection to others. This may be the final truth that McCandless realized; in a way, it’s the truth that killed him—or rather, that he had to die to discover.

It’s tempting to call Into the Wild a tragedy. It’s devastatingly painful to watch and the tendency is to seek a word to encompass that pain. But I don’t think it’s true; Chris made a choice to live on his terms; if someone had asked him if he was willing to die for them, I have no doubt he would have said yes. He died doing exactly what he wanted to do, and where’s the tragedy in that? If anything, Chris was an old-fashioned hero on a traditional quest for truth, but he was not a tragic hero. His “flaw” was in his naiveté, but this was inseparable from his integrity and vision: he knew he might die in Alaska but went anyway. He was prepared; it’s just that his preparations weren’t enough.

It's been years since I read the book, but so far as I know (and by most accounts), the film sticks close to Krakauer's account, which was itself close to being an accurate report of Chris' journey. Yet Into the Wild has the strength and simplicity—the moral force—of a fable, and with any luck that’s what audiences will respond to (those who don’t reject Chris outright as “selfish” or arrogant and dismiss his death as meaningless). What Chris chose—to leave it all behind and return to the wilderness to find out what he was made of—is surely something any sensitive person in today’s world can relate to. But it was more than a London-esque test of manhood or rite of passage (though it was certainly that), it was the searching of a poetic soul for meaning, of a highly sensitive and intelligent kid determined to strip away the layers that came between him and the truth, to remove all the masks and see what was behind them. In a way, Chris’ death was testimony not to his own folly, his obsession, but to the world’s failure to provide any meanings for Chris to believe in. The tragedy, then, is the tragedy of the world, a world represented by Chris’ parents, who pay the ultimate price for their failure, which is their incapacity to love their son in a way that is truthful.

If Chris unconsciously chose to die rather than to live in a world in which he found nothing—no values—worth living for, who can blame him? His death had more meaning than the life his parents wished for him ever could: it was at least his own meaning, his choice. As a writer and director, Sean Penn doesn’t belabor any of this. He doesn’t make the mistake of bringing the parable-like qualities of his tale to the surface. He focuses on the story and on bringing his characters to life, and lets the rest take care of itself; the metaphor is all the more powerful for being “found” rather than imposed. This is a true story, and what Penn has in common with his protagonist is an absolute commitment to—and an almost prodigious gift for—honesty. Scene for scene, I don’t think there is a single false note in the movie, and though the film is long, there’s nothing here that feels superfluous. All the characters bring something unique to the story; their presence serves to develop Chris as a character, giving him a context he would otherwise lack—their affection deepens him in our eyes. William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden as Chris’s parents, Jena Malone as his sister, Vince Vaughn as his friend and employer Wayne, Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker as an aging hippie couple he rides with, Hal Holbrook as Ron Franz, Kristen Stewart, as the achingly beautiful teenage girl who takes Chris to Salvation mountain, all provide bittersweet memories—snapshots of the heart—that Chris takes with him into the wild.

Penn occasionally overdoes his effects, most particularly his use of slow motion, and at times the film veers dangerously close to narcissism with imagery fit for aftershave commercials. And there are a couple of times when he borders on self-consciousness (such as when the old man Ron talks of God’s light and the sun breaks through the clouds); but these are just glitches in an otherwise flawless tapestry. Into the Wild is a tour-de-force, and yet (besides these moments) it never seems to be working on getting an emotional reaction. Penn doesn’t mess around; he gets his effects and moves on, his style is clean and confident—both poetic and prosaic at the same time. He lets the power of the images—and the emotional punch of the tale itself—carry the movie along. The film builds gradually, lyrically, with all the grace and tempo of an epic poem, into a devastating crescendo of imagery and a heartbreaking climax.

The empathy Penn shows for his characters (inseparable from the actors), his affinity for everyday Middle America (the film is shot entirely on location, often in Chris' exact "footprint," according to Penn), and the honesty and pathos of the film would be remarkable in any artist, but for someone once married to Madonna who has spent the past twenty-five years as a world famous movie star (Penn’s breakthrough role was in Taps, at 21 years old), it’s testimony to Penn’s integrity as an artist that the film is almost entirely devoid of inauthentic touches or condescension. It seems to come directly from his heart to us.

Into the Wild is an X-ray of the heart, showing all its intricacies and flaws, its longings and wounds. It draws a delicate yet raw portrait of the human condition honestly and compassionately, and it reveals the tragedy, not in Chris’ death, but in the possibility that his death was the only honest response to a life he refused to take part in. What Penn has done—besides the formidable task of presenting this sorrowful tale in a straightforward and truthful fashion—is what the greatest poets have always strived to do: to reveal the soul’s longings, and reflect our own souls back at us.

As Pauline Kael once wrote (of Francis Coppola’s Godfather Part Two): that’s the voice of the authentic hero.

2007-11-12T09:40:00.000-08:00

Devil Wears Prada, Mr Brooks

OK, after that last one, don't expect any long, philosophical posts for a while, I feel pretty much talked out so far as that goes, and I guess disrupting routines and becoming inaccessible might include no longer broadcasting all my latest realizations and so, potentially, letting the air out of them. We'll see if it works but meanwhile I am going to try and keep up this blog more regularly albeit also in a lighter and more journal-esque fashion. I just got a few commissions to write some reviews for The List, a Scottish magazine (like Time Out for Edinburgh) and I'll be sure and post any and all reviews I write for them here at the blog.

I continue to watch movies at an average of maybe four or five a week; recently I saw The Devil Wears Prada, which to my surprise I quite enjoyed, mostly for Meryl Streep's beautifully nuanced performance. This is normally the sort of movie I would feel almost morally obliged to despise, but it was actually very nicely put together, slick and often facile, yes, but also lively and sharp, and as light and pleasing as puff pastry. Also, Stanley Tucci is always a pleasure to watch, and Anne Hathway is certainly easy on the eyes. But Streep is a revelation. She has become an actress to watch, after two decades of lifelessly studied performances, she has really come into her own in the last ten years or so.

Mr. Brooks is probably the worst movie that I have enjoyed in a long time - there's no reason this preposterous nonsense should make even a passably entertaining movie, but somehow it does. Mostly it's because of Costner (as Brooks) and Hurt (as Brooks' personal devil), and the delightful running repartee they keep up through the film. Like You Kill Me - which I'll review here soon - it's about a killer who goes to AA meetings, the difference being that here Brooks is addicted to killing, not booze, and yes, he is trying valiantly to quit! His condition goes so deep, however, that it's congential - his daughter has inherited his blood lust too. Then there is Dane Cook as a sleazy amateur photographer who gets shots of Brooks' at work and blackmails him into letting him come along on his next murder. Most risable of all, there's Demi Moore as a tough-as-nails, hunch-following cop who is also a millionaire heiress. Oh, and let us not forget another serial killer called the Hangman who has escaped from jail and wants revenge on Demi for putting him away, and yes, all these separate strands are woven together without a shred of concern for the finer points of realism. By all rights, Mr. Brooks should be an out-and-out stinker, but somehow, it's rather fun. Not that I am recommending it, however. I was probably just in the mood for a brazenly bad movie. Costner remains an enjoyably inventive, underrated actor, however, and Hurt is never less than scintillating. He seems to have taken of late to playing scions of darkness, and like Kingsley, it suits him to a T.

2007-09-29T10:49:00.000-07:00

A Glimpse Into the Abyss: The Sex Traffic Industry in the UK

Yesterday I went into the West End to see Ocean’s 13 and meet up with Emma Thompson, a well-known actress and scriptwriter.

It was raining so I decided not to cycle in. Because of a late bus and traffic, I didn’t make it in time to see the movie, so I wandered around a bit then headed to Trafalgar Sq, where I was supposed to meet Emma later on. It was a very loose arrangement, made not with her but with one of her publicity people. Since ET lives nearby, I knew her address and had corresponded with her a few times recently, trying to get an interview for this magazine. Emma had passed on a message saying she was very busy (as usual) but that she'd be at “the installation” all week if I wanted to meet her. I had no idea what installation, so I did a Google search and found out she was taking part in a sort of art exhibition, designed to bring attention to the sex traffic industry.

“Every year thousands of young women are lured to the UK and brutally coerced into a life of sexual exploitation. Bought and sold, they are not visibly branded or shackled, but trapped in local massage parlors and behind the respectable net curtains of suburbia, they are forced to service punter after punter. These women are not sex objects, but daughters sisters and mothers with the same hopes and aspirations as you.”

I got to Trafalgar Sq and found the installation. It was a sort of makeshift tunnel or tube wrapped in black tauplin, and there was a long line of people waiting to go in. Since it was still raining and I was the only person in London without an umbrella, I didn’t feel like standing in line. I went to look for Emma but she was nowhere around. Since I wanted to say that I’d seen the installation when I did find her, I resigned myself to standing in line, and as it happened the line moved pretty fast.

The first stage of “the journey” entailed peering through small key-shaped holes at little scenes of cloth dolls and tiny furniture, showing the kind of environment that the future “sex slaves” had originally come from, then the arrival of a sex trafficker (a woman) to lure them away from their homes, into the hellish new circumstances. It wasn’t clear exactly how the girls were lured, but presumably it was with promises of easy passage to the new land, and of work when they got there, without ever specifying what such work would entail. Traffickers prey upon the naiveté and trusting nature of the girls, and it’s perhaps easy in retrospect to say that the girls ought to have suspected something. But how many of us have been fooled in similar ways—by our tendency to believe the best about people—out of a fervent desire to get what we want? (Which is why drug dealers find it so easy to con their clients, for example.)

The next stage involved standing in the darkness listening to music, mixed with women’s voices and sounds of despair and confusion. This led to the third stage, in which we were invited to peer through face-sized holes in the wall, only to find ourselves staring into a mirror. In the mirror, our own faces appeared atop photographic, life-size images of scantily clad female bodies, obviously prostitutes. This was a crude but effective device, and my first response was appreciatory (and perhaps defensive) laughter.

The next stage was by far the most powerful—a recreation of a room in which the business transaction occurred. There was a single bed, a mechanism underneath causing the mattress to undulate up and down rhythmically. On the sheet were what looked like shit stains. A trash can in the corner overflowed with soiled tissue paper; a box of condoms by the bed, make-up and other random trinkets on a mantelpiece, a mirror with lipstick stains, a board on the wall with the prices for various sex acts, and so forth. The room was rank and foul with the sticky, sweet and sour odor of sweat and despair. It was about now that I began to feel physically sick.

The next stage was about “the customer”: photographs on the walls (presumably of actors) showing various different types and ages of guys, drinking in pubs, hanging on the beach, playing darts, etc. On the audio, various male voices were discussing their experiences with paid sex. Whether or not the voices were of actors (my guess) or real punters, this part of the installation wasn't especially convincing, but it was interesting to hear the various justifications.

Then we were asked to gaze into a large black hole and imagine the Abyss. This seemed kind of superfluous to me. The whole thing was an abysmal experience.

The last stage entailed listening to a recorded interview with one of the girls who had been through the ordeal, and who eventually made it out the other side. She described the whole process from innocence to experience. When she arrived in the UK (aged 19), she had never seen a man naked; a month later, she was having sex with up to 40 guys a day. She described being unable to get their smell off her. She’d been told that once she earned 20,000 pounds for her traffickers, she'd be free to go. That didn’t happen; even after she’d earned the money, they kept her working. After a while she became numb, a machine. She no longer even knew who she was. The experiences were so relentlessly unpleasant that she began to black them out. People can adapt to anything to survive. But there is always a cost. Stick a relatively normal person in abominable circumstances, and eventually they will come to accept them as normal. In a sense, they must become aberrations themselves in order to fit in. Spend enough time in Hell and you have to let the demons in, just to get some peace.

Eventually she made it out. The police arrested her along with a bunch of other girls, and refused to believe her story. She is now living in London , and seems to be “over” her ordeal. Does one ever get over something like that? Let’s just say she has come through it.

I don’t normally write about this kind of thing. I mean, I write about it, but as fiction. I don’t report on it, and it is draining me just to try. I can’t find the words. It all sounds so mundane. There’s no way to “dramatize” something like this. It is too horrendous to need any dramatizing. Yet the mere facts don’t suffice either. I think it’s because it is both mundane and fantastic at the same time. Is there any horror greater than this, any worse a fate to endure? Yet it is absolutely inevitable given our current situation, our social, political, psychological and sexual condition—as human beings. When you put all these distorted factors together, this kind of thing is just one of the necessary outcomes. By “necessary,” I mean in the sense of reaping what we have sown. Horrendous as these circumstances are in and of themselves, they are actually only the symptoms of a greater condition: the disease called “the world.”

The Helen Bamber Foundation ( www.helenbamber.org ), Michael Korzinski, Emma Thompson, and all the people involved with this need courage to do what they are doing. I don’t mean to stick their necks out politically (although the primary intent behind this is to get the UK government to cast their vote with the 9 other countries already committed—10 being the required number—and implement the laws necessary to prevent further exploitation). I mean that it is courageous of them to dedicate so much of their time and energy to something so palpably unpleasant, so unappetizing, to allow it to infiltrate their lives, their thoughts and dreams. Let’s face it, most of us would really rather not know about it. And if we have to know, we will do our damnedest not to think about it for too long. Such knowledge weighs heavy on the soul. There is a loss of innocence with every dark and ugly truth about human nature that is allowed to take root in us.

So yeah, seeing the installation was pretty disturbing. The timing was especially uncanny, because I am writing a script now about a guy who turns a young girl into his sex slave, keeps her in his basement for eight years, until she is little more than a machine for his own gratification. And here I was, confronted with a reality no less dark and twisted, in fact more so, because it is reality. Although my script certainly never glamorizes the subject, it does attempt to make it entertaining—it’s a movie, after all. There was nothing entertaining about this installation. I left feeling like I’d been kicked in the stomach. Like I was polluted. Like I never wanted to have sex again.

It wasn’t guilt I felt, or even complicity exactly. But it wasn't moral outrage either. I didn’t feel anger or disgust at the people who engineered such atrocities. (I would if I saw them, of course.) What I felt was a sense of sadness and horror, a creeping nausea and despair at the state our souls are in, and the fact that our sexuality—the most sacred and powerful and creative force within us—has been reduced to this.

In the end, are the exploiters any less damned than their victims? Considerably more so, I’d say. The image that came to my mind, later, was of myriad souls trying desperately to claw their way out of Hell. And despite their all being in the same Hell together, there was no possibility of contact, communication, or compassion between them.

And yet there is complicity, all down the line. The young girls wanted to improve their conditions, hoping for a better life somewhere, and their desire overrode their innate sense of caution and common sense, making them easy prey for unscrupulous predators. The traffickers, taking their cue, exploited these young girls for profit, in order to improve their conditions and get a piece of the hellish pie which they no doubt consider their due. There is no end to the ways we justify what we do. They probably tell themselves that anyone dumb enough to trust them deserves whatever they get. Or that a few months of having sex with strangers never harmed anyone. They will say that everybody wins in such an arrangement: they get rich, the girls get what they want, and the punters get their jollies. And the punters, the closest to you and I, regular folk, can kid themselves that a little consensual exploitation never hurt anyone. But the truth is something else. The truth is that everybody loses.

There seems no sense in casting stones here. Souls in hell will do anything, ANYTHING, to get out. They don’t care how many other souls they have to drag down in their frantic attempt to get free. The tragedy is that the endless clawing and thrashing only digs us all deeper, into the Pit.

Seems like the only thing we can do is grow wings.

2007-09-17T05:01:00.000-07:00

Fast Food Nation, The Hoax, Hallstrom, Network, Kubrick

Fast Food Nation is a goddamn masterpiece, not a word I use often (masterpiece, that is, not goddamn). Linklater got it just right, the blend of documentary with drama, making his points without getting didactic or heavy-handed, and slowly building to the grisly climax: the cows happy in their pens and then showing us in the most ruthless fashion the horrendous fate in store for them. Kris Kristofferson is great, he has the best line in the movie: "It's like something out of science fiction." No shit. Without ever being ponderous or preachy, the movie shows how satanic/life-destroying modern society has become. Linklater is really the only guy doing this stuff, and with this movie, for the first time since Waking Life, he totally pulled it off. There was nothing at all wrong with the movie, that I could see, everyone in it was great, Hawke, Kinnear, Arquette, Willis, and all the unknowns. But boy was it dark. Probably the darkest movie to make the mainstream in a while. I guess critics (never mind mass audiences) didn't go for it, huh? No wonder. I bet a sizeable % of people who saw it wished they hadn't. They sure as shit didn't feel like stopping off at Burger King afterwards! The movie really blew me away.

Just saw The Hoax, loved it, though once it was over I realized that, though it was a wonderful story, it wasn't quite a wonderful movie. The reason is that Lasse Hallstrom has no distinguishing features as a director. He just tells the story and moves on, turning his films out like cookies. Once Around, Gilbert Grape, Cider House Rules, An Unfinished Life, I even liked Casanova, and besides the confectionary of Chocolat, the only real misstep has been The Shipping News). Yet besides Grape, none of them quite rise above the level of delightful whimsy. The Hoax is his best, most substantial, movie since Grape, and mostly this is due to Gere, who is superb, and really beings Clifford Irving to life, creating one of the most memorable movie characters I've seen in years. This is probably his best role. Oh, yes, that is the same Clifford Irving from F for Fake, a great little underseen documentary film by Orson Welles.

I saw Network recently, having only seen it once years and years before. I was disappointed overall, thought it was a great script but only a good movie. Lumet's direction was flat and leaden,. Then I read Kael on the movie (she scorned it) and I wondered if it was even a good movie (don't you hate that, a great reviewer like Kael can make you doubt your own opinions – which is always my own objective as a film writer, the power of lucid prose to persuade). Talk about polemic – she's right I think in saying that the characters are all just mouthpieces for Chayefsky's rants. But boy, what rants! The best scene is Ned Beatty's speech to Howard, it really makes the head spin with its insights. A major flaw, however, is that the film doesn't manage to make us care when Beel gets shot. To me that causes the whole thing to fall apart, leaving me with a feeling of indifference, a real downer after some of the movies highs.

You could argue that it wasn't supposed to be emotionally involving, but only intellectually—like the films of Kubrick. But I'm detached enough already, and I don't care for these kinds of intellectual films any more than Kael did. I demand emotional involvement from a movie, that's what I love about movies! There are a few key exceptions (Badlands) in which the coldness is part of the beauty and even the meaning of the film – the result being that though I may not be involved with the characters, I am emotionally moved (Badlands is a euphoric experience because it's such awesome filmmaking). If a work doesn't move me emotionally, however, I don't really see how it can be called art. It might be intellectually stimulating, but that's just philosophy. I guess Godard is a good example, since he did film-essays which I loved (some of them) because they were exciting, the excitement of ideas (funnily enough, Kael was a big admirer of Godard). I think perhaps the key is whether a work that's "cold" or removed is pretentious or playful (Weekend was pretentious, Band of Outsiders was playful, god I love the dance sequence in that film – a rare case of what I would call "pure cinema"!). Barry Lyndon was beautiful to look at, but its coldness was a drag, it took itself too seriously, like all Kubrick's later films (post-Strangelove).

The reason Peckinpah is the quintessential filmmaker to me is that his films are imbued with passion—he's the opposite of Kubrick, who is the antithesis of a real moviemaker, to my mind, making it so ironic that he's lauded as the greatest of the greats! I think it's probably because people are in awe of the intellect. I'm not, however, since my own intellect is over-developed, and I know how easy it is to impress with a few cleverly chosen words (or images). But it's really just necrophilia, in the end. Only by bringing characters to life and engaging the audience to feel for them do we enter into the realms of true creation—alchemy.