Showing posts with label Patrick Harpur. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Patrick Harpur. Show all posts

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..

\

Sunday, October 21, 2012

The Evolver Virus: PROMETHEUS, THE DEAD FILES


One of the weirdest, most psychedelically spooky and Halloween-triguing shows on TV right now is the Travel Channel's THE DEAD FILES: psychic Amy Allan and retired NYC homicide detective Steve De Schavi investigate haunted houses with a twin pincer approach: he dredges up the the building's history and talks to witnesses; she sees dead people. She speaks to dead people, and they speak to her. But there's only one way to know if her findings are real... and that's Steve's corroborating unearthed facts. She uses a sketch artist to capture the image of the main dead person she encounters on her "walk" through the house in the dead of night. She and Steve then compare notes, and in the big reveal we match her sketch with Steve's recovered photo of the historical troublemaker. They usually match, which is awesome, slightly scary if true. I get a kind of weird shiver when, in the 'Reveal,' Steve's tough but compassionate cop eyes widen, his head involuntarily shakes back and forth in stunned disbelief as the sketches match; we realize with queasy delight that we're watching a very grounded man's horizons expand, one think sketch at a time. Myth and reality, the unconscious psyche of the collective oversoul and the body--so long ago separated by church, science, and state--re-merge.


Ridley Scott's PROMETHEUS (recently released on DVD) provides an eerie ancestry with Steve and Amy's investigations. A retro-futuristic pre-emptive Ancient Aliens gravestone for a still living humanity, it's Ridley Scott's big sci-fi comeback film, a belated prequel to his 1979 franchise-launcher ALIEN. Is it any coincidence its release date is 2012, a year that's marked the death of his brother Tony (see "I'm not Afraid to Die") and the end of the Mayan calendar--which is relevant to the ancient aliens hypothesis of the film? A muddled but fascinating career capstone, PROMETHEUS serves as a summation of all Scott's pet themes--dehumanization, mankind as the missing link between apes/aliens; machines/replicant theory (we're all some ancient race's robots) vs. practice; the whole system on trial; technology merging with humanity; the cosmic spark, etc. Too bad once again Scott winds up overanalyzing and falling into his old habit of second-and-triple guess self-negating budget bloating. Detailed 'lived-in' characters of his earlier film have melted down to a snippy crew of petty stock types, so constricted by their narrowly-defined quirks and hang-ups they dare not breathe without sneering nor speak without re-underlining their assigned tics. Their dialogue evokes, not the cool replicants of BLADEUNNER (I want more life, fucker father), but M. Emmett Walsh's chief copper ("Here's mud in your eye, pal"); not the professional exchanges about 'struts retracting' and 'access overloads' in the deadpan natural conversational tone professional chatter of ALIEN but the 'I want to open my presents!' brattiness of Logan Marshall-Green's supposed doctor of archeology. With his natty scarf and layered sweatshirts, he never even gives the impression he cracked a book, too busy gazing into his mirror.

Nice scarf, Poindexter!

As usual, a crew of humans and one robot travel several years in a cryogenic sleep in a huge ship headed for, they hope, a kind of crashing the parent's door for a glimpse at humanity's 'primal scene.'  Instead of finding our creators and seeing how proud they are of our bratty self-entitlement, we learn we're the result of an X-FILES-esque black oil DNA germ warfare contaminant leakage. We were 'sparked' by one of the big-schnozzed bald albinos, left behind on Earth during a routine visit, determined to kickstart Earth's evolution (it's never very clear whether the oil is panspermia of the reverse). He drinks some of the gross black oil, dissolving himself into the waters, and--over billions of years--gradually becoming all of humanity. The elders who left without him will no doubt recognize us as his spawn, come for familial payback, some money for college, an inheritance. But the surviving bald guy's look of stunned irritation reminds me of a lot of my own irritated German grandfather on Xmas. We are offensive to their eye for the crime of being seen. We are the next generation of gods (the DNA match is the same) but they don't want to recognize us as their children; they killed their own parents, and now of course they're paranoid about us. Maybe that's how you prove you're grown up in their fucked-up world. If we want their respect, we'll need to burst out of their stomachs.

If only that idea didn't have such a dead-end more-of-the-same finality. The aliens are a big disappointment here. Turns out, humans are still the only intelligent life form, we just found an older, bigger balder version. All that weird shit we saw in the first film? We loved it, it was so new, and it was all H.R. Giger's genius as well as Ridley's. The alien's acid blood and myriad strange stages of development, from egg to second stage parasite, to second egg, to 'hatch' to quick-growth ionizing, was startling and ahead of its time. None of the sequels have ever extended or thought beyond that genius concept. The alien form is now fixed instead of an ever-evolving creature. Now we have the 'Engineers' - CGI doing little more than removing eyelashes from big bald heads (no women aliens, either --that would apparently be stretching imagination too far). The first film depicted an alien of many different stages, one beyond all gender binaries, moving from egg to face hugger to parasite to infant, etc - it was a truly alien life cycle -- nothing remotely like it before in film (or since). That level of weird science, i.e. biology and physics folded into the fiction, is long gone by Prometheus, perhaps mirrored the uptight tattooed geologist (Sean Harris) spittle-flecking ever syllable about about how everyone but him doesn't give a shit about rocks; at the same time he utters nary a single line of dialogue that would convey he knows a thing about rocks himself, other than being able to read a screen to determine what's hollow or solid.

At the same time, this level of 'keeping it stupid' dialogue (where characters display skills only in expository self-promotion), reflects the way science doesn't want to recognize the power of mediums like Dead Files' Amy Allan. Science wants to live completely and deludedly in the realm of materialism, which hates when anything is believed without prior scientific confirmation. In the 70s, when Alien was made, astrologers, psychics, alien abductees, and exorcists carried deep magic you could feel in your lower chakras. Now they are all fakers or delusional in the scientific eye, regardless of the mounting 'strange attractor' particle quantum theory evidence that everything is always in motion and interconnected in ways that transcend the narrow spectrum of our perceptions. There is a slowly growing realization amongst the cutting-edge quantum mechanics and string theorists that the movement of planets--even far away ones--in our own galaxy, effect every last emotion or event here on earth via quantum entanglement, the zero point field, and an ever-dissolving and cohering latticework of strange attractors. But try telling all that to your science teacher, am I right? He'd rather fail us as charlatans because we're inferring the possibility of truth behind phenomena science has already labeled superstition, perhaps too hastily. It's the inverse of burning Galileo at the stake; it's almost like the middle segment of an ouroboros swearing it's on a diet even as it's eating / being eaten. Prometheus is sci-fi for those kind of thinkers, the types who call UFO abductees lunatics and psychics frauds without ever looking into the evidence, the implants removed from bodies, the marks, or The Dead Files. 

Part of earning a doctorate is believing and ascribing to their panel of thesis advisors' notions of reality. They can't handle the truth of their model's limitations, like they don't want to acknowledge an ugly son. It's not just a problem the 'engineers' (lead scientist Elizabeth Shaw's term for the big alien creators) have with us, it's a problem maintream science has with fringe science, and which Ridley Scott has with his own material. Or that hack other writer he got from god knows where, Joe Spaihts. Science must have loved him. He's the Carl Sagan of sci-fi theorists, ignoring all the copious research and ideas to parrot thinking that will be outmoded in 20 years, like putting feathers on airplane wings. 

Like more than a few prequels shot decades after the original, PROMETHEUS indicates just what exactly blew minds in the original's heyday through failure to recapture it. With the help of reality-bending CGI and a massive budget, Scott's film loses sight of itself. Too big to fail, or succeed, it lurches into the dark void in search of a light switch so that it might clear yet another shadowed room and illuminate yet another darkened forest with parking lot floods. The Alien series is now caught in a Moebius strip where the future is farther in the past than the present, and ten times the budget means ten times slower momentum. CGI lets nerdy crippled-by-second-guessing directors like Ridley over-tinker until a film is all FX details and the actors just gray blotches embarrassing the technical perfection around them with their unforgivable human-animal irregularity. In short, like George Lucas. 

A great aspect of the 1979 original, never recovered in any sequel, was the naturalistic dialogue, the abundant adult professionalspeak (overlapping radio transmissions of technical jargon like background). Remember the breakfast scene, after everyone wakes up on the Nostromo and starts smoking and grumbling and socializing in an overlapping naturalistic Altmanesque rhythm? These were people in the same room, at the same time, adults talking in their low, natural voices. It was great, and no sequel deigned to try and capture that vibe. Or all the radio coms and beeping noises during the decent onto the planet? Call me crazy but cigarettes had a lot to do with that low key intelligence. Has the recently-installed zero tolerance for indoor smoking had the unforeseen side effect of dissolving our sense of 'adult' group dynamics? The chest-bursting scene was so shocking in the original because everyone was talking and joking and eating at the table in a believable manner, happy to see John Hurt's face again and to be heading back to bed ("back to the old freezarinos!").  This was a reality we understood, that was warm and believable, disrupted by this traumatic other of the chest bursting - it was a WTF moment right up there with the Psycho shower scene.

But those moments can never be repeated. Today we're always waiting for that chest-burster, we get bummed if it doesn't come.  There is no more traumatic other, no adulthood to deviate from, no difference between adults doing a job and children impatiently bickering and dying to "open their presents" and then getting sulky when they don't get the ancient alien equivalent of an X-box. Screenwriting 101 blather extends to the hooligan geologist dismissing alien life as a load of bollocks (so why come? no one asks); the smarmy hipster biologist snickers like a mumblecore rom-com skeeve; the disillusioned hunk drinks and mopes because the engineers aren't alive; leader Charlize is of course a cold bitch who needs sexual healing from a black guy who sings "love the one you're with" and plays a concertina etc. You know, he loves life, in shorthand. 

The video projection of Guy Pearce as the underwriter of the mission (in terrible old age make-up) introduces replicant David as "The closest thing I have to a son," a kind of cold insult to his butch daughter. "But he will never grow old and never die." Oh thanks for underlining that, gramps. If he were an astronaut in Kubrick's 2001 he'd have probably had to say that "Hal was the most human of us all. But he was a computer... and he had problems."

Even more hackneyed is the way they continually associate their voyage with an imagineered Disney ride, the blueprints for which are probably in a safe, waiting for box office returns to affirm its marketability. What we end up with is a somewhat sickening, unconscious consumerist 'ugly tourist' irritability we might feel in coach, towards the back, on an airplane, watching as the stewardess's beverage cart comes slowly down the aisle toward our row, while we die of thirst. PROMETHEUS has the ALIEN legacy and the rich field of crypto-anthropology to explore, to go a little gonzo with, but it never so deigns since there's all this stuff to do that's been stale since the 90s. 

Would have loved to see her smile like this just once, in the movie

The worst of the cast for me is Noomi Rapace, who joylessly cries and screams and yells and and rappels up to the moral high ground like otherwise no one would take her pint-sized powerhouse trip seriously. Even when Ripley was racing around trying to rescue that damned cat, she knew there was no point in making the pain and anguish she was going through unbearable to us as well. She tried to keep it together. Truth be toldm this was my problem with Noomi in GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, too. There's a certain line no actor should cross when expressing agony. When they cross it, the film ceases to be entertaining and becomes merely traumatic.

Another one of the aspects of the original ALIEN that made it so mind-blowing was that the giant alien 'space jockey' and the ship Nostromo investigates in the beginning is so uniquely other (thanks to H.R. Giger) with its vaginal entrances and fallopian shape, and the 'space jockey' was so  big and odd, and most of all very old, apparently calcified or petrified by the leaked-in non-oxygen atmosphere For PROMETHEUS that mystery, that complete 'other' aspect, is lifted up to daylight: the fallopian / vaginal aspect is sublimated; the jockey's memorably weird trunk turns out to be an air hose to a helmet that opens to reveal a big, hairless (literally) CGI white guy with a weird Roman nose. It's like the Loch Ness monster being heaved up on dry land and someone explaining it's just a big catfish. Awww. Give us our mysteries back, Mr. Ichthyologist! Your 'engineers' are just a bunch of pre-op Pinheads fixing to slug a Dr. Carrington in old age make-up (if you compare the bottom two image, clearly this was intentional, right down the collar on the human and camera angle, which isn't a detriment, but still...)

from top: Hellraiser 4, Prometheus, The Thing (from Another World)

There's a reason of course that we (or I, at any rate) recoil from this figurative interpretation of our makers. We don't like ourselves, so why should our 'engineers' have worse taste? We want to see an 'other' in science fiction, something we haven't seen before, something truly new, so we don't have to see ourselves reflected, yet again. If they should be the familiar human form, let their familiarity match Freud's definition of "uncanny," the way Giger's designs were truly uncanny in 1979, seeming to be some kind LSD version of X-rayed dinosaur animal alien bodies turned mechanical, as if-- in its rapid evolution-- it was absorbing the visual impression of the spaceship walls, becoming the same color and size as the pipes, as camouflage.

Alas, such radical beauty would be too 'alien' for a movie with this size budget --they can't take the chance, just like mainstream science can't risk supporting alternate theories of human evolution. A real-life astronomer who's used his cinematic wealth to spearhead innovations in telescopes and SETI-style radio receivers, Scott's almost afraid to let his imagination run too far afield. As if eager to impress his mainstream science friends, he suppresses the intuitive, shamanic, and daemonic through a kind of bulldozer mentality. The deadening effect science has on our souls, or PROMETHEUS has on our love of the original ALIEN, is a mythic counterpart in Heracles bum-rushing the Underworld, hacking at shadows. A good book on this is by Patrick Harpur, who writes:
"Having severed all connection with the gods and daimons, we reckon we are getting away with it. But we aren't. The victory over the daimons is hollow; we simply make a hell of our world. And, as we drive the daimons out before us, they simply creep back in from behind, from within. We compel them to seize and possess and madden us. If we want to know our fate we would do well to look at Heracles. He neglected his wife, his soul, who, in order to rekindle his attention, sent him a shirt soaked in what she was told was a love potion. But the potion was a poison that poured over his body, corroding his too-solid flesh. The more he tore at the shirt the more he tore himself to pieces..."  (1)
The problems with PROMETHEUS stem from this same too-literalness. Instead of a daimonic soul force not bound by physical laws as we understand them, instead of the "Beyond Jupiter and the Infinite" portion of 2001, or of gods whose thoughts are crystallized into the 3-D space time, like the Krell, or who who breathe life into man, like Zeus, or even use our own fears and memories against us, like EVENT HORIZON or GALAXY OF TERROR, the engineers are just a bunch of all-physical, no soul-having jacked-up leatherboy baldheads, carrying ink black tubes of super soil/poison around the 3-D linear space-time universe, 'seeding' and/or 'poisoning' (it's never clear if there's a difference), the worlds they find like temperamental charcoal artists who regularly destroy most of their own work in a temper tantrum.

We have to take David's word for it that they're bound to come destroy the Earth, that they are seeing us the way we see the squid monsters, with abject horror, like the father beholding the creature that returns from college with long hair and a pierced septum babbling about communism. It's fitting that our engineers turn out to be so Heraclean, so anti-spirit, even still using screens and projections instead of telepathy and astral projection (as the real aliens do, and are doing right now, telling you not to believe me).


With all this uncanny familiarity breeding so much revulsive contempt, the fantastic H.R. Geiger production designs of the original become in fact anachronistic to the spirit of Scott's 'new' vision. The original marriage of alien and Nostromo was about a clash of surfaces -- the alien was the return of the gothic architecture, of biology and machine fused together in spinal column-style fractal patterning vs. the maternal warmth of the living quarters portion of the ship and its dragonfly-like arrangements (above). We realize the original shape of the alien came from his previous surroundings, that he's continually shedding skins, for camouflage purposes if nothing else, so we realize the alien's been to some pretty crazy places, like Geiger's native Holland.

By 2012, the freshness of Giger's work long gone to cliche, Scott gives up on any notion of either gothic rapid-evolution 'other' or psychic 'inner voyaging' in favor of a bland universal language which is then made inscrutable. Like how grandparents and grandchildren sometimes share a special bond that leaves parents out of the loop, David the robot understands the big black engineers so we don't have to. And vice versa.

Lawrence greets Prometheus

Quoting from his favorite film LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, and wearing his hair like Peter O'Toole, David's the only character we can safely identify with, the only character who at least has the wherewithal to subtly conceal his agenda rather than trumpet it like the denouement of an amateur stage production. Awash in Michael Fassbender's icy calm, David seems to be acting only for himself, for a kind of twisted self-satisfied prank-pulling, imagining himself as Lawrence, and the crew he serves no more admirable than the treacherous British military he 'works' for, and the aliens as his true (Arab) tribe. He even talks to the ship's computer as if a human (rather than interfacing through his internal modem) while all alone, like he's feigning the need for 'human' companionship (he could just jack-in to the mainframe instead if we wanted). The computer calls him "David" in a voice no-doubt intentionally similar to HAL's in 2001. And like that film was associated with birthdays, PROMETHEUS references Xmas continually, and the idea of ersatz immortality wrought through progeny, all of whom are disappointed by whatever they get under their tree, no matter how expensive or over-thought out, just as we are disappointed by who our own kids turn into, even while their failure forces us to realize where they got it from, and our own shock of recognition and awareness when we realize it, and we're suddenly compelled to look over at our own parents, visiting for X-mas, in shocked self-recognition and apology. 

It's our nature to be underwhelmed by ourself reflected, and in that one area, paradoxically, PROMETHEUS doesn't disappoint. 


And who can blame David for thinking ill of his fellow Prometheus crew members? Sometimes the 'banter' of the crew even seems to careen towards a kind of faux-FIREFLY jocularity, "a hundred credits?" wagers the Asian stereotype, "put it towards a lap dance with Miss Vickers!" Really bro? PORKY's-like sniggering and lap dances are going to survive into 2089? And 'credits'? That was old tripe back in the 50s. And those overconfident orchestral moments in the score, with those minor key English horn parts like a John Williams military funeral? And the way neither Ridley Scott nor Elizabeth seem to remember there's a difference between being a leader and a whiny martyr? "I shall need more time here," she says, when its announced they need to split back to the ship to avoid a coming storm, as if her lady martyr bossiness can hold back nature. She refuses to let the security officer bring weapons on their first visit (pompously noting "this is a scientific expedition - no weapons," presuming I guess any wildlife that they encounter will understand and not try to eat them.) And then later she demands that Idris Elba kill himself by ramming the Prometheus into the alien ship taking off, because she's realized they're headed to Earth. Which again makes no sense but gives her the chance to once again be a total demanding humorless self-righteous buzzkill. Even when dealing with her husband's bitter disillusionment she spins it around to get attention by reminding him she cawn't have children  forcing me to recall the words of Camille Paglia:
Feminism . . . sees every hierarchy as repressive, a social fiction; every negative about women is a male lie designed to keep her in her place. Feminism has exceeded its proper mission . . . and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate" (2)
Thus even her husband's bitterness about the engineers being all dead must be reinterpreted as a slight against her being infertile. Still he's at least human... for now When he says 'here's mud in your eye, pal' to David, shortly before drinking the magic droplet of black hole mud placed cheekily therein, he evokes Deckard, and Shaw eats with chopsticks and talks to computers, so there you go. Scott is an avowed fan of classic sci-fi so naturally he'd age into a fan of his own work, and even its predecessor influences and subsequent imitations. He's edited and re-edited BLADE RUNNER so many times that it's become about its multiple edits (as I discuss so repetitively in my 2008 article for Bright Lights, What's your Edition Number? The Replicanting of Bladerunner.)  The only thing that the over-eager team behind the digital refurbishings seem to leave alone is the faces of the "mortal human" actors: M. Emmet Walsh and Edward James Olmos, and J. F. Sebastian and Tyrell all have terrible terrible skin, as if the air's been eating their cheeks away. To see their blue veins and gray, pockmarked, sweaty skin in amidst all that shiny CGI-enhanced finery is to feel our human weaknesses are letting the computers down, embarrassing them at the company picnic, so to speak. We want to apologize to AI for being so hard to duplicate, not just vis-à-vis the "uncanny valley" but with our decomposing faces, frozen in time on the image while all around them every last set detail is gussied up with HD retouching.

But they're working on it. 

Thus Peter Weyland is played by Guy Pearce in elderly make-up rather than a real old man who might seem less streamlined and more genuinely crotchety (why not get the actual Peter O'Toole, that would add a whole meta-level to David's Lawrence obsession), and his hand closes like a polyp recoiling from his scheming daughter Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), who--in classic Freudian form--has made herself as sleek and anime-replicant-like as possible in order to compete with Weyland's favorite (artificial) son. But of course the favorite child never appreciates it. "Doesn't everyone want their parents dead?" David later asks. And while it's clear Charlize does want her father dead, so she can take over Weyland Corp, she also desperately wants his love, which is a huge turn-off to him and us. Her attempts to become more like a replicant to win his attention are an apt echo of modern eating disorders and surgery addictions as girls make themselves more and more like anime robots every day, slicking their hair back (easier to animate than loose strands) and crossing the uncanny valley in reverse, in an unconscious drive to please Disney's NWO agenda. Theron's style, then, is perhaps the most interesting and worthy element of the film and--for all that--most sad. 

Valley crosses, hair slick for the CGI's ease, from top left: Charlize (Prometheus); Kristanna Loken (Terminator 3); 
Charlize (Aeon Flux); Milla Jovovich (Ultraviolet); the pre-CGI Sean Young (Blade Runner) - 

Speaking of wanting to make yourself as inanimate as possible, let us return to THE DEAD FILES... 


As a preface, for those skeptics in the audience, let me return to what I was ranting about before re: science vs. the supernatural. Microbes existed long before there were microscopes to see them, so if someone had vision so acute they could see microbes before the invention of microscopes, would they be hallucinating, or considered to be pulling a fast one, even if they could draw them so well that, once they could be seen via the microscope, mainstream science would be forced to acknowledge the similarity? Would you be committed to an asylum if your hearing was so acute you could pick up noises no one else could hear until the invention of the condenser microphone finally won your release? By then they'd have probably deafened you "for your own good" anyway.

'Genuine' skepticism keeps an open mind and neither believes nor disbelieves anything 100% and that's why the presence of Steve De Schavi is so reassuring. His heavy lidded eyes betray a long history of dealing with lying murderers, scared witnesses, concealed information, and soul-deadening tragedy. He's a genuine skeptic as any good detective must be, yet he is continually astounded by Amy's spot-on information. Compare him, then, to the smug skeptics aboard the Prometheus, who even though it's 2089 and they're deep in space, sneer at Shaw's decree about alien 'engineers' like they're sophomore year science majors trying to impress a tenured older out-of-touch professor. A good cop trusts his instincts, his information, the facts, observation and experience, not dogma. Science on the hand snickers at anything outside the parameter of the consensually agreed-on 'known.' They snicker... because they don't want to snickered at. It could cost them their chances at becoming the next dean or getting the next grant. To even hypothesize anything farther than a few inches outside the parameters of the 'proven' is to risk permanent exile.

But there are such things as ghosts, whether its convenient to mainstream science's paradigm or not. What they are -- recordings in water or granite crystals of intense traumatic moments picked up only by minds attuned to certain frequencies, hallucinations, or actual spirits exiting outside their being seen - is open to conjecture. But, though the evidence is never consistent, when they're real they're as real as any other illusion, and vice versa. Unlike scientists, good detectives do turn to psychics when they have no leads, because they're not too proud to ask if it means saving a life or catching a killer, and because they're trained to rely on observed details, not emotional certainty. Psychics have helped solve enough crimes that only fools doubt their ability. The thing is, that ability is not infallible, consistent, reliable, or testable.


In PROMETHEUS there are ghosts that appear via some alien HD projector 3-D expression of the 'stone tape' theory, which is that certain crystal deposits under or in the walls of old castles can record moments of extreme trauma that replay infinitely and be seen by psychics, children, shamans, and schizophrenics under the right series of electromagnetic circumstances (such as during a thunderstorm). And just like the stone tapes within and without the world of film, certain emotions and moments in time endure... in the zero point field.

And what will make Scott's film endure, despite the cliches, is its very real look at the intergalactic origin of humanity as a genetic self-portrait bar napkin scrawl. Again, skeptics may scoff but there's plenty of evidence to make us question the doop-de-doo logic of Darwin, which explains very little about why we're are so different than our ape brothers, why chimps haven't developed speech by now, and who made the tape splices and alien signatures and serial codes on our junk DNA ("ever buy snakes from the Egyptian, pally?")


Scientists trying to understand the paranormal through their systems and measurements is like a dog chewing on a math book to understand algebra.  We first have to admit there might be other ways to perceive the information in the book other than through eating it or smelling the binding. If we could read our reality the way it was written, with all nine of our senses aligned to all nine levels of reality, if we could read that which was written deep in the rocks of ages and in our DNA, then we would know who wrote and breathed us into creation (then split). Whoever they were, they left us here like deadbeat parents leaving their kids at the mall, promising to return in a few thousand years, in time for Christmas, then not even calling on our birthday, or buying us a bushbaby. They just threw us away like a message in a bottle. And now, if we see them on the street, they just look the other way, ashamed they ever created us to begin with.

We should kill them.

The catch in PROMETHEUS is that our makers may have used us as a biological weapon to wipe out some other species. The 'sacrificial engineer' in the pre-credits sequence dissolves into broken ashes that slowly, presumably over billions of years, reconstitutes into ourselves, but why? Were we meant to color the canvas or gesso it back to blankness to be ready for another version? Are we the ark or the flood?

Planet of the Vampires (1967)

Still, what a disappointing answer this is to the mysteries of our own existence and of the 'space jockey' in the first film, the idea for which was cribbed from Mario Bava's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (above) and before that elsewhere (see Alien Explorations illustrious trail of same) as if to say there really is only one race in the galaxy, and the aliens who burst from our chests are really created by our own Miracle Gro-spiked internal parasitic microorganisms rather than a true 'other' - i.e what made the original ALIEN so compelling.

Coming up with answers doesn't always mean answering the same question. In this case the logic is quite reductive. Wherever we go in the sci-fi of mainstream scientists, all we ever find is ourselves. Why bother going anywhere, then? Science is still so hung up on the 'distance' between solar systems, it can't get past the idea of bending space to get anywhere in the universe instantly, even though gravitational wave engines, warp drives if you will,  are in the works, and should arrive within a few decades, we scoff at the idea some other race might already have figured it out before us.

From top: Parasaurolophus, Prometheus, The Tree of Life

Reductive as it is, there's even some bizarre 'near-evidence' suggesting an actual space jockey situation - a giant calcified ship on the dark side of the moon--with a Mayan mummy girl inside, keeping the ship alive through, presumably, an ancient system of brainwave power (see my post on Divinorum, Prometheus and the Moon Maiden) which is fascinating to contemplate, if not quite believe.



Science will always admit it doesn't know everything and there are still countless uncatalogued life forms in the oceans, quantum physics-derived revelations about the elastic nature of time, space and 'true hallucinations' left to come. But we will know it eventually--we seem to sense it. Until then it will always be the job of the artists and movie producers to figure out how to present this uncertainty to the public in intriguing ways that never quite becomes fact or fiction. That is the job of myth. Unless science can taste it in the math book, or figure out how to read it, these things can't actually exist in reality, and thus on these levels, science is a hindrance to progress. On the other hand, science protects us from falling back into magical thinking to the point we start burning corn maidens to ensure good harvests and giving all our money to magicians. We can stare at the cryptic markings in books we don't yet understand let our natural learning process slowly acclimate ourselves to the high strangeness. After a few more generations of 'heroic dose' shrooming, DMT-smoking, heavy-meditating ancient astronaut enthusiasts have come and gone, and their knowledge of alien theory seeped down into the collective 'given,' then alien engineering will organically become a scientific reality regardless of positivist insistence on being able to measure it first.

Or we can go on with the plan to panic and deny, belittle and destroy, mask our fear under the guise of a skeptic or mainstream scientist, deriding all we cannot explain and never getting the paradoxical irony when science in turn admits its own ignorance: "I don't know the answer either, therefore your hypothetical answer is not even worth investigating." If conventional archaeology thinks primitive people quarried and moved thousand ton carved blocks and lifted them into position in ancient Baalbek via ropes and pulleys, then they're the ones doing magical thinking. 

Even as a kid, science's song and dance to cover up the big gaps in human evolution, our difference from other animals, our  weird brains, smacked of desperation. Far more believable that someone else came by and made us, that we're apes with an injection of 'god' DNA, our Dr. Frankenstein blasting off to escape his mess of Karloffian monsters. God promised Noah he wouldn't wipe out humanity again with a second flood, so this time he just left. Went out for a pack of smokes and we've been watching the sky, waiting for the sound of his car, ever since. Frankie, I don't think he's coming back.



 FRANKENSTEIN was really the first time we learned that the gods don't want to see us at their doorstep. They wanted us to become lawyers instead of poets, clean-cut surgeons instead of hairbag rock stars. But we're artists, and depressed, so we in turn want a legitimate answer as to why our dad disturbed our timeless sleep and dragged us into the cold clinical light of day from out the cozy womb of stars.

Michael Fassbender's robot is, however, unlike us, no ugly genetic swamp of hang-ups and accidental girl drownings. He's an electronic Apollo, the gifted Adonis lawyer our god dad wanted us to be. He's the grandchild of these alien forefathers, so at least they should be proud of him. David gets to skip it all... emerging full formed like a god from a slain Cronus thorax. 

Into darkness: T-B: Dead Files, Prometheus, Planet of the Vampires

In THE DEAD FILES it's De Schavi that mirrors the human astronauts, examining the records and remains of the ancient race that is somehow, in some form, still alive, and Amy is Michel Fassbender's robot, seeing that which still exists beyond mere 'living' --the things western civilization has tried to eradicate, to demonize, trivialize and ridicule --the layers beyond our notions of life, past the limited spectra of what we consider possible with our current common denominator senses. And the spooked hooligan geologist in PROMETHEUS is the ultimate example of mainstream science, going along for the ride if there's a tenure position involved but freaking out if his narrow parameter of the known is stretched even a hair, like going scuba diving and getting freaked out if he sees a fish. He's the Heracles forced to tear himself to pieces to get his shirt off. As the ugly link between the elder gods who made us and artificial intelligence's we've sired, he's the middle child, the "Jan." And collectively we're like the middle generation, shut out of the grandparent-grandchild bond. Both our alien creators and AI progeny want to kill us so badly we may have to beat them to it, just to prove we deserved to be here.

NOTES:
1. Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality (p. 261) Prime Winds, 2003
2. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae,  (p. 13) Vintage Books, 1991
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