Great Acid Easter Cinema: THE GREEN PASTURES (1936)

This 1936 all-black folk interpretation of the Old Testament draws 'Uncle Tom'-style flak from liberal academia, and maybe they're right (1), but on the other hand, God is portrayed as a black man (Rex Ingram), and He is a God of Wrath and Vengeance. Talk folksy as he may, even within a heaven of clouds, fish-fries, five cent see-gars for a-dults, and cups of firmament-deficient custard, Ingram commands the screen with a profoundly resonant analog gravitas. And I personally love the shit out of this movie, and if part of that love comes from a kind or round-about racism, then stone me not lest ye be first stoned, as I was when I had it on a six-hour tape sandwiched between a host of 30s Betty Boop cartoons and Death Takes a Holiday (1934). The tape was labeled "In case of Emergency" - knowing this blog you might guess what kind of emergency I meant. For nary a month or so went by that my weird self-medication regimen wouldn't fail on me, to the point I'd drunkenly and ill-advisedly take too much acid or too many shrooms in order to pull myself out of a spiritual depression tailspin and, instead of finding solace, wind up spinning even faster, the yawning chasm of Hell below me like a giant laughing Medusa planet maw. In those dark moments, with Death so close I could see its reflection in the toilet bowl mirror, I'd reach for the Boop-Pastures-Holiday trifecta tape, and lo, I would be slowly lifted back up from the pit. The music of the Hal Johnson Choir is the kind of music I hope they play when I die - I'll follow that sound right up the heavenly gates, or--at any rate--out of  the devil's grasp. The Hollywood group for such things (they also supply similar notes of grace in Dumbo and Cabin in the Sky), the Hal Johnsons are like the hand that lifts down from the clouds to raise the lowliest of sinners from the mire. Even as they're perfectly in tune you can hear nearly every voice separately at the same time - the cumulative sound is never muddled, and always warm and freeing.

"Nothing dies forever," (perhaps) a (mis)quote I just now heard while in the other room where is playing The Expendables 3.  But honey, ain't it apt?

It worked for me in that low moment because, for all its folksy stereotyping, Green Pastures glows with real spiritual magic, of the same sort I feel listening to Leadbelly or Mississippi John Hurt. I think it's because, at its core, Green Pastures is not about a black child's simplified imagining of the Old Testament portion of the bible while Mr. Deshee regails him at Sunday School, so much as it is an illustration of how suffering is the prerequisite to compassion, which is the pre-requisite to true happiness, how these steps can't be 'faked' even with good psychedelics (as I'd learn time and time again) and how the god of wrath and vengeance too must suffer and in that, at last, finally find the compassion that eluded him for his own creations.

When viewed from the soul-broken LSD bad trip that leads to clear-headed mystical scissor complexity it is a very modernist film, fusing the mythos of the Old Testament to the mythos of the Carl Sandburg/Mark Twain-folksy Old South, with nary a nod to any kind of banal social realism or political correctness along the way. Very of it's time, not just for its free hand with race and co-opted culture but for its ability to tread clearheadedly into avenues of deep overt symbolism thanks to the literati's post-war existentialist crisis. Darker than blue and wrong as acid rain, it goes down sweet as whole bottle of vanilla extract, gulped down as a last resort on a blue law Sunday when the shakes are so bad you can't even get off your knees without dry-heaving.

Like that extract's effect on a shattered alcoholic system, the Green Pastures' sweetness helps you keep it down even as its potency warms you up. The gentle but properly-aligned gravitas of Ingram's lord is like a salve to gash that's bled your soul, mind, and spirit into each other. He's like a draft of Moby Dick's hot blood in a shiny grail fed to a crippled Ahab. He doesn't grow back a new hollow leg, but he just might make it to the kitchen on the one he has, and there are refills thar. The strong response we get from the white community, as in the vicious minstrel satire of it in the "Going to Heaven on a Mule" number in 1934's Al Jolson vehicle Wonder Bar. compared to the earthy resonance and genuine care given to every fibre of Green Pastures should make us all ashamed. Most of these talented actors struggled along playing servants, if anything, or threadbare budgeted blacks-only films and plays. The enduring power of Pastures, Stormy Weather, Hallelujah!, Emperor Jones, and Cabin in the Sky is that these actors cram a whole canon of worthy work into them, a reminder of how much richer our collective cinema might have been in a less segregated history. 

And me, during those brutal Sunday hangovers and too-much acid 'suffering side step fails' while miserably alone and bereft and it's winter and work looming like the gallows, man, the thought of an entire keg of liquor waiting on a nice rainy ark, with everything from guys in gorilla suits to freshly painted zebras for company, was like a salve that erased the pain from phantom limbs I didn't know I had.

To a poor space cowboy fallen so far off his horse he'd already passed the ground three times, jerking spastic as he'd plummet, like catching St. Vitus on a yo-yo string, Ingram was the one lord who made sense, the only lord I trusted.

1930--the year Green Pastures was written (first as a play)--was a year of expanded demographical suffering for this great country. A whole lot of once-middle class white folks--many of them decorated war heroes--were suddenly very enlightened in how it felt to be poor as hell, spat on by the cops, forced to sleep in Central Park and to take whatever demeaning job was offered for however insultingly little. They were, as the saying goes, humbled. They knew at last some measure of what it was like on the other side of the class divides. The market had crashed, the Depression was on, there was as yet no such thing as minimum wage or unemployment insurance; you couldn't even drown your sorrows because of Prohibition. FDR was still three years away, but Hitler was rolling slowly but inexorably into view as well, like his dark mirror twin. Each a socialist public works highway-building savior to their nations, both Adolph and Franklin hit their full stride in 1933, ushering in respective sweeping reforms (like on the US side, social security and prohibition's repeal) but that was three years away. In 1930, only the factors that created the need for them existed.

What was needed also maybe was some kind of faith that modern hip disillusioned NYC audiences could embrace without feeling  overly churchy. In other words, we all could--through the "American Negro Spiritual"--get needed heavenly uplift. Anyone who's been kept from the psych ward by the saving grace of an old Leadbelly record, heard perhaps by chance while passing an open window, knows what I'm talking about. There's an alchemical power to transmute sorrow to joy, hell-lashed helplessness to heavenly power, in those Leadbelly records. You know it when you feel it and you never forget it, because it's an inexhaustible source of solace. And urban audiences both white and black could get behind it.

This same appreciation for black spirituality--real or imagined--took root in a lot of us who grew up in 70s Middle Class America. As a child in Lansdale PA, I was used to black people more as TV characters than actual neighbors: Good Times, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, and What's Happening! and of course radio, where you couldn't tell who was male or female ("Hot Child in the City" was my favorite song 'til I learned it was sung by a man) let alone black or white. Our sense that the racist jokes and cartoons we saw and heard were wrong (it was mostly Irish and Polish jokes anyway) and the evil of racist thinking didn't really sink in until Roots came along, and suddenly and abruptly, we--along with the bulk of white America--were all like, holy shit, that really happened??! We ashamedly threw our joke books and inherited Little Black Sambo 78s away, and watered the seeds of our newly planted collective social guilt like it was a rare orchid.

At the same time, I today regard with suspicion the uber-liberal academe for whom ever single word spoken in popular media on this subject is either vile and racist or safely didactic, either flavorless, dour, or scolding. A black actor for these lefty liberals has to 'represent' color, one way or another, elevating or denigrating with his or her every step and word. To quote one of Green Pasture's angels as he looks down from the clouds at Jesus carrying the cross, "that's a terrible burden for one man to carry."

Performing the opposite of that kind of mono-dimensional liberal strait-jacketing, Green Pastures' modality recognizes the universal man as black via accentuation of the black man as Other rather than a bland mouthpiece for the kind of sanitized PC sermonizing that reinforces stereotypes even as it works to transcend them. In the liberal mind, the black character is so not different he can never be universal--often the more entitled (usually upper middle class) liberal mind can't see that basic paradoxical opposition.

So it is that white fans of 30s black Hollywood like myself (and Quentin Tarantino) risk demonization at the hands of the left for the crime of looking at the vibrant soul of the black performer with vampiric envy. We recognize that vitality, that wellspring of submarine missile-to-stratosphere soul, as something we lack. We feel it in our soul's bones, whether it's projecting or not, it's still valid. Like Mick Jagger gaping at the wonder of James Brown on that legendary 1966 TAMI Show, we long to absorb that resonance, that heavy frequency. The performative aspect of a white writer of earthy black characters may seem racist, but race is way too complicated not to mar the vision of the liberal who sees such envy as racist a priori to the experience of that level of depth. The hard left tries to create equality by denying the existence of any actual 'soul' resonance. Spike Lee will tell Tarantino's fans to be ashamed for loving his liberally N-word peppered dialogue, irregardless of their race, but art flowers in the offal of wrongness. It withers and dies when subjected to 'peer-reviewed journal' sterility. Those journals are either part of--or at the mercy of--political dissent-promoters out for tenure who just don't 'feel comfortable' with genuine subversion. They need iron gates installed around the campus just so they can demand they be removed. Like Barton Fink, they feel the common man's plight, but only if they don't have to eat next to him, for truly he doesn't measure up in direct experience to their sanitized ideals, who does? 

And so goes my rambling preface to my telling you that The Green Pastures was written in 1930 by the great white wit Marc Connelly, one of the Algonquin round table, who based it on the irreducible Roark Bradford's Ol Adam and his Chillun. And critics are right, it's a mite racist in its colloquial innocence. But it's also 'from the mind of a child,' for whom misspellings of names like "Aardvark" for the  ark sequence are comparable to painted signs in Our Gang comedies. And let us not forget, in the same era, the most popular books were savage satires of white hick poverty and deviance by eugenics proponents like Erskine Caldwell, which were even lousier with folksy phoneticism. Relative to Caldwell's hilarious savagery, Pastures is socially progressive, wise, and gently humorous rather than mercilessly misanthropic. If some of the black actors seem to embody exaggerated grotesques, it should be remembered that the source text basically chronicles Eden, the Flood, ancient Egypt, Babylon, and so forth, and puts forth the idea of humanity ever-oscillating between humble reverence and depraved decadence, between higher human idealism and bestial indulgence, that each flood, famine or volcanic eruption, or other extinction event which God creates, wipes out the more animalistic (analog) heathen versions of man in order to distill a stronger divine (digital) proof. This fits ancient alien theories too, positing 'extinction events' as our otherworldly creator's method of scrubbing the kitchen clean, tossing out the failed batch, and starting again with a modified recipe, one step further on the road to modern humanity.

We should also remember that the most racist of all biblical films are really those deadly dull ones from the 50s that cast only white actors, sometimes in black, brown, or yellow face, to play Middle Eastern/North African biblical figures. These ponderous roadshow 'scope endurance tests never get called racist even by liberal academes (who've probably never seen them, for in sooth, they are generally godless). Based on the relatively small geographic area where most of the Old Testament transpires, characters should all actually be Arabic, Israelite or North African. Where in popular culture, aside from that Isaac Hayes album Black Moses or the colorblind Jesus Christ Superstar, or on Kwanzaa tapestries, are Old Testament characters ever black? The black man is the original man, true? So no other race should portray Adam and Eve, and that means everyone else in the bible should be played by some mix of African and Middle Eastern heritage, even towards the second half as part of the Israel / Ishmael divide. (2)

Right

Wrong!

Now, I'm no fan of the bible and its obtuse user-unfriendly 'folk' language, but when it's folksied up by old man Connelly, I feel the mythic archetypal potency of its message blaze outward in ways no old lady Sunday school teacher or droning priest could ever match in my own unwilling churchgoing experience. Alone amongst biblical films in its wise humor, Pastures works to summarize (and hold accountable) God's actions throughout the Old Testament. God's periodic visitations of Earth, His judgements of early man's wickedness, and his 'wrath and vengeance'-spurred habit of raining destruction to start anew, over and over, proves a bad habit humanity can't help but pick up themselves. God is loath to recognize himself the source of evil. To this end, the film manages clarify the huge difference between the Old Testament God and the New God, moreso than any other movie or sermon I've seen or heard.

For an illustration: almost at the end of the film, in the midst of a WWI-style battle, comes a son of Adam, named Azrel, who runs into God a few hills back from the front line and--like all the other humans but Noah---never recognizes him (even though he's played by the same actor, both God and Azrel - reflecting God's own inability to recognize His reflection).

"Maybe we was tired of that old God," notes Azrel. He and his people have created a different God for themselves, one way nicer than the God of wrath and vengeance, as He calls Himself. Azrel lays a trip on God that cuts deep: man needs God to be a god of mercy, not vengeance, and so the new God will be perceived that way whether He is actually merciful or not.  To thrive, and to understand the concept of mercy, God realizes even He must suffer. Forgiveness can be learned no other way. Azrel won't even acknowledge the wrath of the old God, regardless of the God's wrath. The new God is merciful and kind, and even God Himself doesn't have a say in the matter. It's such a profound yet simple message it took me awhile, wasted as I was through my first dozen or so viewings, to really understand. It was only, really, after my drinking got so bad I went into AA and had a few spiritual pink cloud awakenings that it hit me in the same way. Without the prolonged wretchedness of my last year of drinking, would I be humble enough to accept this true and complete surrender? A soul is like a piece of steel that must be softened in the hell of the forge before it can be crafted into a beautiful functional blade. If we try to avoid the heat, we shatter under the hammer, and it takes rehab or detox or just years of denial and pain to get all the chunks to bond back together in the forge, otherwise the parts shatter again the first hard surface the blade strikes. So it is that, in its bizarre unheimliche mix of historical fact and mythic 'telephone game' translation and editing, Green Pastures gets at a truth too deep to convey with anything like dull DeMille solemnity.

Wait, are you not paying any attention, and just rolling your eyes at my typical educated white boy need to justify co-opting blackness through folksy blah blah?

If all I've said doesn't mean anything to you, o judger of my love for Pastures as 'benevolent racism' then consider just this: The Hal Johnson Choir does some great singing as the Heavenly angel congregation, the kind of music we don't hear nowadays when gospel is either Mahalia Jackson style (which is awesome but every song sounds the same) or classic (which often grows stodgy after one bar). Hal Johnson's choir is more attuned to, say, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, another old trippy favorite of mine. Pastures is not a musical and the songs mostly serve as transitions between scenes and as background, but their heavenly (it's the only remotely appropriate adjective) sound underwrites all the action like firmament underwriting the Earth. While God meddles with, or just visits, the folks on his Earth over the course of the millennia, like a botanist checking on his experimental orchids, deciding whether or not to wipe out this latest breed and start splicing again, the Angels up in the heavenly choir keep everything rooted, sanctified and grand in a way that manages to be humble and cosmic at once,

And if the language seems outdated, note of the original bible text (which I looked up wondering what the hell firmament was):

Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day (GENESIS 1.6-8)

Jeezis that's muddily convoluted (and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament;?) I far prefer de Lawd's version:

"Let there be some firmament, and I don't mean no little bit of firmament. I mean a whole mess of firmament, 'cuz I'm sick of running out of it when we need it.".

Like a lot of enduring mythic texts, the Old Testament defies easy interpretation as either truth or fiction, i.e. it is true myth, i.e. tall tales ala Ulysses, Prometheus, Paul Bunyon, and Poor John Henry. It's a text rife with magical staffs and personifications of elemental forces that were probably never meant to be taken as concretized dogma (3) as there are huge gaps in logic that my Sunday school teacher never could answer for me. For example, who did the children of Adam and Eve go off and marry if there were yet no other people? And later, the children of Noah, the same question. Did they mate with some prehuman life form? Or with each other? If with each other--and this goes for the two of each kind of animal Ark system--how, with such a small gene pool are we not all deformed, inbred monsters so many generations later?

My Christian Science Sunday School teacher was worse than ignorant of the answers. She radiated the smell of elderly skin and rotting old lady teeth which, coupled to fellow student Marilyn's infernal and endless sniffling, further abstracted whatever meaning we bored kids might derive from our reading the bible aloud, around and around the table, the abstract and redundantly worded language of the text devolving further and further into meaninglessness. We would either rush through the text in a bland monotone (Marilyn), stutter and mispronounce every word (Terry), or make fun of it by emphasizing random words in a hammy voice (me). Green Pastures at least has the gumption to discern the common threads in the text and summarize its events into a relevant and moving preface to the New Testament.

The moral being, even God sometimes needs to suffer to grow, and the only way God can understand mercy is through His own suffering, the kind that comes from seeing your son die on a cross. Through acceptance of the unmitigated feeling of hangover depression comes its deliverance-isn't that what the blues is all about? For the hungover wretch like me, the pain was abated as long as the old country blues played on the speakers, like a hot bath for sore muscles. Silence or some other music was like suddenly getting out into the cold shivering air. 

For First World middle class white kids like myself, with no diseases or ailments or crippling accidents or arrests of any kind, we can really only know true suffering via mental illness, such as bi-polar depression, or our own self-inflicted variety (via perhaps self-medication to allay the first kind) so we suffer from anorexia, drug withdrawal or bad trip overdoses on psychedelics that turn out to be laced with strychnine or formaldehyde, or are just way stronger than we were prepared for, amplifying our sense of loneliness and isolation to the point of existential agony. Failing that, it's my opinion suicide attempts are a last ditch effort to achieve the same grace. If you survive, suddenly your once stifling woes are dialed back into focus and maybe your mom finally lets you get the help you need. Suffering is the fire of God the blacksmith, melting down your frying pan brain. Best learn to love the sound of the hammer ringing, because He's never satisfied, not 'til your shiny and pure and sharp as a Hattori Hanzo Bill-killing special. Here's a little song I wrote about it, ready?

The dentist is not punched for his painful probe;
instead you pay him for the end result.
The infant is forgiven his filthy diaper, and
the old man his soiled bedsheets;
but not the young junky vagrant with no bowel control!?
Not the drunk, convulsing, stumbling reminder
that no purloined ecstasy escapes its full opposite?

What hypocrites we are to not see each new load of shit the same,
each endured pain the price of future joy,
the clean fang the dentist's pain full paid;
heart unafraid to face the same fate
as that dead old boy, 

poopin' his way back to you, babe.

--

If your crying is not from worry or the dread of dying
Allow it. Aummmmmm
If your crying is not from fear the manna shall soon cease its flow,
Aummmmmm, allow.
If your crying is not from dreading some fatherly punishment yet to pronounce
over missed finals, Aummm

nor from tedium feared before it's even started
aum...
This suffering is sanctified.

Where the twig meets the leaf is where the first frames of meshed mom morph.
Then it vibrates outward like the unspooling spiral of the seashell snail shape Aummmmmmm
shuffled downward onto plankton carpets,
shamanic rattles caked in baby spittle,
white and shiny salivas glistening like the freshly hatched serpent.
Aummmm, shapes cut from glowing red lantern spin orbit patterns as your crib surrounds you.
Aummmmmmmmm, the holy gleaming halo of your last first faint sunset Aummmm.
Each death, night, goodbye, adieu just an outward breath Aummmmmmm.
Mom, that titan, encircles us no more tonight,
just the slow spinning stars of nontoxic plastic, above us casting shadows,
out of reach, above the bars of our baby crypt.

The rattle dries into whiskey and drum sets, growing tall brings girls of equal height,
their breasts no longer big as beanbag chairs,
only the forgotten homework now stirs a guilty shiver
only that is the infant's giant mom's
harrowing equal
in absence.

Inward..
Buzzing, the razor stops suddenly, the chair
either dentist of barber, you forgot which,
lurches downward.
The bib comes off.
We're unleashed,
but to where, with such an obscenely naked neck?

And so we sense that the hangups that befoul our spiritual questing are all beaten and cleared away by the enormous suffering of the Jewish slaves and the black slaves of the Old Testament, and the grotesque words, faces, jewelry and actions of their oppressors speaking to a great evolutionary comeuppance, as the grotesque exaggerations of blackness, the dice game, the koochie dancers, the grim inhumanity and shallow interest in 'tricks' gives way to hard-won dignity as humanity collectively moves from a pagan pantheon of animal gods and graven images (requiring human sacrifices) to the idea of a single, yet jealous god who demands fidelity, and finally to the one god himself changing from a god of wrath and vengeance to a god of love and forgiveness not through his own choice but because his creation, man, wills it, via the strength over him he's given them through suffering - the indirect 'balance sheet swivel'. It's all there in Ingram's face as de Lawd, and also as Adam, and also as Hezrel, a name that appears here and nowhere else.

During my 'here comes the big 12/21/12!' big rapture moment (4)  I understood at last with diamond clarity that all the suffering in the world had only this one purpose, the shaking of the gold prospector's pan - to sift away the dross and mud so God might see what's left to shine, and all the baubles and wealth in the world won't buy you one step onto that golden stair, so don't be sure all that glitters in the Robert Plant's hair has two meanings.

But in losing all that, in tossing possessions away, in enduring centuries of slavery with one's every pain-wracked step (5), one earns the gift even God can't take away. No expensive wine ever tasted half as sweet as plain water to a man dying in the desert. So Jesus made men desert wanderers, that they might know this awesome sangre vintage. Why did God invent war? Because there's no atheist in a foxhole.

And because I'm too pampered to want to wander and die in the desert just for a taste of this golden water nectar, too lazy and grandiose to want a walk-on part in the war, I became a psychedelic surgeon lead role in a cage, cutting myself apart in endless operative bars. But when I accidentally sew my ego into my soul via incorrect sutures and stay awake in the dark night of the soul despair, then I got Leadbelly, and Lightnin' Hopkins, and the Pastures, to raise me clear above it via a transcendental alchemical process of absorption, for I can feel the beauty and triumph to be found through 'feeling' their own acceptance of their pain. This is a true alchemical miracle. It comforts me and reminds me the desert's always waiting, somewhere wrapped in foil in a forgotten college freezer, the 'good work' always ready to be picked up right where I left it. Aummm. And don't let the lord convince you that one keg of liquor on the ark is enough. Better take two kegs, lord. Or the Big Book of Alcoholic's Anonymous. On disc. As read by Tim Leary. Or at least Dennis Leary.

A final word: 
Perhaps in order to balance things out, Rex Ingram also played the devil, or at least his son-in-law in Cabin in the Sky, another all-black film that posits negro culture as being more extreme in its polarity than whites (i.e. a black man is either a sober God-fearing Christian family man or a debauched craps-shooting, razor-wielding pimp --there's nothing in between, aside from Little Joe, of course) gets far less critical dross, but I think is far more racist (7). In Cabin we never see the lord, Ingram only plays the devil; in Pastures we never see the devil, Ingram is only the lord. And he played the genie in Thief of Baghdad! In other words, he's very good at playing larger than life mythic archetypes that far transcend the generic role of the 'bearer of the burden of blackness' though he seems to be able to do only one per film. For example, in his opening words in Pastures, he genuinely seems to be asking, in that beautifully gentle but forceful purr of a voice, "Have you been baptized?" ("Certainly, Lord" the choir responds) Have you been redeemed? ("Certainly, lord"), etc. He's a complex god because though he judges his creation, his main requests are simple that man honors him on Sunday, obeys the commandments, and doesn't go "squirmin' and fightin' and bearin' false witness." He brings in the three Hebrew angels in long white beards, and declares "It so happens I love your family, and I delights to honor them." The angels mention their people are in bondage down in Egypt. "I know they is. Who do you think put them there?" The Angels look dismayed "Oh, that's okay, I'm gonna take 'em out again." The Angels smile - but again there's the nagging suspicion that God is a bit of an insecure egotist. A good parent understands his children are bound to disobey on occasion, that it's essential to good growth of independent thought. This seems especially true with a God who seems to do things for no reason and then undo them, looking for any kind of dissent at his contradictory impulses.

During my last big awakening I became a ball of light unmoored from my body and 3D space time. I realized I was always either revolving closer to the godhead or farther away - but there was no such thing as true motionlessness, like a balloon constantly being lifted between ceiling and floor - and to merge into the godhead obliterates all separateness, and can be dangerous unless you're ready to die -- like moths aren't meant to survive hitting the bulb they orbit. A part of them lives on, dried on the bulb, so to speak, but the shell falls away. In this case it was I realized, a rebirth moment- reliving the ground zero of infancy --the sun being mother's breast, her uncritical love, her all-protective presence.

When you're a baby, your mother is a gigantic icon, more then five times your size. You worship her and need look no farther for true sustenance and comfort and if you hold a good orbit around her you're okay, but drift too far from her amniotic light and it's total darkness (she has to go to sleep sometime). She becomes just another star as you drift (as seen in Enter the Void). And if you're not working back towards that holy light, the devil's got you in his long reach gravity, convincing you to curse, get drunk, and get more stuff for your shelves because God doesn't exist anyway. True or not makes no difference: I remember, I feel the comforting gravity of the lord when watching Green Pastures -and that is enough. If there is a God, the miseries he creates here on Earth are to aid us in finding a streak of true faith and true mercy, true humility, the nonjudgmental love that unites all dualities back into a healthy radiant whole. There's really nothing else important -- life is just for this. Crying about injustice doesn't move him. It's there for a reason, to get you to cry your way past the trap of ego, to uncover the you that remains when your ego is finally willing to leave and let your Full Self emerge. It's all that lasts. Do I bend mighty low? I do. And showers of warm grateful tears are my reward.

Until the drugs wear off.

------
NOTES:
For New Testament Action, see Acidemic's 2011 Great Acid Cinema JESUS OF NAZARETH (1977)
1. See G.S. Morris's great, even-handed analysis: Thank God for Uncle Tom. Race and Religion Collide in The Green Pastures (Bright Lights, Jan. 2008)
2. I don't know what I'm talking about here, shhhh!
3. Imagine if Aesop's Fables were taken as truth, with vintners making sure their vines are always low enough for foxes to reach, lest the grapes turn sour, etc.) Naturally, were the ancient alien theorists right, all these miracles would be the result of their advanced technology
4. fall 2012 if you're keeping score, check the posts.
5. Giving away all your possessions and $$ gives you a rush of total freedom, if it didn't then cults wouldn't exist. Add to that the idea that a vegan diet is both very holy and right and yet makes you highly suggestible and passive, and drudgery and ceaseless toil give you clarity (i.e. when standing for 24 hours straight, lying down is a sublime ecstasy) then cults have a great rationale for all their exploitive behavior.
6. STP - or DOM - is a Berkeley chemist masterpiece, it's a sports car that comes with no brakes, and no way to de-accelerate, the gas tank just has to run itself out. I didn't know til Erowid that what I'd taken (DOM) was the same as what my doppelganger avatar Dave in Psych-Out (Dean Stockwell) . See: Great Acid Cinema: PSYCH-OUT (1968)
7. see one of my very first posts on this site: CABIN IN THE SKY: Co-Dependence and the Lord. (7/07)

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..

\