Showing posts with label Disney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Disney. Show all posts

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Summer of my Netflix Streaming I: A Psychedelic Odyssey


It's the time of year when people come to me and say "Dude, how can you just sit there watching movies when it's so nice out??" Splayed upon the couch, limbs fecund with moss, I retort "duuuude, I'm going to get up any minute." They wait, but I do not stir. "OK, guess I'll go home," they finally say, "but I need some good Netflix recommendations. What should I watch tonight?" To this, I lurch forward in a great beverage-toppling spasm. "Welcome, then," I say, "to part three of a one part series: Summer of my Netflix Streaming; a psychedelic odyssey. Take two with grapefruit juice and call me in the void between six and sixtereen.

First Up:  Do you believe in death after life?  Roll the shizz, mon Scarab...

To remove your anxiety about what to watch in what order and when, I suggest you check all whatever of these in the order listed.. Empty your cue.... empty.... your....cue. By dawn things will make sinse (hic).


DMT: THE SPIRIT MOLECULE
(2012) Hosted by Joe Rogan

Go Rick Strassman go-ooo--ohmmm! In case you were born in some inane, counterintuitive dimension where all the chemical shortcuts to spiritual enlightenment have been made into felonies, you should know Dr. Rick Strassman actually got official clearance by the government to do DMT studies in clinical trials. The results? Mind-blowing, of course, but inconclusive, equally of course. See this and answer the question only you can answer: is there really any difference between hallucination and reality? If what you experience in the DMT-verse feels a hundred times more real than your waking, consensual reality, then doesn't that mean--as quantum physics and bioverse theorists contend--it's realer?

The only answer is.

Even so, enough bad trips happened under Strassman's watchful eye that he now feels a little guilty for messing up so many minds. So is he a Pandora's box cutter, a modern messiah, an apex predator Albert Hoffman, or just a scientist who, like Dr. Eric Vornoff before him, tampered in God's domain?  Only the machine elves know for sure --and they only tell the silver spiders tat spin together crystal cities that cohere out of our universal thought web. Deep down, you sense you already know the answer, and you do. 

Heads talking include my boy Daniel Pinchbeck and that 'other'-other McKenna. There's lots of groovy Alex Grey art and deep hallucinogen-ready kaleidoscopes. Joe Rogan narrates while standing in front of a blackboard --for extra validity. (more from Tripumentaries)

See also: Ayuhuasca Vine of the Soul


(2009) Dir. Gasper Noe

Drifting around Tokyo's pinku parlors, orbiting the heated copulations and floating into light bulbs (like Hitchcock's POV if it didn't find its way out of the black tunnel connecting the drain with Janet Leigh's pupil in PSYCHO), we never know what the late Oscar's free-floating POV soul orb is thinking or trying to merge into (though we can guess, heh heh) Drawn to the gravity of the flaming sexual heat of the sidpa bardo's intertwined coupling, the film's/Oscar's disembodied POV drifts towards any old giant sun egg in which to be reborn, looking for the white light to absorb it/us into the 3D space time groove. But it/we find only the respite of 60 watt bulb lamps, black light art exhibits, frenzied and deserved narc-bashing, and sex that goes nowhere as far as reincarnation opportunities. The Oscar/our POV/soul matrix winds winding up floating off to the ceiling again and again, ever on the move, falling via the abortionist's knife, and bumbling onto passenger planes, floating along he way we used to walk around outside the Dead shows when we didn't have that miracle ticket, looking for that unlocked fence, that lax security guard... that one ripped condom, the missed pill.. (from: Die Like an Eagle) 




(1940) Start at the 7:32 mark (and avoid the 2000 version)

(From Acid Sound Symphony:) Walt Disney was determined to not just blow minds and thrill art lovers with his 1940 epic animated classical music film FANTASIA, but to bring what critic James Agee referred to as "middlebrow highbrow" culture to an America on the edge of war. It didn't work, but when re-released in 1969, FANTASIA caught on with a new kind of American at the edge of war, the dosed hippie draft dodger. Seen today, whether you love or hate it it really depends, however high you may be when you come in, what you're feeling, how loud the sound is, and how receptive you are to a non-linear narrative concept of this painterly magnitude. The wonderful thing about trippers, is that a long, nonviolent movie full of nonlinear painterly abstraction and music is like heaven. The big fear, having to leave your comfortable spot on the floor and face the downstairs neighbors. But with headphones cranking the Bartok, the colors dripping off the page, it's either transformative perfection or the movie equivalent of the chill out tent. Either way, now you can scroll ahead if a segment is tedious or too square. Your bound to find something, especially if you start watching at the 7:32 mark, to avoid the draggy intro, and stick with the original. 


 METROPOLIS 
Giorgio Moroder version 
(1927) Dir. Fritz Lang (new version1984)

With wild color tinting, sci-fi sound effects, and Giorgio Moroder's 'great' 80s rock soundtrack (w/ Pat Benatar and Queen among others), Moroder's often unjustly-forgotten FANTASIA style protean music video narrative is way more fun and engagingly goofy than the digitally restored super-long original cut (also on Streaming) that got a theatrical rerelease back in 2005 (I've seen 'em both on big screens). I know it's cineaste heresy but I think Lang would have roared in indignation-cloaked delight to see his 1927 sci-fi parable turned into a stoner rock musical instead of slathered in the orchestral pomp most versions use for their soundtrack. If he could see the genius in Jess Franco's SUCCUBUS, Lang could surely see Moroder's grandiloquent disco cocaine-shiver synth 80s synth grandeur is the perfect fit for his cast's Weimar-rabid frothing-at-the-mouth acting style and the sped-up herky-jerk of Karl Freund's silent 'crank' camera.

Great moments of rock synergy include the factory workers' FLASHDANCE-style pop anthem, and the upper class brothel debut of the robot Maria, which is given growling rock authority via Bonnie Tyler's "Sweet Jane"-chorded "Here She Comes." If only all silent sci-fi films were given such loving attention from synthesizer-twiddling Italian disco composers! You'll be wondering where lurketh thy holy copy of 1980's FLASH GORDON after this, for the two would be a great double bill. Some detractors say the story's harder to follow this way (it's condensed to a brisk 90 minutes), I say those people are just not high enough, and neither is their stereo. 

CHARIOTS OF THE GODS
(1970) based on the book by Erich von Däniken 

The History Channel has been laden now for years with ancient alien-related programming and Erich von Däniken is there, but so is repetitive narration and whiplash editing and enough catheter commercials to give you panic attacks. But this is the original, the groundbreaker. The wild locations where Von Däniken found his archeological signifiers are still fecund with overgrowth, under-explored, and surrounded by indigenous tribespeople; von Däniken is obviously the first white man some of these natives have seen since the last 'god' came down. Shot on 16mm with the earthy 60s-early 70s In Search Of vibe, most all the talking heads are translated / dubbed (from German and Russian) giving a nice weird alienation affect. An illuminating highlight: some valuable footage of cargo cults in the Pacific help us understand the root of all religious thought, drawing such a clear parallel with sky cult Christianity you'd need to be blind no to see it. These natives keep watching the skies, praying for the return of the white brothers in their big silver birds and their cans of delicious peaches, if we want the aliens to land on the White House lawn, why don't we visit these islands again, drop off some canned goods and lighters, and thus kickstart the engines of sky god karma?

THE SOURCE FAMILY
(2012) Starring: Yod, The Source Family

At one point does a divinely inspired lysergic-macrobiotic sage remember that way down deep he's just a lusty huckster?  Yaweh-O, or whatever Papa Bear's name in this incarnation, was a Gilgamesh-esque mountain man messiah and ex-bank robber who, like the greatest of modern gurus, was able to waken peoples' kundalini with just a touch or a glance. Alas, poor Yod, he was deluding even himself if he thought he could hang glide (he crashed and died). That's why my own spirituality will always stop short of wearing long flowing robes and divesting my worldly possessions. It's a curse as well as a blessing to be so wary and spiritual at the same time - it's only the twin signs like Pisces can do it, and we have no choice - we're never taken in totally, not even by our suspicions. Wether your kundalini sleeps or crawls, watching this crazy documentary and hearing these crazy beautiful starry-eyed people proves to be a solid trip that can charm your inner electric serpent into crawling up your spine and sparking off your third eye like an Olympic torch struck by a cobra bite strength tester hammer gong. (see also CinemArchetype Senex: The Sage)

And now... two episodes of STAR TREK 
(1968-70)
1. "This Side of Paradise" (season 1, ep. 25) finds Kirk as the only member of the crew not bewitched by space poppies. Everyone who beams down on this certain Edenic planet becomes too happy and content to do anything but loll around in the sun and love one another. Kirk tries to convince them they need goals... and challenges... to evolve... as people, but the crew are too busy mooning over the flowers; it's not until he stirs their more violent emotions that they snap out of it. Turns out humans need to be miserable and angry to evolve, to move forward. Without negativity we lilies-in-the-field it like a bunch of blazed welfare bums.

And though we get cogent arguments for the validity of both sides, it's one of the earliest examples of Kirk seeming a killjoy, especially when Spock gets the closing line: "For the first time in my life, I was happy."

2. "The Way to Eden" (season 3, ep. 20) finds a band of itinerant space hippies trying various scams to convince the Enterprise crew to take them through the 'forbidden zone' to an allegedly pristine planet named Eden. The hippies include Charles Napier, on space guitar! He invites Spock to sit in and jam with the flower people. Spock does! ("He is not Herbert! We reach!") Vulcans, Spock explains, consider the way these groovy brothers and sisters live to be the highest form of sanity. But just as the Source Family found disaster following Father Yod to Hawaii in the last film, so this Eden planet carries its own tricky backhand bitch slap reward for their bucolic naiveté. (Sex, Drugs and Quantum Existentialism: The Acidemic STAR TREK Short Guide)


MICROCOSMOS
(1996) - Starring: insects (les bugs)

With all the machine elf aliens dancing and the dangerous space microbes and cosmic mind-altering spores of the last films still percolating in your toasted brain, let's, in the words of Steve Martin, get small. Without any music or narration, this day-on-the-leaf insect documentary provides the kind of 'close' reading nature's been primping for all this time. Finally, special cameras show how truly fucking bizarre insect interactions are. We see ants milking droplets of water they stole from clingy flea-style bugs; ants kicking ladybugs off their precious droplets, but gently... etc. This weird 'right under our noses' insight is what head trips are meant for. The utterly strange fractal aliveness of our world--what our mind usually screens out unless it recognizes a threat or a desire--is made suddenly front and center. Only as small kids were we attuned to the crazy scariness and odd joys of the insect community. Remember back when turning over a garden rock was like opening the door to a gross weird world? Was that before DDT wiped it all away, or did we just get too tall to see and too distracted to care?

Well, when you tune into the 'other' realms you get all that kid's eye view back, so let the bug show begin.

On the other hand if this gets too boring or gives you a minor dose of delirium tremens, skip ahead!


(2012) Dir. Don Coscarelli

What if those weird bugs from Microcosmos were also hallucinogens that let their user see through time and space and transmute dimensions? And other bugs were constantly taking over human hosts and killing them while preparing for a sixth-dimensional Lovecraftian tentacle crossover? Whaaat? Slow down, man. Thing about what you're slaying... 

Unlike Gilliam's Loathing, this is truly a film where the weird turn pro.


HENDRIX: HEAR MY TRAIN A COMIN'
(2013) Dir Bob Smeaton

There's one thing that never gets old when you're super tripped-out, and that's the crunchy delicious sexually far out sounds of Hendrix's guitar. On good psychedelics, his blazing electric sound is one long warm, trippy current that zaps your saliva glands like patchouli lemons and makes all other music seem pointless (aside from Ravi Shankar and Otis Redding). Let it take your mind wild places, and wonder what new sounds might have come forth from his giant hands, if not for the always bad idea of mixing excessive Valium and alcohol.

In fact, I actually tried to go back in time to prevent Hendrix's death, as a kind of Reverse Terminator, but instead I just aged into oblivion. (see: Hippy in a Hell Basket - left)

---

From here of course you can greet the dawn's early light with The Other One, the Bob Weir Story; or the occasionally not pretentious and over-budgeted Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or you could go to bed. I mean, the sun's coming up, dude. People are getting up for work! They'll know! 

Too bad W.C. Fields isn't on Netflix because what you really need now is Never Give a Sucker an Even Break or International House, Mississippi or The Fatal Glass of Beer

IF AT ANY POINT YOU WIG OUT:

TELETUBBIES

If the walls start closing in, switch to this televisual equivalent of a Wavy Gravy chill-out tent immediately. This is way better than Bruce Dern handing you thorazine but insisting on touching your hand in a weird soft way when he does so, or Jack Nicholson and Adam Roarke melting into zombie monsters while trying to stop you from cutting off your own hand with a circular saw at 'the gallery'. Not that you ever would, because you're not a lightweight. And because you know when to change the channel on the escalating hellfire pit of Bruce Dern-handedness.

TELETUBBIES will save you!! It was designed to stop kids from crying so I think you'll be able to handle it bro, so nut up. 

Coming up Next in the Summer Series: "Post-Giallo Dream Logic"

Wednesday, June 04, 2014

All Hail the New Flesh Keychain: ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW



Sticking it to the Walt Disney Military Intelligence Complex by inverting its 'Lächelnd macht frei' ethos, ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW (2013)--newbie writer-director Randy Moore's black-and-white chronicle of the last day/night of a family at Disney World--is the first sign the the apocalypse will involve enforced smiling and animatronic vampires holding hands around the world. Beautiful to look at in 16mm handheld on-ride stolen shots (the movie was filmed on the sly without Disney permission), Escape's camerawork delivers surprisingly little whiplash jerky motion sickness and instead offers comedic cognizance, great AMERICAN BEAUTY / LOLITA obsessive midlife crisis management, David Lynch post-modern prefab-surrealism, and Guy Maddin black-and-white fuzzy basement expressionism. As we watch a nuclear family implode, dad's (and eventually mom's as well) perceptions of reality, fantasy--and papier-mâché facsimile--dissolve into one throbbing archetypal hydra. You wanna ride that shit? Get in line!

As the disintegrating papa, Roy Abramsohn is an ungainly blend of guarded and agape. Fired via an early morning phone call while in one of Disney's plush motels (the call taken out on the hotel balcony, to not wake the family) and then locked out on the hotel room balcony by his evil little son (and dad too polite to make a ruckus and wake his perennially irate wife), poor papa is still expected to put on a happy face, and be the spontaneity-loving mobile moneybag for his ungrateful troupe of slackjawed consumers. A pair of nubile but clearly underage French girls (Annet Mahendru, Danielle Safady) are his perfect objet petit a, managing to always be in front of him, from monorail to ride lines, appearing as if by magic dust, giggling amidst themselves, making flirty eye contact with his children, and expressing jubilant post-pubescent vibrancy in that perfectly self-contained between-two-young-girlfriends kind of way that heralds any sex-starved 40-something father's nervous breakdown. Powerless to resist ogling them like a school boy bewildered by his first hormone surge in years, he's helpless to resist their gravity. And why should he? The mom (Elena Schuber) won't even accept his most rudimentary physical affection--for no reason she can really explain. We Jungians know why though - she's animus-dominated. Any emotional response she feels strongly -- positive or negative--is taken as truth. Her inner dad thinks she deserves far better, and there's no swaying such an irrational voice, and she lacks the self-perspective that would dismiss the voice as an artifact of immaturity rather than feeling the need to shut out the husband. Not to get Jungian on you, but yeah, she's a bitch. 


I've always felt that the eye of older men being drawn to younger women is analogous--not to cougars--but to older women being drawn to other people's very young children. It's not necessarily sexual, it's just an urge towards self-renewal, the drawing of a fading star to a bright young one. ESCAPE clearly agrees with me: the film becomes a reflection of the differing gender drives and how the mom-son pair bond is considered holy and the father-daughter pair bond vile. Each then becomes reprisal against the other. So which came first, man's attraction to younger women or his wife's disgust over him? Her longing for adorable-age babies, infants and cherub-faced preschoolers to fawn her kind of nonsexual adoration on, or her derided husband and outcast teenage daughter--who mom now considers a mirror-mirror rival. Shut out of the closed circuit of a son-mother pair bond--unable to raise so much as his voice--the dissolving father is sabotaged by negative portrayals in the media on his role as ultimate signifier. Instead of the proper Freudian equation of father as alpha male and child envious of his priority in the mom's life, the son is priority and the father reduced to abject Oedipal exile, emasculated by the mother's literally infantile mental digression. But mom doesn't want him leaving or finding love elsewhere either. He must suffer for the crime of not measuring up to the impossible perfection demanded by her inner animus/father.  

It's just this sense of isolated exile though that frees him from duty as the ultimate signifier of the law. Why shouldn't he be drawn to a woman still young enough to think he's not a child, but old enough that she's equally cast out of the closed circuit mother-son pair bond? When the girl's too old to be cute to the mother she becomes cute to the father (and a threat to the mother). Meanwhile, to the girl, the man's wedding ring signifies both a challenge and a safety throw--a chance to feel like she's correcting the Elektra complex-exile she has herself suffered (think Natalie Wood in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE). Rather than recognizing her responsibility in creating their shared exile, the mother sees their closeness a priori justification for her coldness.


I have a grand over-arching theory that this post-70s change in husbandry was instigated by huge films like THE EXORCIST and E.T., all of which have a conspicuous absence of the dad. He is not even present in a phone call, so mother and child bond against interlopers without him. Ever since E.T. became the new family model dads (with a few exceptions like Brody in Jaws) have been depicted as either wimpy-voiced second class females (i.e. Greg Kinnear) or else gangsters, thugs, rapists, molesters, Satanists, sell-outs, government flunkies, pimps or psycho loners, OR simply not around at all (they only return --with their unique sets of skills--when their daughter's been abducted or killed by a man who IS around, thus negating the father function except en absentia).

Older daughters meanwhile--those not devout or cheerleader bland--are Lolitas by necessity. White trash short shorts-wearing harlots! They tempt weak-willed husbands 'just because they can' or they are sexophobic virgins able to forge a sex-free friendship only with some similarly disabused and immanently dead older male, such as a sad-eyed cop, lawyer or mining engineer. Even then, mom glowers to the side, as if the only role their man should have is as a devoted spectator to her perfect bond with their young son (ala Jennifer Connelly in LITTLE CHILDREN). Raising children on their own regardless of the father's presence, these moms are elevated to saints---they have no time for smiles or joy as they work two jobs to put food on the table and swat away questions about why dad left with tearful displays of eternal devotion that all but ensure the son never grows up, leaving the post-pubescent babysitters and any remaining fathers to drive back to her house alone together, with mom's curses and suspicions by way of adieu. C'est fou, eh, Pierrot?

Moi aussi, Marianne. 


But that presumes a certain midlife crisis-level case of bad judgment, the sort only spousal scorn/frigidity (and no place or time to masturbate) can bring. With that bad judgment comes an inability to correctly read a scene - to never know if the son has black alien eyes or if those teenage French chicks really like you or are just creeped out and trying to humor you. A smart fella would know his perceptions in these matters are seldom accurate. But that takes self-perspective, experience, making enough of a fool of yourself misreading signals that you no longer believe your own impressions. From there it's a short skip and a jump into the abyss of delusional paranoid schizophrenia, and then... 

Imaginationland!

Does Disney World's all-consuming devotion to fantasy merely encourage this escape, or enforce it?


Some critics complain that we never quite learn what the hell is really going on in ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW. By now you should know I am not one of them.  I applaud any movie that dares blur the line between daydream, fantasy, hallucination, nightmare, and paranoid reality. Once some parameter is set up as to what's a dream or fantasy vs. real I lose interest, which is why I'm no fan of BILLY LIAR, for example.

Ambiguity might or might not rule!


Along his embryonic journey, ESCAPE's dad gets into a fight with his bitch wife, runs into a sexy nurse whose tears and veiled worry about some contagious disease rocking the park make her seem both starved for attention and desperate to seem 'open' to seduction (as soon as she's waved them out of sight, she breaks down (above) and it's okay since no one is watching. (Smiles are rigidly enforced by the Disney gestapo, we later learn). Dad also runs into a spooky aging Maleficient (Alison Lees-Taylor - the sexiest craziest witch since Deborah Reed in TROLL 2!) who hypnotizes dad with a sparkling jewel, and lures him into a midday tryst at the presidential suite while his daughter sleeps in the other room and the witch's son watches TV. The witch's post-orgasm sad eyes reflect a weary desperation when she tells him that rich Japanese businessmen pay thousands of dollars to sleep with the Disney princesses --and she was one of them once--when she younger--and that not being able to register a single negative emotion all day at work gradually drives every Disney employee insane.



If this all sounds a bit like EYES WIDE SHUT, well, old Walt was a 33.3 degree Mason and the enforced smiling signifies tier-two Monarch programming. Is the witch some kind of manipulator/ trigger sent on by the forces of darkness upon sensing his vulnerability? Or is she just an accidentally 'activated' Illuminati hypnotized kitten? You'd think getting his rocks off would lessen his frustrated weirdness, but even when the boyfriends, replete with obnoxious long curly hair, of the younger girls show up, he still can't get them out of his line of vision. The ride/movie becomes like the approaching pinnacle of a steep flume chute, down which only the brave Cinemascope funeral snake handlers such as David Lynch or Bunuel dare plunge. But like them, Randy Moore knows that when you can no longer tell what's real or illusion, you are finally free, finally getting your all-day pass's worth. Monsterdom begins at home and if you have to look farther than the mirror to find your mortal enemy, you never really had one to begin with.

Little CGI flashes of animatronic fangs, blackening pupils, shining hypnotizing jewels, and fairy wings all do their bit to cement this equation. Moore's use of Disney's subversive archetypal psychology against itself constitutes a kind of psychoanalytic detournement, enabling the idea that, in order to appreciate a fake wonderland, your schizophrenia has to supply the missing details. Having never tripped at Disney World I'm not sure if this is what it's like, but before this movie I presumed it was like the classic SIMPSONS episode where the kids go to Duff Gardens and Lisa ends up drinking the water under the log ride and hallucinating wildly, eventually declaring "I am the Lizard Queen" but Moore's film is now the new benchmark. Little moments: the pre-fireworks pool scene, wherein both the girls and the wife seem to be both pulling him towards him as he floats in the middle of the pool until he seems trapped in the center of the pool like a spooked Marilyn caught between Gable's, Clift's and Wallach's rodeo lassos in THE MISFITS. Lifeguards pull him out of the water thinking he's drowned; has he? Is this what it's like in your last hours on earth? Are heaven and hell really all commingled in a land of fake castles, expensive witch costumes and nubile woodland fauns with braces? Considering all the photos being taken in the park it's hardly surprising that a guerrilla film could be pulled off but it's still an audacious move, throwing legal safety to the wind (Disney is a notoriously rigid enforcer of their copyrights) along with any semblance of sanity or logic, and aside from a few missteps, such as a scatalogically unfortunate climax (I went into the other room until the gross noises stopped) it's pretty tight with the ambiguity. Even the shots that are obviously filmed against a blue screen generate absurdist post-modern unease.


If ESCAPE ends up being slightly less than the sum of its parts I for one shall not complain. I've always felt the French are far more clued-in about how to balance work and play because they know vacations have to be more than a week long to do any good. If you go to the beach for a month, you never feel the clock ticking on your space for enjoyment. You never feel the crippling urgency of fun endured by working Americans whose every second spent with the kids at Disney hemorrhages their waning college fund. In France, you're never burdened with the imperative to have 'more fun' than you are having now (the family rapt before some display of fireworks or whales, and mom or neutered father going "isn't that wonderful, Caitlin?!' or "isn't this fun, Caitlin?!" --unable to shut off their motormouth thought babble even before a spectacle that overwhelms any rational need to comment). Instead of this (socialist) cognizance about the inability to have fun under a time clock, America surrenders to the idea of the one week vacation, the trip to Disney World as being some sacred ideal to aspire to and hold holy as you slog away the molasses hours at work the rest of the year, saving money and deferring all joy in life for this one expensive dream week, until you're finally there, and any sense of spontaneity or fun buckles under the pressure.

But old Walt is too canny to not understand this basic problem--hence the all-inclusive package stay, which makes the unlimited access to all rides and accommodations a liberating freedom from any imperative to enjoy, though some moms stick it in anyway (like the one in ESCAPE). Here's an example: My dad traveled all the time for work so hated going on vacation with us. He needed a break, so my mom took my brother and me by herself to Bermuda one year and then Disney and Epcot (shortly after the latter opened) the next. Going to Bermuda without him made me feel I had to step in, even at 11 years-old, and be the man of the family, which meant worrying about how much everything cost (I wouldn't go snorkeling since it was $23 an hour per person, so my mom and brother went and I sulked in the room, afraid to touch anything lest we be billed for it) but at Disney my oldest man of the house status didn't compel me to take on responsibility. We had already paid up front, so it was about getting as much as you could out of it. And being able to monorail back to the hotel and then return at night to Epcot was just getting the most out of the already paid $$ (which I didn't know how much the package was, hence I was free!).


I mention all this to draw the conclusion that fathers might be needed in Bermuda but are superfluous at Disney World. Their dreams are never meant to come true, because their dreams involve being single, childless, and young. And since they can't go back in time to being 22 they do not belong. Once they see a way back into the past, a chance to dive onto (or under) the passing train, they take it. They get drunk, dance around, buy a motorcycle or a fez, and let themselves be seduced by younger women. But beware giving up your adult father power, Papa. This move will only confirm mom's treatment of you as the perpetually 'in trouble' oldest son. You can try to feign spontaneity while she glowers and nags, but the bloom will not come back to her thorny rose and the souvenir 'all hail the new flesh' mouse ears have grown so deep into your brain as to be irremovable. When you finally look for the treasure map that leads to your buried balls, you realize it's been torn, frayed, and scattered Osiris-like to the far corners of the REKALL amusement park. 

Lucky for you then, there's a facsimile souvenir offering proof you ever had some, and photos. Look at this one... it's proof you had fun. You were there. 

You're even smiling! Look, Caitlin! 

Wednesday, October 09, 2013

Make up Your Mind Control: 33.3 Ways to Read EYES WIDE SHUT

"In regards to the title of this film, Eyes Wide Shut is said to be a code phrase used by members of high society that translates roughly into --- you have not seen any of my misdeeds, because your eyes are wide shut. This allows such people to run amok above and beyond all laws, and without the threat of ever being caught. We see this happen time and time again in our lives, where if one of us broke the law, we would be dealt with in a prompt manner. However, we see on the news and read in the newspapers and news magazines, where globalist figures are constantly walking away from serious crimes without so much as a slap on the wrist. - The Kentroversy Papers 
"At the opening party at Victor Ziegler’s house, Alice Harford meets up with and dances with a Hungarian man. The name of this character is Sandor Szavost. This character shares his name with the creator of the Church of Satan, Anton Sandor LaVey. This would be an accurate analogy, as members of the global elite are all dedicated to either Lucifer or Satan. Their religion has them believe that both Lucifer and Satan are good, and the God of the Christians has forsaken these so-called fallen angels, and is therefore, an enemy God. This type of thinking is extremely twisted, and represents what some have called a Satanic Reversal --- evil is good, lies are truth, death is life, and darkness is light." --The Kentroversy Papers
"It may also be significant that the film's director Stanley Kubrick died suddenly. Mozart, a mason, died soon after revealing masonic mysteries in his opera, The Magic Flute. Author Stephen Knight, whose book, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1975) revealed Victorian London's Whitechapel Murders as the work of ritual masonic killers, also died mysteriously. And William Morgan, author of Freemasonry Exposed (1836) was kidnapped and allegedly murdered by masons. -- Uri Dowbenko (Steamshovel Press) 
"During his dark night of the soul, Dr. Bill travels through the seamy underworld of his disturbed psyche, searching for sexual release, haunted by some insatiable hunger driving him toward unknown ends, along the way encountering a woman he hardly knows, who swears she's madly in love with him. Add to this collection an HIV positive prostitute, as well as the daughter of the aforementioned costume shop owner--who's apparently being pimped out by papa--and what we have is a trinity of lost souls, caught up in the grinding wheels of a powerful machine that eats people up, then spits them out in tiny, fragmented pieces. All of these woman could easily be Monarch victims, and even if they aren't, each is a prisoner of a system of control prevalent in our society; a system which exists on many levels, and in all strata of society, both seen and unseen."--The Konformist
"According to "Treee," a young Las Vegas woman who claims to have contacts inside the secretive club [The Bohemian Grove], a ritual sacrifice of Mary Magdalene takes place Tuesday July 21; and the ritual sacrifice of Jesus Christ takes place Wednesday, July 22. A human body or effigy is burned in front of an large owl symbolizing Moloch, the pagan Canaanite God...
If having our world leaders belong to a satanic cult weren't bad enough, the Las Vegas woman says the Illuminati are actually an alien reptilian species that occupies human bodies and feeds off our energy....
She says: This reptilian species is called "Sangerians;" they are a "fourth dimension race" and make up 3% of the world's population. She claims to have met "more than one, more than once." They have three-hearts, shift shapes, are cold blooded, but are developing human feelings from devouring human flesh and blood. -- Henry Makow
"The reptilian-illuminati hybrids are obsessed with sexual aggression and domination, which is evidenced by their sex magic rituals. Humans are routinely taken and programmed to serve them as familiars and sex slaves; more evidence of their desire to control and "own" others. 
Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut is probably an accurate representation of what takes place in one of these rituals. He was certainly involved with some of their circles and must have been exposed to things like this on more than a few occasions.

As a side note, he was apparently killed because he refused to cut a scene which contained subliminal triggers that were intended to break the mind-control programs of the people in the audience. Following his death, the scene was cut and never made it to the final film." -Carleee (Prison Planet Forum)

And so it goes, ever deeper and more perverse... I was going to just keep quoting for this whole post, let the paranoia mine its own irony, but the sinking feeling in my poor stomach was too much. Because, you see, I am easily traumatized, and this shit gets disturbing... Trauma-based conditioning? Yeech!

I believe the above craziness is true without necessarily being real. Keeping my sanity and peace of mind requires me to dismiss most of it as collective subconscious complexes, but the way my lower chakras spin like frightened tops when reading it means there's more going on than just schizophrenic hallucinating.

On the other hand, just because it gets me so worked up and upset it slips my sanity from its moorings, a horrible feeling of sinking helplessness overwhelming me, doesn't mean it's 'true' - it just means whatever it is, or isn't, it is certainly 'myth' in the most vivid of senses. Myth being stories that line up with archetypal forces in the psyche with the precision of an overhead mylar slide atop another, so that fiction feels realer than truth, and truth suddenly seems open to interpretation. No single event is ever just one thing, RASHOMON-style!

So how can a memory of Satanic abuse recovered in hypnosis be one and not the other, you ask, real but not true, or vice versa? Pay attention to my ambiguous wording. There will be a quiz. In fact this is it:

THE S.A.T. OF SURREALIST PSYCHOSIS:

33.3.. Answer the following hypothesis / questions in 1-2 paragraphs, w/set-up + concluding sentence

HYPOTHESIS: You drop a jam jar on the linoleum floor of your kitchen. It breaks. Jam flies all over the floor. You sweep up the glass, scrub the floor but the jam is still there. You wind up cleaning the whole house, scrubbing top to bottom.

The jam, though hazier, is still there floating like a ghost imprint over the sparkling floor.

QUESTION: Is the jam 'really' there?

ANSWER: The ghost jam 'vision' is an ephemeral after-image, fluttering its Rorschach butterfly way across the linoleum lining of the subject's subconscious' ceiling. The ceiling of the (subconscious) basement is the same as the conscious (kitchen) floor. The jam was spilled on the floor but also in the mind that saw the spill, therefore leaked to the floor of the basement subconscious. The jam was therefore spilled on the subconscious ceiling as well as consciousness' floor. 

But the error is in the idea that the 'spill' created the spot on the subconscious ceiling, rather than the image of the splotch on the ceiling manifesting through a moment's kitchen conscious clumsiness (the unconscious firing a distracting volley at the right time to manifest the moment's clumsiness that creates it). The conscious floor spill is only a reflection made to order. Something 'below' compelled the above 'accident' to manifest.

The only jam that 'is' is the jam unseen. The 'there' in the 'real' physical stain of the kitchen is a projection. The truth is the act of the spill. And no amount of cleaning can undo the act.

It has always been spilling, Mr. Torrance.

You're the only jam in town.
 ----
We can apply this same answer to our tendency to believe in Satanic conspiracies. The 'recovered memories' of drugged ritual abuse are like the ghost jam, or the tell-tale heart, pointing to a zone that horror authors have been parking in for centuries, but which Freud and Jung never compared enough notes to find on the map --the collective subconscious. Freud had his personal subconscious (the repository of forbidden libidinal desires and traumatic memories) and Jung had his collective unconscious (connected to all living things and all ancestors outside and beyond linear time and space, dreams assuming the same mythic archetypal recurring patterns; the descendent of a viking is compelled to sail the oceans the same way a seed finds itself, without trying, to become a fully grown tree).

Because its pattern seemed to validate (or at least parallel) mysticism, astrology, numerology, tarot, Freud didn't approve of the collective unconscious, and Jung didn't go in for the sordid limits of the personal subconscious being the be-all and end all. Neither thought there could be a collective subconscious. Why would there be? How could there be a mass repository for all the dark repressed Oedipal fantasies of the individual, all coalesced into a collective projected non-space/time bound parallel 'real' - where one might see people they know, from the neighborhood, dressed in robes and doing very dirty incestuous things? And then those same people would see you on the street the next day but pretend not to have met you in that mystic ceremony, because to admit you were there breaks the code, or maybe you had a mask on in their version the way they had one on in yours. And anyway, it was just a dream, right?

 Kids though, have a weird subconscious that can't easily distinguish the collective unconscious / dream from reality--too much of the 'adult' is still unformed-- hence, under hypnosis, a full litany of the collective subconscious' atrocities, neighborhood-wide, comes out. The hazy nebula of adult sexuality and the primal scene floats over the paradigm of childhood, so that these giants looming over you at the breakfast table take on grotesque, totemic significance. No longer your parents, friends and neighbors, in dreams they presume the phantom proportions of graven image fertility deities. These images are then locked away in the basement until the hypnotist, rummaging around down there like a greedy Pawn Star, digs up some juicy tribal masks and thinks surely these must be repressed memories rather than repressed fantasies. Once they've gathered enough dust, is there even a difference?


I believe all paranormal recollections under hypnosis tend to be true but not real at least not in the limited way we currently define reality. I believe in a collective subconscious, which as far as I know, makes me a whole new kind of Freud/Jung paradigm. I believe there is a fourth libidinal third eye dream dimension, a crawlspace between pre-genital sexual impulse repression and collective Jungian myth, and it's there these 'ceremonies' occur. They're one chakra up from dreams/memories of trying to find a bathroom and winding up knee-deep in overflow from some crowded public restroom, before waking up from full-to-bursting bladder (the echoes of that early potty training anxiety, that 'holding it in' won't work once we're asleep) and one chakra down from actual crushes on babysitters or pop idols.

I am learning how to be a good adept in navigating this fourth dimension; does that just mean I sleep a lot? To me it's like the collective multiverse is a phone book of infinite thickness and our world at this moment in time is one page but sometimes other worlds find their way in, laying atop or below us like layers of a Photoshop file. Most of the time it's all pretty copacetic -- the personal subconscious is a vile basement of repressed and banned emotions and thoughts, but at least it's our own basement -- no one else sees it. The collective unconscious is more about symbols, sages, shadows and initiations, the shared myths and codes, the father who's gone on ahead in the No Country for Old Men darkness.

But the collective subconscious is completely different, as you might imagine:  personal basement tunneling into other basements in the neighborhood- meaning ogres from other people's repressed personal dark desires can crawl through your neighbor's cracks and come lumbering up the stairs to abduct you while your dreaming psyche while you sleep. The recovered memories of Satanic rituals in hypnotized children or victims of ritual abuse are recollected via hypnosis through through the third eye, the same eye we dream with, but the mind cannot distinguish between the real and the vividly imagined and neither can the analyst. Maybe we don't remember our dreams for the same reason we repress painful memories, and we need to externalize this mechanism, hence the idea of pervasive CIA mind control experiments as being responsible for our amnesia. It's not that I don't believe such experiments happened, they are on record, it's just that I believe the results were too uneven to count as a success so they gave it up. I could be wrong, but what's the point of being right? I can't do anything about it. And it makes my skin crawl. In fact it makes me so upset I have to question its validity just to not succumb to heartbreak and panic attack.

The conspiracy theory behind MK Ultra-Illuminati started long before Kubrick, the CIA, the Masons, or the Annunaki. And it reached a 20th century full flower in the Satanic panic of the early 1980s, where, like we did back in Salem, we ignored lack of physical evidence and let a bunch of disoriented children to incriminate their parents, nannies, teachers, daycare workers, and neighbors via their memories of witchy ritual. Until the time it became obvious that there was no logical way some of this stuff could have actually happened, the fear and mob mentality and (my guess) deep-seated sexual repression all cauldroned up to activate the collective subconscious. After all, these kids (in both Salem and the 80's) had no visible marks or scars and--according to their hypnotic regression testimony--they'd had limbs removed, given birth to hundreds of tiny babies, swallowed serpents, grown wings, and spent a longer time in the coven then they'd been alive, and so forth:
Recovered memories of early sexual trauma, satanic ritual reconstructions, and the development of multiple personalities satisfy the wish of both patient and therapist to understand a bewildering array of symptoms that plead cautious study. Until the 1970s, multiple personalities were considered extremely rare. Although almost entirely absent from the European and Japanese literature, more cases of multiple personality have been described in the past five years than collectively in the past hundreds of years. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has not found one single case of satanic cult ritual burial remains, although tens of thousands of individuals every year are purported to have been victims. - JAMA (1995 abstract, Making Monsters: False Memory, Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria)
My theory is that the hypnotists and children were getting at a truth but it was a truth unrelated to any physical reality. It was a truth related to the subconscious of a developing (pre-empathic) child's mind, where everything dirty and only half-understood from adult coded conversations and stray X-rated imagery is translated into ornate fantasies of dominance and subjugation built up larger and more terrifyingly bizarre with every session. Some of the less grisly of these reports of abuse resembled my own prepubescent fantasies in the early 70s. I remember them well for they caused me no end of torture, it being years before I'd have my first orgasm (thanks to my own irrational fear via Judy Blume books). These fantasies involved girls from my first grade-class and some of the cast of CHARLIE'S ANGELS, but were focused on spanking and leashes and nudity and humiliations. Details of anything further were scrambled. But maybe there's times all America's most twisted suppressed dark desires from childhood are loosened from the individual psyche and start floating around in the ether, ready to be received like radio stations direct through the subconscious of hypnosis patients into the headline-grabbing hypnotist's tape recorder. Eventually most of us develop compassion and empathy and stop torturing insects and start helping our fellow man and woman rather than dreaming of owning them as naked slaves, but those dark twisted infantile pre-ejaculatory pre-empathic sex fantasies remain... in the basement... forever....


I didn't really understand it until I read Patrick Harpur's Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld which points out the science vs. religion vs. occult arguments are all failing to encompass the way our perceptions themselves shape the perceived:
As with all anomalous entities, the very act of observing the particles disturbs them. Observer and observed, subject and object, cannot finally be distinguished. Particles whose existence is predicted obligingly turn up. If we didn't know better, we might almost say that they had been imagined into existence. The so-called New Physicists smelled a rat long ago. They began to compare the whole enterprise to oriental religion or to suspect that its reality is primarily metaphorical, not literal and factual. This is not to say that daimons cannot manifest concretely, as we have seen. In fact, the smaller they are, the more powerful they can be, viz. the atom bomb. (more)

Harpur also points out the similarity of Satanic child abduction to the indigenous tribal initiation practices through the centuries, practices we would consider barbaric and illegal today. But these ancient tribes understood the importance of trauma in enabling the symbolic death of the child and his rebirth as an adult (as in hazing or military indoctrination). Note the astonishing similarities in the tribal ceremonies Harpur describes below and the recovered memories of children that led to the Satanic panic (as well as the Salem trials):
"They are snatched from the safety of their homes in the dead of night by tall entities with extraordinary faces --slit mouths and noses, large eyes, for example -- and carried off to a dark place, sometimes narrow and subterranean like a grave, where they are left for days at a time. Deprived of food, exhausted, they are periodically visited by the entities, who torture them, slashing their penises and scarring their faces. At the same time they are given amazing knowledge --secrets they must not reveal -- before being returned to their villages in a blaze of lights where their families no longer recognize them. (231)
Harpur writes that the children kind of know what's going on -- that this is all an initiation -- but are still terrified beyond all measure, not only of death but of the suspicion that their parents and relatives have been transformed into demons:  "The children themselves are painted to look like ghosts... for their former childish selves have to die through the initiation before they can be reborn into new adult selves." (231)


It would explain a lot if we took this into account alongside the sole non-PG remnant of the tribal initiation rite in our modern age--the losing of one's virginity -- to explain the sordid sexual nature of the Satanic panic and mind control sex slave EYES WIDE SHUT mythos.

It might seem like I'm saying this stuff doesn't exist.  The tribal initiation, the paranoid schizophrenic fantasy, the Salem Sabbath, and the the Illuminati mind control conspiracy are, in my proposed theory, all part of the same collective subconscious. Please understand that at the same time I don't think it's 'bunk' or 'made up' entirely. There is a vast wilderness beyond what our ego and mainstream liner science allows as 'reality' (a term the ego doesn't even like to examine, as like HAL 9000, it refuses to see itself as it truly is --an illusory construct).  If you saw the screen you're reading this on 'as it really is' for example, solid matter would just be low frequency light-energy emanating from closely interwoven buzzing atoms. And that's no way to go through life. Our ego is our blinders that lets us avoid distraction from all the pretty sparks, but we shouldn't kid ourselves which side of the blinders holds the 'hallucination'.

Seeing ROOM 237 last week (review here) is what set me off on this tangent. If you see that film you naturally have to see THE SHINING right afterwards, and then keep going, applying the paranoid deconstructions from 237 to Kubrick's other films. But I warn you, keep out of EYES WIDE SHUT with your ray of paranoid layer uncovering! Just stay out! A few luridly detailed 'recovered memories' of trauma-based ritual programming and--whether they're true or just paranoid fantasies-- you might be wishing you could put those blinders back on and get back to your relatively Edenic pasture.

I don't know why I'm so shocked by all that SRA (Satanic Ritual Abduction) theory I've been reading. Reproduction is a nasty brutish business, even without the Illuminati stealing all the hot women, and the idea that mind control frequencies in TV broadcasts turn girls super slutty if you give the right code word ("Tiffany's! Cartier!") is the kind of unlaid juvenile fantasy that perhaps leads to latent guilt once you're old enough to be their father.

Such stuff, I'm sure, has happened in some horrid flea pit of reality here or there over the centuries, and it might be a comfort to the broke, lazy slob in his easy chair, seething with resentment that his wife isn't a Victoria's Secret model, to imagine he may yet stumble on a magic book of code that will tell him three easy steps how to make one his slave. Me, I poison myself with straight white male liberal hatred against my darker self until I feel literally sick but it doesn't do a bit of good. Women don't think misandry is sexy, and no matter how cleanly feminist I think I am, I know there's another layer of self-awareness under that wherein I realize maybe it's all an act, dating back to my virgin middle school days, wherein I deludedly believed my sensitive new age guy routine would enable me to get girls into bed rather than just have them label me probably gay and just a friend. I didn't want to understand the truth, for the truth is vile, as any pack animal mating ritual seen on TV evinces. Failure after failure with girls while I was trying to be a saint made my soul begin to itch for the balls to let Mr. Hyde free. By the time I unearthed that layer and was able to lay foundation for a deeper level of sensitive self-awareness and wise up to my six foot-deep playa tricks ("the best agent is the one who doesn't even know he's an agent," said Bill's insectoid typewriter), the girl I was trying to woo was off having children with a stable husband. Always just a beat too late, Erich.

Naturally I think she did so just to spite me. And that kind of solipsistic paranoia seems to me at the heart of some of this Satanic recall. An unresolved Elektra complexes + bi-polar tendencies and/or schizophrenic delusion = a terrible mix. Just go read a ton of stuff on the Monarch MK-Ultra conspiracies out there and then watch TV, any TV show or movie, and you can feel the truth of it. You can feel yourself starting to crazy --it's like it's tuned to the frequency that jars your mental fault lines and creates tremors. Synchronicity and random coincidence coalesce in odd ways so that you know longer wonder whether you're 'awakened' or delusional, for you at last know that by the time you realize which is which, you're wrong. "Snap."

For example, as I'm writing this, CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG is on TCM in the background: an audience of power elite have assembled to watch a demonstration: an automaton girl is standing before a series of mirrors (which I've just learned they use in Monarch mind control programming), singing that she's under a spell and delivering an almost exact description of sexually subjugating mind control techniques (including having the demonstration occur before an assembled audience, which mirrors our standard dreams of being exposed naked at a school exam). Coincidence?

Maybe nyoets for if there was a blueprint for mind control, it would work towards reproducing the iconography of normal subconscious dreaming, allowing the programmers tap into the control state, programming their automaton women, the "standard pleasure model" ala BLADE RUNNER, DR. GOLDFOOT, etc. (see CinemArchetype #16 - the Automaton) to fall in love with whatever billionaire diplomat is breezing through town for a weekend and/or kill them.

I don't believe this was what CHITTY was trying to achieve (then again, Walt Disney was a 33-degree Mason) but it shows you that once you let this paranoid stuff into your mind, it mutates and transforms even dishwater dull children's movies into rabbit holes of horrifyingly vast circumference.

Staged (with audience) Programming (note raised hands), from top: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, 
Clockwork Orange, Manchurian Candidate

And it's a rabbit hole we're hardwired as children to be attracted to... scared to go in, yet unable to look away, dragged down into it by the gravity of our pelvic chakra. Part of this is our secret masochistic projection as per Freud's "a child is being beaten" rubric or modern thriller cinema's latent obsession with sexual abuse and abducted children: the proxy agony of the hypothetical abductee is mixed with the proxy agony of the parent screaming in the parking lot for their missing child. The rationale for drinking and moping over the missing or dead child's photo or old home videos (as Cruise himself does in several films, including Spielberg's MINORITY REPORT) equates approximately with the recurring mental image of Kidman being ravished by the naval officer in EYES --an image to something which her character admits up front is only a fantasy. And yet, even knowing it's a fantasy doesn't help it allay its function as a trigger for paroxysms of masochistic acting-out. This mental picture Cruise's doctor holds onto so perversely would make even Josef Von Sternberg go "whoa, bro. Get a grip."

The naval officer theme is no accident, either, appearing as it does in the dream 'cover memory' in ROSEMARY'S BABY and in the process equating the ocean with the military industrial complex; the devil and the deep blue sea; the dream captain, the "master" of the oceanic subconscious; the animus imp authority figure; the Sea Wolf. Cruise's doctor might explore the chthonic feminine depth via physical exams and so forth, but always with a glum matron present, always with sterile gloves. The navy man goes in deep because he is master of the ocean! He needs no matron present (except naked, in the shadows, chanting); his lust is equated with the father, the non du pere (the military requires discipline).

Row, Row, Row! (from top: Eyes Wide Shut, Rosemary's Baby - dream sequences)

True or not, imagining all the hotties in the world are mind-controlled sex zombie toys for the rich and powerful serves as an ingeniously masochistic tool to explain why they are so unavailable to you, the average schmuck on the street who falls to pieces when one walks by, but never grasps fully the extent to which every other guy does too, making her life a constant series of unpleasant male harassments. Maybe your wife is ugly because you're good and true! Be grateful--no one wants to steal her --if she was hot, you'd get surly and antisocial as everywhere you go, metaphorically and literally, men want to steal her. Enjoy your sole dominion, you don't have to spend your life fending off aggressive rogue male interlopers like, say, a bull sea lion.

For these and other reasons it makes no difference if this paranoid vision is real or just the subconscious id's favorite childhood bondage scenario remembered as real through hypnosis. In other words, even if true it is still a paranoid fantasy!

As per Lacan (as analyzed by Zizek):
"Even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological. Along the same lines, one could say that, even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls), their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological - because it represses the true reason the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. So, in the case of anti-Semitism, knowledge about what the Jews "really are" is a fake, irrelevant, while the only knowledge at the place of truth is the knowledge about why a Nazi needs a figure of the Jew to sustain his ideological edifice." (Looking Awry, p. 71)
Translated to the Illuminati codexing of EYES WIDE SHUT, the only truth is that we need to project our latent masochistic perversity onto shadowy authority figures who practice lewd sociopathic rites what we won't even allow ourselves to fantasize about (The "Jewish Conspiracy" running along the same line--as per the casting of Sidney Pollack as the loathsome, loaded Jewish illuminati pater horribilis). If these projections turn out to be real it is only because these dark fantasies tap so exactly into our latent Oedipal frustrations that they structure the fantasmatic dimension of our social order. In other words, if the rich and shadowy act out the role of our primal father it's only because our collectively repressed fantasies and desires have to be put somewhere. They take the job as if political office. At the same time, they serve a valuable function, and are in turn are denied the fruits of that function (like Moses shut out of Canaan or the Wayne shut out at the end of The Searchers) - they are denied the illusion that the expression of these lurid acts brings some kind of secret libidinal enjoyment denied the common man. They bring only emptiness of the worst kind - the horror of having no libidinal id fantasy to sustain them. Their personal subconscious is an empty, barren basement.

If we could prove these evil secret networks did exist outside of our paranoia, with names named and figures arrested and under-duress confessions taken down by sweaty monks in judges robes, secret mass infant skeleton burial pits, et al it would merely be a hum-drum scandal. A secret society that's no longer secret is just another dumb 'club'--and the worlds of paranoid schizophrenia and acute narcissism would be without their dark support structures, their dark lord center. If you have friends with these conditions (as I do) maybe you have heard them talk about ex-boyfriends breaking into their apartments and moving objects around and planting cameras and microphones the size of pinheads inside their TVs or radios (or teeth). They can sound very very sane and convincing, these friends, and you may even believe them, for a few minutes anyway, but eventually you need to get away from them, to roll your eyes at their lunacy (when they're not looking) for your own sanity. Because in the end, even if these things are really happening to them, you're better off not believing it. This is not the same as denying its possible truth, for the more we try to scoff at or downgrade these experiences the more we drift into the role of spokesperson for scientific rationalist dogma. We have to realize that, the more we believe them, the truer their story becomes and the more in danger we are of having people move stuff around in our own apartments (for now they know we know about them).

Missing the Orgy

Part of the paranoia of all this, which I really resonate with, is the feeling of being left out of life's grand bacchanal.  Somewhere, somehow we know we've missed or are missing the orgy--life at its fullest and most rewarding --the decadence we're denied and so demonize. It's going on right now, somewhere, and we're not invited!

I remember the brutal (even-for-Syracuse) winter night 1989 when I was with my then-gorgeous girlfriend, being super sick with the flu, sleeping over at her little one-bedroom apartment (she lived alone, so went over there to convalesce). A fine arts major, she was working on a painting in the living room; I was right down the small hallway in her bedroom, with the door slightly open. All windows shut, of course. As I lay there in my delirium I began to realize I could hear conspiratorial voices: my girlfriend and some sneering man were laughing and talking about me in the living room, both keeping their voice low but barely hiding their contempt for me. Delirious with fever, I forced myself out of bed and staggered down the hall into the other room to confront her, but she was alone. focused on her painting, not even on the phone, not even the stereo on. Then I would go back to bed and once again begin to hear them, and to 'know' deep in my gut that the guy was there. It took me only a few seconds to search the closets and under the one bed, so I knew, consciously, I was just delirious, but it didn't help. I would 'feel' deep in my heart that this guy was hiding under the bed. I looked under and checked--nothing. So I became sure he was in the closet. I checked. Nothing. I checked under the bed again. I was sure he was there. Then I heard his voice in the other room again, laughing under his breath, with my girlfriend once more, about me. And so it went...

It didn't matter I found no man (the apartment was very small and easily searched; no windows were open - it was below zero and snowed-in outside), I knew he was there. I was ready to start a massive fight with her over it; I was sure he, or they, were hiding, mocking me, from every shadow. The moment I closed the door I heard my girlfriend begin to laugh quietly and him whispering. I whipped open the door, nothing, over and over. Even knowing I was just having feverish delusions didn't help allay the actual hallucination of their voices.

Luckily, years of LSD and mushroom use had prepared me to doubt my own senses automatically or lord knows what an ass I would have made of myself. I mean, more than usual.

But when I later saw RAGING BULL later that same year I knew why Jake was so psychotically suspicious of his wife: head trauma from all those punches!

Then I learned of a condition of chronic alcoholism called 'alcoholic hallucinosis" -- the voices are always talking about us, mocking and laughing, but never addressing us directly.


We can see the end result of this paranoid trauma fantasy in regards to the SRA issue via one good samaritan named Richard McCaslin, who "planned a heavily armed assault on the exclusive (and alleged site of sadistic Illuminati-reptilian Satanic abuses and human sacrifices) Bohemian Grove men's club for more than a year," believing "it would take something dramatic" to draw attention to human sacrifices he feared were being held there":
In a jailhouse interview Monday night, the well-spoken, lucid and clean-shaven man said he "wanted to make a point" and was prepared to kill people at the Monte Rio resort if necessary. 
McCaslin said he thinks he is sane. 
"They might beg to differ," he said with a laugh, pointing his thumb behind him into the mental health ward. --- The Press Democrat (1-22-02)
Was Kubrick, the filmmaker version of McCaslin, confused by the mix of suppressed subconscious fantasizing, exclusion anxiety, and "somewhere a child is being sacrificed" or "Somewhere my love lies sleeping (with a male chorus)" neurosis?

OR was Kubrick initiated into the weird world of mind control and sex ritual due to his being hired to fake the moon landings - thus giving him an 'in'? Did this dark secret prove such a burden to him, not being able to tell anyone, that he finally snapped and made this film, mirroring Bill's late inning confession to Alice? And that's why they killed him, the way they did Mozart over THE MAGIC FLUE? Or did Kubrick just read a lot about the subject in those 'recalled repressed childhood Satanic abuse trauma' and MK-ULTRA conspiracy books and eventually it warped his mind, so that he became a recluse who only shot on closed sets and was afraid 'they' were moving his stuff around while he was asleep, and planting tiny microphones in his teeth?

OR is EYES all just an isolated out-of-touch overly-intellectual neurotic's conception of how rich oversexed people behave at parties? In other words, was Kubrick himself a victim of paranoia and delusion spurred on by libidinal repression, or an 'actual' Illuminati tourist?

The case of McCaslin should illustrate by now that there is no real difference.

Part 33.3: Antahkarana Kadabra!

The weird irrational behavior of the two models in the opening party, for example, can be explained through the maze of the mind control theory, as they want to take him "over the rainbow," presumably a well-known code for the world that is shown to subjects of the practice, leaving them a way to explain all the bizarre things that seem to happening to them, THE WIZARD OF OZ being one of the source texts for this kind of conditioning:
"The Rainbow--with its seven colors has long had an occult significance of being a great spiritual hypnotic device. Constance Cumbey, in her book The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow, which exposes the New Age Occult Movement, correctly writes, "The Rainbow (also called the Antahkarana [left] or Rainbow Bridge) (...) is used as a hypnotic device (p.261). 
"The Supreme Council of the 33rd" of Freemasonry has used the rainbow on the cover of their magazine. In a book teaching Druidism (as in Illuminati Druidism), The 21 Lessons of Meryln, the Rainbow is described as "A true sign of Magic...it exists in both worlds at once!" Elvira Gulch is a woman who owns 1/2 of the county where Dorothy lives in Kansas. She is shown later in the Land of Oz transformed as a witch.
Many of the Illuminati elite are rich and lead double lives. People who meet them at a ritual will see the dark side of these rich people. At the rituals, people are tranced from drugs, chanting, and mind control; they are "over the rainbow." - Fort Refuge
On the other hand, the two girls may be there to just set up the future problem between Bill and Alice, whose mutual attractiveness has surely caught them the attention of interested parties before, but like the single night of misadventure that opens A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and subsequently comes back in karmic haunting, their marriage seems to begin at this party. (No one from Alex's violent misdeeds prior to the home invasion night gets their own karmic revenge, for example, though there are presumably many.)

The figure who separates Bill and Alice originally, Nick Nightingale, has a name that symbolizes sleep (we always fall asleep alone no matter who is in our bed), and immediately after Bill is called away, Alice is hit on by her animus-representation, the Anton La Vey, and soon thereafter Bill gets drawn into a menage a trois any man would melt in his bones for, maybe to the point of skeeved panic.

Now, in my experience, any good looking young couple is going to want to mingle and flirt and bask in the adoration of others at a party, and then they go home together and no harm done. What, are they supposed to just canoodle all night? Why even go to the party if not to strut? So why are they so cowed and confused by this attention they're receiving? Why does Alice seem to change into a different person, very coy, tranced out, and strange, the minute Anton approaches? Why are these girls so bizarre? Is that illuminated star by the door some psychic trigger to release their inhibitions, or is this just what really really good expensive champagne does?


In the end there's a weird symbiosis between the masked orgy Bill crashes and Alice's dream and the idea that Alice is actually the girl who dies (or 'has her brains fucked out' to use Sidney Pollack's vile terminology), begging the question: what is worse, a sex-saturated dream where you lose control and are violated every which way but which you are enjoying (she's the center of attention -- she 'belongs' there) or a sexual reality in which you are out of your depth and know it?

As someone whose had a panic attack after being hit on by two spooky hot models at a 2006 Halloween party, I no longer envy and hate Dr. Bill the way I did when I first saw the film in 1999. I hadn't read Lacan then, and couldn't stand the fact that Bill's uncertain fog lets these two hotties slip away, or that he even got them in the first place, or was so easily picked up the West Village streetwalker. I mean this isn't Atlantic City! But now I'm beaten down, broken on the wheel of time, like a scarecrow. If I had another encounter with those two spooky models I would still run away but wouldn't hate myself so much later. Why? Because now I've read up on EYES WIDE conspiracy mind control theorems!

Here's a detail I remember about those two girls who tried to pick me up but gave me a whopping panic attack instead (and this after I 'tested' my psychic powers by requesting in my deep meditation to pick up not one but two girls for a menage a trois that night!)-- the shorter one was dressed as a dominatrix, the other wore a black bikini, had a perfect body, AND REPTILE EYES, though they were presumably contacts for her 'costume.' OR we were meant to assume so, just as we are meant to assume that all of the masks at the orgy in EYES hide human faces. Are reptile contact lenses on Halloween the perfect cover, allowing reptilian-human hybrids to show their real selves?

Now that we're talking about it, I'm remembering a run in or two with another pair of spooky girls, hippie chicks (and one guy) up in Syracuse in 1987. They were gorgeous and way too sexually open for my (in hindsight) prudish tastes, to the point I found myself backing up away from them and was not sure why, as I was hardly a virgin, or sober. I can barely remember what any of these two sets of girls looks like now, except that they were very sexy, and seemed possessed with eerie calm. If I did hook up with either set, would I even be alive today? And are all my subsequent peccadilloes just my long night of the soul trying to get revenge on womankind for making me feel all itchy and strange for my chickening out of these encounters? Were these girls even human? Was their whole mission just to seduce men and steal their DNA, and/or leave us with a lifetime of sexual anxiety that they could siphon off with their orgone harvesting matrixes?

My roommate Eric did sleep with one of those hippie chicks and was super weirded out afterwards. He told me that something about her vagina didn't look right, though he couldn't explain exactly what was so wrong about it....then again he's not a writer. One of them came onto me at an outdoor concert while I was tweaking out on way too much LSD and my dog acted all afraid of her and her beauty carved into me like talons; I could feel the emanating waves of open sexuality calling to me but I could see my mortal death as well. I heard myself muttering an incoherent apology and felt my legs carrying me away even as a part of me tried to take up her offer.

Plus, Bill getting called away before he can go 'over the rainbow' to deal with the OD seems to be implying those two girls meant shooting him up as well as whatever sexual stuff... and he may have wound up as comatose as she is. Even metaphorically it means he is spared the problems that plague a man beset upon by two hot women, a kind of all-encompassing panic-inducing mix of dread and desire that confound his ability to walk or think clearly (the awkward nervous banalities of their conversation reflects this kind of flushed disorientation). It is like a drug in and of itself, draining normal humdrum reality, the way, for example the music dies down and changes and the rest of the world becomes a blur when Maria and Tony's first spot one another in WEST SIDE STORY.

What's in that champagne?

Another way I can and have read EYES is as a metaphor for addiction and recovery. The name Dr. Bill is even a hybrid of Dr. Bob and Bill Wilson, the founders of AA. And that 'program' as they call it can get very cult-like, despite the founders' best attempts. The drug downstairs at the party is champagne but they all act like they're on heavy duty opiates, or maybe expensive champagne is just so expensively good it acts as a moral inhibition quasher.

Even so, I've never seen anyone act as bizarrely as they do at that EYES opening party, except at gatherings of sexy friends where everyone was drunk and super high on ecstasy and/or roofies (that they took intentionally and at proper dosage). Did someone tell Kubrick that people at parties talk super close (because of loud music) and act weird on ecstasy, so this is what he was going for? Maybe he should have actually gone to a few parties. That's the problem with all these cultish mind control readings: maybe they're true but their behavior is also very close to the ideas of what a person who has already missed all the orgies would imagine orgies are like, someone like a doctor, who always has to keep his mind relatively clear in case there's an emergency call.

To get back to Lacan, there doesn't even need to be an orgy going on to feel you're missing the orgy. But miss it too much and you might come crashing in armed to the teeth like our poor friend McCaslin, shocked to fine an empty grove instead of the full-swing Sodom that was causing so much unbearable Freudian anxiety!

Awake, sleeper, from the dream of Cruiselessness

But, even if that's what he desires to depict, Kubrick messes up again because upstairs the comatose hooker Mandy looks nowhere near pale or blue enough to be believably OD-ed. Her skin glows. Bill does a good job of 'reaching' her through her blank eyes in a way that might mirror deprogramming, though: "Mandy, Mandy, are you in there. Can you hear me? Move your head if you can hear me..." Shining a light in her eye, you can feel almost what it's like to be lying down hearing him far above you as you die, and maybe that is a parallel with Scientology's work with addicts, but when he says, "you can't keep doing this... you're gonna need some rehab" it's a joke. How does he know? She could easily be just dozing off from too much of that roofie champagne. Probably she won't need rehab for the very reason that her tolerance is way way down otherwise she wouldn't have passed out so early in the evening. Maybe she got the good stuff at this party and it's usually cut with B-12 so she overdid it and passed out for a hot second. She should just tone it down, stay the hell away from Ziegler and has super-potent supply. He's like that producer whose underage girlfriends keep OD-ing in BOOGIE NIGHTS. Ding!


The next scene, their post-party clinch to "Baby did a bad bad thing" by Chris Isaak, seems a little shady, too.. The joint rolling is cool but then Alice goes back to talking in that close druggy whisper and you're like damn girl, you ever talk normal, like a normal person? Did Stanley make you take roofies all during the shoot? Was Rohypnol your cough drop? Did he stress you guys out so much that roofies were your only escape? I've done my share of Rohypnol and let me tell you, on the right dose you don't pass out (if only you take a half like you're supposed to), rather you float around on winged angel Roombas and talk real close to people, in a whirl of abandonment and inhibition-free jouissance.

But to take the paranoid conspiracy theories quoted at the top to their inevitable conclusion, all sexual openness and ecstasy is a product of hypnotic mind control, or Rohypnol-spiked champagne. And that's sad. I believe there is mind control behind desire, but it's not Satanists or the CIA or the Illuminati at work. Power is enough of an aphrodesiac, they don't need to get all drastic to have chicks swoon for them, No, the culprit behind all this is far more evil than any inner circle of hooded power brokers, and more serpentine and twisted than any 4th dimensional reptoid.


Of course I'm referring to DNA.

Call it alien programming, if you like.... why not? Our DNA after all wouldn't have survived this long had it not liked to inspire us to throw condoms to the wind. The genes that survive through millennia are ruthless in their goals. They can make you think not using condoms just this once is going to make it sexier, and keeping the baby is nobler, and that your lover is "the one" you should raise a family with forever, and ever, and ever. But that's before you climax and plant the seed. Once you've dropped off the goods, that drive now tells you to split. Hahaha that voice wants you to be a tomcat whore; ten minutes ago it was preaching at you like the mufhuggin' Bishop of Canterbury. Now it wants you to move on and inseminate the neighbors.

Or worse, our genes are the result of love and family sure, but also sexual violence, dominance. History's most insatiable rapists (like Genghis Kahn) and the women who can Stockholm syndrome their way into loving them--these are our deep, truest most archaic ancestors. This genetic con job is the oldest trick in the book. We're like the tip of the iceberg thinking it's moving of its own free will when all the while the bulk of it is below the surface being drawn hither and yon on murky currents. Thinking you can really ever know how deep below the waves you go is, in the end, the very definition of 'fucking' madness..

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