“Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.” ― Jean Baudrillard
"Fake it 'til you make it" - old AA proverbWritten and conceived by doe-eyed El Salvadorian ex-SNL writer Julio Torres (the genius behind the 'Wells for Boys' sketch) and the startlingly deadpan young writer/comedian Ana Fabrega, LOS ESPOOKYS, a new HBO comedy is one of the first to be filmed in Spanish meant for American audiences as well as the world. Set in Mexico, the show chronicles the interlocking adventures of a group of horror make-up/effects specialists who--for a fee--stage 'real' scares: everything from UFO abductions, to exorcisms, sea monster sightings (to drum up seaside tourism), and old dark house hauntings and so forth. Fans of classic Mexican horror, Ed Wood, Alejandro Jodorowsky, the ficciones of Borges, the deadpan drollery of Fred Armisen (i.e. Portlandia) and all the true (?) ghost and UFO shows on cable--ay dios mio!-- must love it.
Aside from the deliriously deadpan ultra-fey Torres (as emo/goth/his own thing cookie fortune heir Andres) and the vacant Tati (as the group's idiot savant intern), the show stars Bernardo Velasco as Renaldo, the sweet-hearted ringleader, and badass flaca Ursula (Cassandra Ciangherotti). José Pablo Minor is Andres' hopelessly vain fiancee; Paloma Moreno Fernandez is the possibly hypnotized TV hostess whose E-style clip news show becomes a showcase for these 'real' happenings; John Early is a coked-up pyramid scheme health drink scam artist who power talks Tati into buying hundreds of cases of his energy drink on credit, then comes after her with the coked-up fury of a rabid dog; Fred Armisen is Renaldo's Uncle Tico, who lives in America where he's a master valet who rescues and then hooks the gang up with Carol Kane as a kind of Doris Wishman/Roberta Findlay horror director; a stereotypical blonde American ambassador (Greta Titelman) enters the picture when they need work visa and she may be willing to expedite if it means they stage a haunted mirror abduction that will garner her an extra week vacation. It all only gets weirder from there, but hey - we're with these unfadable titans of scariness, every haunted step.
dee-glorious |
The Age of Post-Reality
“What you knew in your childhood is true; the Otherworld of magic and enchantment is real, sometimes terribly real - and certainly more real than the factual reality which our culture has built...” ― Patrick Harpur
You can read that last paragraph two ways, either as racist (Mexicans are dumb enough to believe anything and can't afford to go to Harvard) or as an example of the Latin American gift for magical-realism ala Garcia-Lorca / Jodorowsky / Castaneda / Borges. We come to the zone where we have to realize that Spanish /Latin American conceptions of the supernatural exist on an infinitely higher plane than the true/false dichotomy of the North. In the mythic reality of Mexico, the wall between the real and the vividly imagined is not only elastic, traversable, and illusory, but porous. The ability to traverse freely across this barrier is something that Americans only get during the LSD trips, or as young children, or during schizophrenic breaks, or when suffering from an intense fever. It's something we'd never usually see in an American TV show where we're constantly on the scent for hoaxes and scams. We're so terrified of looking foolish to our peers(and maybe attracting all sorts of scam artists who sense our 'kook' gullibility) that it's far better to just keep our lips frozen in a perma-sneer of disbelief.
Will get fooled again - Jaime Maussan |
In the world of Los Espookys, there are multiple realities within the diegesis: the horrors staged by the group are fake, but demonic events, hauntings, inter-dimensional mirror abductions, etc. seamlessly occur as well. The funniest of these being an ancient underwater creature who promises to tell Andres the truth about his birth (he believes he's a demon child who was left on the doorstep of his adopted parents), provided he first show her The King's Speech on his laptop.
Certainty is a luxury reserved for the ignorant.
The Panacea of Myth
There's a fascinating episode of M*A*S*H--the season six finale ("Major Topper") where the unit runs out of morphine and has a full house of suffering casualties. Colonel Potter decides to try the giving out placebos until the real stuff arrives. He instructs his doctors and nurses on the importance of acting as if this placebo is the real thing: they must show absolute confidence in the power of the pill. They tell patients it's a very potent new drug, etc, even stronger than most opiates. The slightest lack of conviction on the staff's part can lead to... nothing... no effect. But they pull it off, and for most of the wounded, it works great.
Is not the razzle-dazzle carny tricks, the shaking rattle and strange dances of the shaman, the mix of hocus pocus and hypnosis, similar to the belief in the placebo? Conjuring healing spirits up out of feathers and sage smoke, the shaman conducts the air, blows tobacco smoke in the face of invisible demons, and create psychic currents in the mind the way the snake charmer blows his drowsy reed.
In the eyes of a debunker, this would be a hoax. Would the "Mythbusters" feel the need to storm the MASH tent and wise the patients back into a world of 'honest' pain? Since the mainstream medicine can't quite figure out how a trick of the mind can affect the physical healing process so strongly (or vice versa, as in the stigmata), surely they must point out it cannot technically be working.
The mind is a curious, unknowable thing, as vast and strange as the universe it's part of. Fiction is seized on as needed - thus a book that never existed, like the Necronomicon, is now sought after by people who believe it's real; then some enterprising genius writes one --a kind of post-myth truth. Or consider the case of Carlos Castaneda's "Teachings of Don Juan," based on the teachings a Yaqui shaman who, by most accounts, doesn't actually exist, but people say they have 'studied with him' - did they mean the took mescaline in the Mexican mountains and spent an hour having a life-altering psychic conversation with what he thought was a snake but turned out to be an abandoned grouse nest?
The brain that works so hard to deny the unknown is itself dangerously unaware of its own unconscious. The person with such an attitude may be in some form of repetitious denial from, say, being laughed at in elementary school for believing in fairies. An affirmed atheist is usually reacting against being forced to go to a very dogmatic church as a child, little knowing or allowing himself to know that there are millions of other, better ways to envision God -they have killed off their sense of wonder by a desperate bid to belong to the 'right' side, to believe only in what is firmly and conclusively 'known' and areso hostile to ideas involving aliens, ESP, reincarnation and ghosts that even concrete evidence is dogmatically disregarded. They have a flimsy sense of self and groundedness, otherwise they wouldn't have such a closed-minded reaction. They are the witch burners of their age.
The American Embassy in Mexico City in the Age of Trump |
This goes both ways of course - the undeniable power of God-- a holy visitation - a heavenly hand reaching from the clouds opening up behind you, to touch your shoulder and electrify your kundalini like a bolt of lightning, can either lead you to join a holy order and renounce selfish ways - you asked for a sign and received one! Or to think about doing that, then shrug it off after awhile when you realize what a drag that would be. Maybe you were just 'expecting' some big holy event, some Potter placebo effect, and it was delivered. Thus the doubter who insists on a sign before belief--and then gets just that sign--often refuses to believe anyway.
In sum, we're better off without either undeniable evidence or a dead worldview that allows no wonderment about the world. Los Espookys' genius lies in this, in becoming the "/" in the either/or dichotomy. To find the truth behind the unknown too soon may seem like a good idea, but then you're stuck having to pretend to be surprised later, when it's finally time to open your present. The trick is to have already forgotten what it was, because you're so stoned all the time.
Here's an example of Disinformation and the Mythic in action: After the massive triangle shaped UFO sighting over the Phoenix skies in 1997 (thousands saw it, video evidence galore), the city's mayor was under extreme pressure from a panicked public to provide answers. He didn't have any, so what were they expecting? What did their panicked unease demand? The idea it was military flares didn't really gel (the local air force did drop some flares afterwards, in a classic bit of disinformation/obfuscation after the fact), and the demand for an explanation itself became a looming threat to the local government - how could they ease the public without lying to them?
The fact that anyone would even call the police when they see a UFO proves the point. If you need the police to come because you see some lights, you can't handle the truth. So what can the mayor say that will allay pointless panic and dissolve expectations of 'action' and answers from local government? The mayor's masterful psychological solution: bring the alien (an aide in a costume) to the press conference.
The worry ended in a scattered eruption of nervous laughter. The gut response of the city and the thousands of witnesses was both momentary amusement followed by lingering resentment - feeling their concerns weren't being taken seriously. Clearly they weren't deconstructing the tactic or they would have 'gotten' its brilliance. Sure, the arrival of that costume and alien mask on the podium made a a lot people mad --they felt the mayor wasn't taking their concern seriously. But he was, he just didn't have an answer for them. The only way to dissolve their fear of the unknown was by turning it to disgruntled disaffect. It was a masterful example of a kind of anti-placebo, the wrapping of an unwieldy football field-sized question mark into a sugar pill of fiction.
As in the hauntings of Los Espookys, the alien at the press conference is a 'true' joke, a classic example of disinformation and the mythic real. Look at the the alien mask/head above for a minute: its a far too large to be a grey - but otherwise looks just like one, even suspiciously so if you really stare at it. Even the hands and uniform are on point. The 'joke' aspect is a way to admit there's really nothing the government can do. There's no real need for the public to know that the most powerful nation in the world can do absolutely nothing to stop these strange unknown phenomena from doing just as they please. The only response the president of a fully 'disclosed' nation could make about alien visitation concerns would be either "Don't worry, if it comes back we'll shoot it down! USA Number One!" Or "I think we should take our five purist virgins and leave them on a mountain as a welcome present."
"Phoenix lights" press conference 1997
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The worry ended in a scattered eruption of nervous laughter. The gut response of the city and the thousands of witnesses was both momentary amusement followed by lingering resentment - feeling their concerns weren't being taken seriously. Clearly they weren't deconstructing the tactic or they would have 'gotten' its brilliance. Sure, the arrival of that costume and alien mask on the podium made a a lot people mad --they felt the mayor wasn't taking their concern seriously. But he was, he just didn't have an answer for them. The only way to dissolve their fear of the unknown was by turning it to disgruntled disaffect. It was a masterful example of a kind of anti-placebo, the wrapping of an unwieldy football field-sized question mark into a sugar pill of fiction.
As in the hauntings of Los Espookys, the alien at the press conference is a 'true' joke, a classic example of disinformation and the mythic real. Look at the the alien mask/head above for a minute: its a far too large to be a grey - but otherwise looks just like one, even suspiciously so if you really stare at it. Even the hands and uniform are on point. The 'joke' aspect is a way to admit there's really nothing the government can do. There's no real need for the public to know that the most powerful nation in the world can do absolutely nothing to stop these strange unknown phenomena from doing just as they please. The only response the president of a fully 'disclosed' nation could make about alien visitation concerns would be either "Don't worry, if it comes back we'll shoot it down! USA Number One!" Or "I think we should take our five purist virgins and leave them on a mountain as a welcome present."
Welcome to our new squid overlords, 2029! |
IN A CHILD'S MIND:
Think back to being a child and watching bad old movies and not noticing the special effects because your own vivid imagination helped sketch in the missing details. But back on fuzzy local TV as a six year-old in the 70s, my childhood imagination painted movies like Yog! The Monster from Space (above) so much more vivid than they look today. I remember watching this as a kid of around nine or ten, being coated in sweat from the dread caused by that alien, who could jump from body to body, enlarging a crab or a squid offshore or becoming a dangerous man in sunglasses. I cheered the bats that scramble its sense of radar, like they were the cavalry. I have a clear vision of a bat's eye view shot looking down from the height of the thing, seeing that massive drop to the ground and feeling a vertiginous rush. I saw it for the second time recently, on HD widescreen and, eh - it was okay. Those bats weren't the same. My adult blinders had closed off my sense of wild wonder. There was no shot from the bat's eye view at all, just the medium shot you see above. But does that mean I imagined it? Am I somehow wiser than a Mexican Catholic version of myself who still swoops swoops to those nutty bats?
Similarly, a bunco spiritualist might bilk old ladies out of money but they give them assurance - and a place to project their own wishes. The medium provides the sound effects and the spirit lights and the ghostly voices, the grief-stricken participants project (unconsciously) the voice of their departed loved one onto the noises. The medium works with the client's unconscious mind, opening it up into a kind of auto-hypnosis due to grief, guilt, and fervent longing to say one last thing - to project/create a 3-D image of the departed spirit (and maybe the combination of that image--maybe a photo of the departed projected onto a silver/white balloon released by secret lever--plus the unconscious drive of the participant and the psychic openness of the medium, all combine to allow the projection of the actual spirit, much like the way a newborn body provides a screen for the projection of the soul (beamed down from the heavenly projector). The trappings of the skulls, darkness, candles, hand-holding, deep breaths and chants, etc. all soothe and orient the mind towards suggestiveness, towards a child's kind of keyed-in imagination, painting in details with such ease even the most mundane setting is imbued with memorable magic (that will later pay off as an adult with endless nostalgic comfort).
At the same time, a debunker, too, would find what they were looking for. The reverse of Col. Potter's placebo may well apply too. If the patient is sure they're getting a placebo but they actually get the real medicine, would it even work?
Sorry - lots of tangents. But as someone who is fascinated by the living myths of the supernatural and extraterrestrial via a Jungian lens, I just have to chime in. I hope you too will enjoy LOS ESPOOKYS and pay attention to the progress of alien information dissemination as it gains more and more momentum via cable TV channels like History, Travel and Destination America. As more and more dis/information is gathered, the line between speculation, theory, evidence, belief gets moved closer and closer over the border into being incorporated into social doctrine. Can our immersion into a childlike sense of agog wonder be far behind, I mean ahead? Los Espookys predicts it all by pointing out it's already true in its glorious falseness. Has it never not been?
Communion (1989) |
For more, visit Divinorum Psychonauticus - my extremely "other" blog, for occult theory, trippy art, and... is that it? Just those two things?
UFOs in sky, or close-up on powder blue bowling ball? |
Here are some recommended vistations:
Unconscious Contact: COMMUNION (1989)
The Evolver Virus: PROMETHEUS, THE DEAD FILES
from Divinorum Psychonauticus:
The Truth is a Hoax and that is a Lie (2.12)
Keeping Roswell's Plain Sight Secret: Phillip Corso and The Day After Roswell. (8/13)
Anthropological Amnesia: Humans aren't Human (March 2012)
Guide to Cable's Paranormal-Ghost-Hunting Shows (August 2012)
Aliens do it up the Nose: HARD Evidence (Aug 2010)
A Bug-eyed Look at UFO Disclosure (May 2010)
Demon Sheets: Sleep Paralysis Theories (Aug 2013)
Through a Dark Symbol (Nov. 2012)
Disclosure Happened: you missed it (3.11)
From Satanic Rite to the UFO to the Afternoon Nap (2/11)
I Blur the Line (July 2010)