Disinformation Please: LOS ESPOOKYS, and the Mythic Real

“Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.” ― Jean Baudrillard

"Fake it 'til you make it" - old AA proverb

Written and conceived by doe-eyed El Salvadorian ex-SNL writer Julio Torres (the genius behind the 'Wells for Boys' sketch) and the startlingly deadpan young writer/comedian Ana Fabrega, LOS ESPOOKYS, a new HBO comedy is one of the first to be filmed in Spanish meant for American audiences as well as the world. Set in Mexico, the show chronicles the interlocking adventures of a group of horror make-up/effects specialists who--for a fee--stage 'real' scares: everything from UFO abductions, to exorcisms, sea monster sightings (to drum up seaside tourism), and old dark house hauntings and so forth. Fans of  classic Mexican horror, Ed Wood, Alejandro Jodorowsky, the ficciones of Borges, the deadpan drollery of Fred Armisen (i.e. Portlandia) and all the true (?) ghost and UFO shows on cable--ay dios mio!-- must love it.

Aside from the deliriously deadpan ultra-fey Torres (as emo/goth/his own thing cookie fortune heir Andres) and the vacant Tati (as the group's idiot savant intern), the show stars Bernardo Velasco as Renaldo, the sweet-hearted ringleader, and badass flaca Ursula (Cassandra Ciangherotti). José Pablo Minor is Andres' hopelessly vain fiancee; Paloma Moreno Fernandez is the possibly hypnotized TV hostess whose E-style clip news show becomes a showcase for these 'real' happenings; John Early is a coked-up pyramid scheme health drink scam artist who power talks Tati into buying hundreds of cases of his energy drink on credit, then comes after her with the coked-up fury of a rabid dog; Fred Armisen is Renaldo's Uncle Tico, who lives in America where he's a master valet who rescues and then hooks the gang up with Carol Kane as a kind of Doris Wishman/Roberta Findlay horror director; a stereotypical blonde American ambassador (Greta Titelman) enters the picture when they need work visa and she may be willing to expedite if it means they stage a haunted mirror abduction that will garner her an extra week vacation. It all only gets weirder from there, but hey - we're with these unfadable titans of scariness, every haunted step.

dee-glorious

Aside from this powerhouse cast, great concept and deliriously rapid but easygoing pacing, it's just nice to find a show on HBO that cares nothing for sudden, disturbing misogynistic sexual violence. Instead we're blessed with a colorful, good-natured zesty comedic dissertation on the way reality encompasses the fictional to create living myth, popping with great colors, sublime ensemble acting and subtext that brilliantly encompasses the way magic-realism keeps myth alive in Mexico (the way it just isn't in hopelessly materialistic Yankee-land).  In stepping out of the borders of the US it delves deep into the more open-minded mythic social structure of Catholic-heavy Mexico, a land where imagination still reigns and one can believe in haunted houses, get thoroughly scared by a bunch of ghosts, but then show up the next day to hire the gang who faked it all for your own event, never once letting the dichotomy of that, of belief/scared coupled to knowing its 'faked' - bother them.

The Age of Post-Reality

“What you knew in your childhood is true; the Otherworld of magic and enchantment is real, sometimes terribly real - and certainly more real than the factual reality which our culture has built...” ― Patrick Harpur

While Smithsonian and the 'SCI' channel deliberately obfuscate UFO "truths" by exploring already debunked cases (then proudly debunking them), and History and Travel go the other route, Los Espookys transcends both to arrive at a 'hole' truth superior to both fiction and the socially-accepted parameters of 'reality'. As we see with the clients that hire them and the people they scare or entertain, knowing (or suspecting) something is fake doesn't detract from the power of the myth, especially in a more mythic place like Mexico. There the metatextual post-modern simulacrum of our current era is implicitly understood in ways America, being itself a simulacrum, will never see (the way fish don't notice water). There's no need to add a logos-choked materialist 'skeptic' like Gunnar Björnstrand in Bergman's The Magician (1958) or one of the smarmy hipster naysayers that even History Channel UFO shows once employted to keep in the idiotic little investigatory teams (see "Zealots of Doubt"). Free of America's terrified knee-jerk tenure-brass-ring grabbing first-world 'expertise', there's no need to protect the borders of what constitutes reality. Once undefended, it disappears.

You can read that last paragraph two ways, either as racist (Mexicans are dumb enough to believe anything and can't afford to go to Harvard) or as an example of the Latin American gift for magical-realism ala Garcia-Lorca / Jodorowsky / Castaneda / Borges. We come to the zone where we have to realize that Spanish /Latin American conceptions of the supernatural exist on an infinitely higher plane than the true/false dichotomy of the North. In the mythic reality of Mexico, the wall between the real and the vividly imagined is not only elastic, traversable, and illusory, but porous. The ability to traverse freely across this barrier is something that Americans only get during the LSD trips, or as young children, or during schizophrenic breaks, or when suffering from an intense fever. It's something we'd never usually see in an American TV show where we're constantly on the scent for hoaxes and scams. We're so terrified of looking foolish to our peers(and maybe attracting all sorts of scam artists who sense our 'kook' gullibility) that it's far better to just keep our lips frozen in a perma-sneer of disbelief.

Will get fooled again - Jaime Maussan

The Mexican consciousness (based on this and other shows, purely) is by contrast not as concerned with governing one's belief system based on popular opinion as if they are still stuck in some stressful high school pecking order.. An example of this difference is the undiscerning Mexican TV UFOlogist Jaime Maussan (left) who tends to take all evidence presented as truth rather than hoax or misidentifications. If photos, video or witnesses are proven either deliberately or accidentally off the mark, Maussan never seems to feel ashamed or taken for a fool - he merely puts one case down and moves onto the next.  For him it's the wonder, not necessarily the affidavit. A snarky UFO doc I saw awhile ago actually released a close-tied bunch of big silver balloons into the air above Mexico City when they knew he was out filming to trick him - and he fell for it. But is he dismayed? Nope. And frankly, that's what makes him way more intriguing than some of the other authenticity-obsessed types who never seem to get any evidence at all.

In the world of Los Espookys, there are multiple realities within the diegesis: the horrors staged by the group are fake, but demonic events, hauntings, inter-dimensional mirror abductions, etc. seamlessly occur as well. The funniest of these being an ancient underwater creature who promises to tell Andres the truth about his birth (he believes he's a demon child who was left on the doorstep of his adopted parents), provided he first show her The King's Speech on his laptop.

In the meantime we in Los Estados Unidos turn to horror films for our fakery, living the myth through that extra window of separation. That's the end moral in the show, where Renaldo learns that it's better to scare people for real in Mexico than make bad movies in America. To make fake reality is to make myth - this is not hoaxing, this is the anti-hoax. The skeptics of America would stamp HOAX on pictures of Santa, and FAKE on Easter Bunny mall pics (as in my own expose of Bunny Fraud, via Queen of Disks - above left) this is aiding the supernatural with a screen for itself to project on from within the collective unconscious.  Trying to say what percentage of the universe is still unknown makes one look stupid for just trying to answer, like casting a fishing line into New Jersey and when you don't get a nibble, declaring it an empty lake.

Certainty is a luxury reserved for the ignorant.

The Panacea of Myth

More than ever, the mountain of evidence in favor of UFOs is so high you only have to start reading and watching cable to get that stoner jaw-drop kind of feeling. If you doubt, just look into Dr. Roger Leir's implant removal and the subsequent forensic research on said implants; the death bed confessions from high-ranking leaders in the military and aeronautics industry (Phillip Corso, Richard French, etc);  the case of Phil Schneider and the Dulce Wars; the stories of Bob Lazar; and the videos and firsthand accounts from military personnel assembled by the Pentagon's exotic technology study group vis-a-vis whistleblower Luis Elizando - the evidence stacks higher and higher if you can handle it. But it's terrifying the more convinced you become. That's why a parallel belief that it's all just hoaxes, our own advanced technology misidentified (due to lack of communication between black budget military projects) or drones piloted by mischievous third world supervillians or brainiac little rich hackers - is so important for our peace of mind. If you think the fabric of our social reality wouldn't tear in a million pieces if such news as an alien presence was made 'undeniable', as in, pics of the aliens landing on the White House lawn on CNN, you haven't really thought it through. We haven't officially acknowledged the alien presence in at least 3000 years. As a result, we've been allowed to build some neat shit, confident it's the first time it's been done. Would a neanderthal feel inspired to learn basic math if he was met by people of today?? He'd just bow and pray or try to smash your smart phone out fear. He'd feel no sense of actual progress and achievement, only an ocean of inferiority so vast there's no point trying to build a boat.

There's a fascinating episode of M*A*S*H--the season six finale ("Major Topper") where the unit runs out of morphine and has a full house of suffering casualties. Colonel Potter decides to try the giving out placebos until the real stuff arrives. He instructs his doctors and nurses on the importance of acting as if this placebo is the real thing: they must show absolute confidence in the power of the pill. They tell patients it's a very potent new drug, etc, even stronger than most opiates. The slightest lack of conviction on the staff's part can lead to... nothing... no effect. But they pull it off, and for most of the wounded, it works great.

Is not the razzle-dazzle carny tricks, the shaking rattle and strange dances of the shaman, the mix of hocus pocus and hypnosis, similar to the belief in the placebo? Conjuring healing spirits up out of feathers and sage smoke, the shaman conducts the air, blows tobacco smoke in the face of invisible demons, and create psychic currents in the mind the way the snake charmer blows his drowsy reed.

In the eyes of a debunker, this would be a hoax. Would the "Mythbusters" feel the need to storm the MASH tent and wise the patients back into a world of 'honest' pain? Since the mainstream medicine can't quite figure out how a trick of the mind can affect the physical healing process so strongly (or vice versa, as in the stigmata), surely they must point out it cannot technically be working.
The mind is a curious, unknowable thing, as vast and strange as the universe it's part of. Fiction is seized on as needed - thus a book that never existed, like the Necronomicon, is now sought after by people who believe it's real; then some enterprising genius writes one --a kind of post-myth truth. Or consider the case of Carlos Castaneda's "Teachings of Don Juan," based on the teachings a Yaqui shaman who, by most accounts, doesn't actually exist, but people say they have 'studied with him' - did they mean the took mescaline in the Mexican mountains and spent an hour having a life-altering psychic conversation with what he thought was a snake but turned out to be an abandoned grouse nest?

The brain that works so hard to deny the unknown is itself dangerously unaware of its own unconscious. The person with such an attitude may be in some form of repetitious denial from, say, being laughed at in elementary school for believing in fairies. An affirmed atheist is usually reacting against being forced to go to a very dogmatic church as a child, little knowing or allowing himself to know that there are millions of other, better ways to envision God -they have killed off their sense of wonder by a desperate bid to belong to the 'right' side, to believe only in what is firmly and conclusively 'known' and areso hostile to ideas involving aliens, ESP, reincarnation and ghosts that even concrete evidence is dogmatically disregarded. They have a flimsy sense of self and groundedness, otherwise they wouldn't have such a closed-minded reaction. They are the witch burners of their age.

The American Embassy in Mexico City in the Age of Trump

In their way, atheists are really no better than the creationists, for really, any decent Pisces could show them a third alternative, where both evolution and creation, where God and no/God can easily fit into a single paradigm (DNA as the computer language God uses to code itself into existence).

This goes both ways of course - the undeniable power of God-- a holy visitation - a heavenly hand reaching from the clouds opening up behind you, to touch your shoulder and electrify your kundalini like a bolt of lightning, can either lead you to join a holy order and renounce selfish ways - you asked for a sign and received one! Or to think about doing that, then shrug it off after awhile when you realize what a drag that would be. Maybe you were just 'expecting' some big holy event, some Potter placebo effect, and it was delivered. Thus the doubter who insists on a sign before belief--and then gets just that sign--often refuses to believe anyway.

In sum, we're better off without either undeniable evidence or a dead worldview that allows no wonderment about the world. Los Espookys' genius lies in this, in becoming the "/" in the either/or dichotomy. To find the truth behind the unknown too soon may seem like a good idea, but then you're stuck having to pretend to be surprised later, when it's finally time to open your present. The trick is to have already forgotten what it was, because you're so stoned all the time.

Here's an example of Disinformation and the Mythic in action: After the massive triangle shaped UFO sighting over the Phoenix skies in 1997 (thousands saw it, video evidence galore), the city's mayor was under extreme pressure from a panicked public to provide answers. He didn't have any, so what were they expecting? What did their panicked unease demand? The idea it was military flares didn't really gel (the local air force did drop some flares afterwards, in a classic bit of disinformation/obfuscation after the fact), and the demand for an explanation itself became a looming threat to the local government - how could they ease the public without lying to them?

"Phoenix lights" press conference 1997

The fact that anyone would even call the police when they see a UFO proves the point. If you need the police to come because you see some lights, you can't handle the truth. So what can the mayor say that will allay pointless panic and dissolve expectations of 'action' and answers from local government? The mayor's masterful psychological solution: bring the alien (an aide in a costume) to the press conference.

The worry ended in a scattered eruption of nervous laughter. The gut response of the city and the thousands of witnesses was both momentary amusement followed by lingering resentment - feeling their concerns weren't being taken seriously. Clearly they weren't deconstructing the tactic or they would have 'gotten' its brilliance. Sure, the arrival of that costume and alien mask on the podium made a a lot people mad --they felt the mayor wasn't taking their concern seriously. But he was, he just didn't have an answer for them. The only way to dissolve their fear of the unknown was by turning it to disgruntled disaffect. It was a masterful example of a kind of anti-placebo, the wrapping of an unwieldy football field-sized question mark into a sugar pill of fiction.

As in the hauntings of Los Espookys, the alien at the press conference is a 'true' joke, a classic example of disinformation and the mythic real. Look at the the alien mask/head above for a minute: its a far too large to be a grey - but otherwise looks just like one, even suspiciously so if you really stare at it. Even the hands and uniform are on point. The 'joke' aspect is a way to admit there's really nothing the government can do. There's no real need for the public to know that the most powerful nation in the world can do absolutely nothing to stop these strange unknown phenomena from doing just as they please. The only response the president of a fully 'disclosed' nation could make about alien visitation concerns would be either "Don't worry, if it comes back we'll shoot it down! USA Number One!" Or "I think we should take our five purist virgins and leave them on a mountain as a welcome present." 

Welcome to our new squid overlords, 2029!

IN A CHILD'S MIND:

Think back to being a child and watching bad old movies and not noticing the special effects because your own vivid imagination helped sketch in the missing details. But back on fuzzy local TV as a six year-old in the 70s, my childhood imagination painted movies like Yog! The Monster from Space (above) so much more vivid than they look today. I remember watching this as a kid of around nine or ten, being coated in sweat from the dread caused by that alien, who could jump from body to body, enlarging a crab or a squid offshore or becoming a dangerous man in sunglasses. I cheered the bats that scramble its sense of radar, like they were the cavalry. I have a clear vision of a bat's eye view shot looking down from the height of the thing, seeing that massive drop to the ground and feeling a vertiginous rush. I saw it for the second time recently, on HD widescreen and, eh - it was okay. Those bats weren't the same. My adult blinders had closed off my sense of wild wonder. There was no shot from the bat's eye view at all, just the medium shot you see above. But does that mean I imagined it? Am I somehow wiser than a Mexican Catholic version of myself who still swoops swoops to those nutty bats? 

Similarly, a bunco spiritualist might bilk old ladies out of money but they give them assurance - and a place to project their own wishes. The medium provides the sound effects and the spirit lights and the ghostly voices, the grief-stricken participants project (unconsciously) the voice of their departed loved one onto the noises. The medium works with the client's unconscious mind, opening it up into a kind of auto-hypnosis due to grief, guilt, and fervent longing to say one last thing - to project/create a 3-D image of the departed spirit (and maybe the combination of that image--maybe a photo of the departed projected onto a silver/white balloon released by secret lever--plus the unconscious drive of the participant and the psychic openness of the medium, all combine to allow the projection of the actual spirit, much like the way a newborn body provides a screen for the projection of the soul (beamed down from the heavenly projector). The trappings of the skulls, darkness, candles, hand-holding, deep breaths and chants, etc. all soothe and orient the mind towards suggestiveness, towards a child's kind of keyed-in imagination, painting in details with such ease even the most mundane setting is imbued with memorable magic (that will later pay off as an adult with endless nostalgic comfort).

At the same time, a debunker, too, would find what they were looking for. The reverse of Col. Potter's placebo may well apply too. If the patient is sure they're getting a placebo but they actually get the real medicine, would it even work?

Sorry - lots of tangents. But as someone who is fascinated by the living myths of the supernatural and extraterrestrial via a Jungian lens, I just have to chime in. I hope you too will enjoy LOS ESPOOKYS and pay attention to the progress of alien information dissemination as it gains more and more momentum via cable TV channels like History, Travel and Destination America. As more and more dis/information is gathered, the line between speculation, theory, evidence, belief gets moved closer and closer over the border into being incorporated into social doctrine. Can our immersion into a childlike sense of agog wonder be far behind, I mean ahead? Los Espookys predicts it all by pointing out it's already true in its glorious falseness. Has it never not been?

Communion (1989)

PS - If you do research the Leir implants, especially the recent scientific examinations that have found microscopic nanobot sub-frequency wave generators within their unique weave, don't let it scare you to the point you call the cops. You can always peek out from behind the curtain and just watch the big green head projection telling you not to worry. You are granted, by a parental government, the freedom to doubt everything you see and read. The grey alien face itself is probably just a great and powerful OZ-style mask, and behind that, still another, a human face, then a lizard's, then Christopher Walken's -- just stop looking when you get to the face marked 'fiction' if you're scared, and 'real' if you're bored. If you can find the perfect balance, you must be in Mexico, or are a Pisces. Duda realidad y creer ficciónes -  solo si es mito es verdad

For more, visit Divinorum Psychonauticus - my extremely "other" blog, for occult theory, trippy art, and... is that it? Just those two things?

UFOs in sky, or close-up on powder blue bowling ball?

Here are some recommended vistations:

Unconscious Contact: COMMUNION (1989)
The Evolver Virus: PROMETHEUS, THE DEAD FILES

from Divinorum Psychonauticus:

The Truth is a Hoax and that is a Lie (2.12)
Keeping Roswell's Plain Sight Secret: Phillip Corso and The Day After Roswell. (8/13)
Anthropological Amnesia: Humans aren't Human (March 2012)
Guide to Cable's Paranormal-Ghost-Hunting Shows (August 2012)
Aliens do it up the Nose: HARD Evidence (Aug 2010)
A Bug-eyed Look at UFO Disclosure (May 2010)
Demon Sheets: Sleep Paralysis Theories (Aug 2013)
Through a Dark Symbol (Nov. 2012)
Disclosure Happened: you missed it (3.11)
From Satanic Rite to the UFO to the Afternoon Nap (2/11)
I Blur the Line (July 2010)

Avenger of Whatever: KILL LIST, QUEEN KONG

I started to write about Ben Wheatley's disturbing KILL LIST (2011) and how British cinema is so edgy and America's genre equivalents so lamely safe- but- if I think about KILL LIST too deeply my paranoia leads me past its jolly surface, to the depths of its SRA Illuminati-CIA mind-control symbolism, ala EYES WIDE SHUT meets MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. Then I got to write about the alleged 'entrance fee' into the inner circle (according to the paranoid fringe): child sacrifice or violation, which 'binds' one to the devil and subjects the victim to the dissociative traumas that necessitate split personality coping mechanisms. In other words, you join the 'elite' when you plant the seed of the Manchurian Candidacy in your own child through ritual Satanic abuse (SRA), which the kids--at least--forget... for awhile (until they read about it online or get hypnotized to help them overcome their bizarre nightmares and missing time). If you match the the outline of paranoid schizophrenic delusion to this tangent of conspiracy theory you get a perfect match, which isn't to say it's not true. If a shadowy sect really is out to control you via subconscious programming, what better place to hide their mechanizations from you from then within the fabric of your own certified paranoid psychosis?

The big question still nags (especially if you've encountered (alleged?) SRA survivors in real life. Are the 'buried' memories they uncovered in hypnotic regression merely glimpses into the collective subconscious, reaching up like Satan's hoof through the thin ice created by the removal of the conscious mind's rational obstruction, the way, say, it does via fever hallucinations, sleep paralysis, the afternoon nap, childhood nightmares, or actual dissociative cover memories induced by severe trauma? (That last one of course being the most devious double bind in the Satanic Ritual Abuse canon.) If anyone knows for sure which is which, it's probably not the victim.  If they do know, the programming clearly didn't work well.

The LIST gist: Wheatley and his longtime collaborator and co-writer Amy Jump start with a mood of cheery beer-and-chips kitchen sink naturalism re-the friendship between two working class hitmen. Neil Maskell stars as Jay, the laziest hitman in town. He prefers to loaf around with wife and son rather than kill people, to the point he even dodges a lucrative job coming his way via his partner Gal (Michael Smiley), but Nordic alien hybrid wife Myanna Buring (THE DESCENT) wants him out of the house and back in the saddle. Then Gal comes by for dinner and lots of drinks with a strange new bird, Fiona (Emma Fryer), who marks the back of Jay's bathroom mirror with an arcane symbol... That's all I can say, except the super eerie drone score by Jim Williams gives even a simple torture murder a nightmarish edge far ungodlier than just seeing brains bulge out of a cracked skull!

Meanwhile, I've been having a series of mild panic attacks watching ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK Season 3. No one escapes the trauma of self-realization on that show, and it's too well-acted and written for my own good. If I watch too many episodes in a row it gets that I can't distinguish fantasy from reality anymore. I have to go to the bathroom, look in the mirror and make sure I'm not a woman in a woman's prison. And then I go to my Park Slope grocery store and see someone from the cast in there, shopping (they occasionally shoot in my neighborhood) or wait, do I? Am I being prejudiced or easily-influenced to think that? It's one thing to spot a celebrity at the coffee shop and another to think you recognize a minor bit player from a movie you just watched. And that brings me around to KILL LIST again, because that's what indoctrination is all about -- breaking down a person's mind and distancing them from the collective 'concrete' reality so they're receptive to programming in order to activate the inner automaton killer.

Not to jump tangents, but: Ever since being dragged to a dry frat rush as a freshman at SU I've harbored a streak of horror and hatred towards the baser elements of the masculine species. And when a man like me is all hopped up on depositions or depictions of rape and sexualized misogyny, I'm ready to go stomp anyone with Greek letters on his sweatshirt. Amp it up a little more, dissociate me so that I think I'm acting out th heroic role in a vigilante rape-revenge picture, and I'm ready to kill... ready and set and waiting for the starter pistol.

Where am I going with this? Movies, man, are dangerous mind control tools. Just look at the rash of Charlie Bronson Cannon movies in the 70s-80s. So much Bronson.

There's no word for this kind of ambient rage I feel thinking about those rapey frat guys. Its so intense it becomes a kind of TAKEN-esque homicidal fury that heightens the senses. It's instinct. A good male populace patrols itself, and if a pedophile or frat boy violates a woman or child it's the job of 'any man that's around' to destroy him, to make sure he burns, right there on the spot, rather than hope the law can successfully complete its myriad incarcerating hurtles before the victim is immolated on the pyre of humiliating defense lawyer cross-examination. 

This instinct to protect women and children is innate, I think, in all good men. Our blood boils and hands ball into fists at the thought of a child molester in our neighborhood. But then, only a few 'pushes' more and it approaches the same mindset as the lynching, the fascist rally, and the riot. The biological urge to protect women and children, and even animals,  taps our deep primordial homicidal well like a Plainview milkshake straw. Is that perhaps not the reason it is done? The fleeting sexual gratification if any is lost in cocaine and alcohol and idiocy and then hopefully, a lifetime of bitter regret and self-recrimination. 

How easily that straw can itself be tapped by sinister forces! 

Of course if it turns out the victim is lying, or the story is misreported for ratings, then we may have murdered an innocent man... Then it's no longer a drive-in trash spectacle but a self-important Stanley Kramer vehicle. We cut the rope, slink home, and wait for the inexorable hoot-hoot of Spencer Tracy's approaching train.

Bad Day at Black Rock 

I'm one of those guys who hate misogynists to the point of judicial blindness; I'd probably string up some of these rapists and molesters if I had the chance, and the safety of numbers, and was properly drunk or coked up (I hate frickin' coke almost as bad as frat boys). And so I need to recuse myself from writing about the Illuminati or Cosby, Polanski, and Allen. It gets me just too damn mad, for I have no target to vent this hostile rage upon, or the wherewithal. It just makes my blood pressure rise and my hands tremble with fury. And yet there are surely camps that might lump me in there, for I have sinned, and womanized, and broken vows, losing my head in the moment-as an alcoholic it's easy to do, our lows are lower and our highs are higher, so we lack middle ground. I have never been violent or fooled around with anyone below the legal limit of adulthood, but that doesn't make me less culpable. 

Is that not the whole point, perhaps, of all this evil in the first place? To provoke a response that will enable us to kill people on command (via post-hypnotic trigger word activated false accusation)? In movies like TAKEN, the filmmakers tap that sac knowing we'll instantly be deeply focused on the narrative, that milkshake straw twisting like clockwork. In real life the same is used, but in the Illuminati sects, and decadent Hollywood, it's also used to get recriminating videos of you doing illegal things to make sure you 'play ball' with the 'ballers' on their ballistic terms. Dance, puppet! The world is yours, now that we conned you into ruining it.   

In 70s films, the vengeful vigilante as hero was born, guiltless and unbroken, while the liberal D.A. would rather harangue him or Paul Kersey than the hoods running around unsupervised. The biggest, meanest, most New York of all the 70s urban vigilante movies (for a few months anyway) DEATH WISH, a huge hit that led to a score of imitators, the best of which (not that I've seen many) Abel Ferrara's MS. 45. (above) where her violence branches out to include any men who tries to hit on her, or even looks at her, or any man, period.  And she's not wrong! 

Sorry to go off like that. This kind of shit really gets my goat. Besieged and eaten away by death, money, and employment, all elements ever-changing and shifting, riding the lifeboat of the televisual, these unresolved issues really stir my hackles with rage for reasons I have just now edited out of this post (there were about ten embittered paragraphs I just spared you- you're welcome) Today, aware of my raging sensitivity, I still have never seen LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, IRREVERSIBLE, FUNNY GAMES, TAKEN, any white slavery documentaries, THE HUNT WITH JOHN WALSH on CNN, etc. My girl and I watch a lot of DEADLY WOMEN, though. One thing I've noticed... these women con dumb bleeding hearts like me into killing husbands and fathers all the time, via, what else? Fabricated stories of systematic abuse. Man oh man...

Luckily I live in an age where it's easy to cocoon oneself in a unique televisual patchwork quilt of one's own curation. The result is, I watch a lot of El Rey channel and TCM, avoid all button-pushing true crime abuse-of-the-innocent sagas, and listen to mixes I create that never end and can't tell one ninety-pound chalk-white dude in suspenders and tiny fedora or Children of the Corn hat playing a standup bass or mandolin from the other. Now that it's such a serious crime to harass wimps-and there's no cigarettes around to make them cool or deepen their voices--these high-voiced needle-legged hipsters get all uppity and rat you out to HR for forgetting a pronoun. Where is their goddamn crippling anxiety and self-loathing? Why did Courtney Love even bother getting sober?

Oh I must not judge. That movie KILL LIST really shook me.  And so I run... I run so far away.... all the way to QUEEN KONG. No British double feature was ever so strange, yet so right. 

QUEEN KONG

(1976) Dir. Frank Agrama 

**

God bless British women, British Actresses... for they are an inspiration to men across the USA that not all women are either passive-aggressive bores or dysfunctional harridans. There are very few shrill Annette Bening types in Britain (at least in films). American women (again, this is all in films, mind you) are mired in an either/or dichotomy. In England, with its rich history of sadomasochism, women are badass and still sexy -- they smoke and drink and don't sweat their carbs in shallow pools of gossip. While American woman is browbeating her husband for having a faint odor of cigarettes on his clothes, Brit women are saying ah fuck-off ya wanker and light me one before I break this bottle over your head.

Didn't we know all this as kids when we first beheld the toothsome Emma Peele in THE AVENGERS? And now, rather late in the game (De Laurentiis sued to hold it up), is QUEEN KONG. Let it happen. Judge not! 

Its young hot female cast is sublime -- barely a man in the whole thing - which is such a relief. BUT QK has two slight problems: 1) its bawdy brand of cheeky humor doesn't translate well upon leaping across pond and decades; 2) it may have the lamest ape suit in all movies --like it's just a bunch of fake fur throw rugs stapled together.

I don't care. Damn it, this movie is just what the world needs now.

Movies with reversed gender types were big for a few minutes in the mid-70s, but then got the kabosh and now those reverse gender fantasies are almost impossible to find anywhere, even on faded VHS dupes. We must cherish them no matter how bad they are.

The reverse gender fantasy I should point out is different than the whole men in drag thing, which gets old fast and seems more and more sexist as time goes on (with their idea that women need men disguised as women to teach them how to stand up for themselves). Movies and TV shows where sexy broads are the dominant strong class and men just objects of beauty to be protected and objectified are, on the other hand, rare and precious and need to be rediscovered. Chances are, you have never even seen one. There were only ever a few: ALL THAT GLITTERS (Norman Lear's ill-fated 1977 soap opera imagining this same women-in-charge world) and the British-West German co-production STAR MAIDENS (1976 - same year, tellingly, as the QUEEN). Clearly 1976-7 was a high watermark in the exploration of realities where women were the dominant gender. All three examples are either unavailable or despised. That's quite telling. Our sexist world is clearly slow to change its patriarchal mindset, scared to even imagine an alternative. None of the three are on DVD or even VHS. QUEEN is on Prime almost by accident, as if at any moment someone might notice it and take it down.

Don't shoot me, but damn: Valerie Leon in PREHISTORIC WOMEN

and of course below, the BLOOD.

As far as imperious, but available: Valerie Leon--so imperious and sexy in BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB--appears in QUEEN as the leader of the Amazons! Hardly recognizable, she's lost some weight and is wearing disco-level make-up, spouting offensive ooga booga lingo, (and I have a feeling she was dubbed by Hammer- they do that) and the print on Amazon Prime is royally messed up.

But hey, better quality would probably make it worse. At least the plot allows for some nice views of the Portobello Street Fair and we have the cheeky Ray Fay ("eat your heart out, Elton John") as the love interest, and great snatches of diva dialogue between Ray and the local girls prepping him for sacrifice: "Why does she want me?" asks Ray.

"She wants you to because you look like Doris Day." 

"Who's he?"

The Carl Denham character is named Luce Habit ("the biggest producer.. of B-films.. with "love interest"... in the business") and played by Rula Lenska, Britain's answer to Zsa Zsa Gabor or Peggy Hopkins Joyce. At least that's what we figured back in the 70s when she got off a plane like we were supposed to know who she was in an Alberta V0-5 ad. Our not knowing set a chain reaction to the point she was canned by her agent or fired him first. Here we learn she's a grand comedian if nothing else,  drugging Ray after catching him stealing a KING KONG poster in the Fair, slinging him over her shoulder in a sack, and making for her tugboat party vessel like she just scored a bushel of temporary legal psilocybe mushrooms [10]). She even carries some joints for him, like Denham's Ketamine bombs.

In short, Lenska's Luce Habit--"-is a great camp diva delight. In fact, her wry delivery of intentionally terrible lines reminds me a little bit of my own! Shhhh.

Of course QUEEN eventually wears out even adoring viewers like me after awhile, thanks to its unrelenting cheekiness I liked the JAWS dance but when a lame shark shows up with lipstick and breasts it's a good sign this shitshow's going to collapse long before it's officially over. I confess that I stopped watching after two tiresome monster battles after Ray is abducted by the Queen and carried into the 'jungle (the scene with her wrestling a pterodactyl seems more like she's trying to open an overly taped-up Amazon package). And there was one too many leering Benny Hill ass shots and just too damn much of that damn moth-eaten 'lady' ape suit (the suit in KING KONG VS. GODZILLA is pure chinchilla by comparison).

and yet - how often do we get a movie that's nearly all female - just a few baggy pants weirdos aside in a cast that's all Luce's chorus of leggy bikini models or the all girl Nabonga tribe.... it might be gayer than John Waters and campier than 60s BATMAN but it's got strong British females up the gooma humma barooga.

Still, I just couldn't let it go on. I had to stop and take a nap. That's show biz.

But the point is, thanks to the QUEEN I was delivered from brooding about the diabolical paranoia-fueling brutality of KILL LIST and its all-knowing savvy about mind control, and how maybe that's what all this shit like A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES, is for... MK-ULTRA programming of male assassins... to get us all riled up to go stomping whomever we're conditioned to think is raping and abusing our innocents. (And we all know who's next on the kill list... if you saw the Trump speech in Atlanta).

And hey, both QUEEN KONG and KILL LIST are British so it all ties together. I wouldn't go so far as to say its tied "wonderfully" but because my brain is always making connections to random unrelated events, and its susceptible as hell to the mad loop of conspiracy theory... but it's tied, of that I am certain, so let's just... relax. One salves the other, for unless I'm about to charge into battle I prefer the death where the dead person gets up a moment later and takes a bow.  It helps avoid trauma to see the fakery of death. And no monster needs more than a simple mask with some fangs to serve it's purpose. In keeping the film world looking our narrative immersion dissolves and we're symbolically freed from the drama of our lifetime movie.

When we decide our movie's a comedy, any grim circumstance is just the jet black ink on the page. Past Buñuel and Kubrick, the sans-eyes darkness devours all but your whistling, so make the tune brave, lads. Something from Joyce or Yeats, mayhap. Oh I was a day in Portlairge, there was wine and punch on the table. God hears our complaints and can only roll His one red eye and hope none of the other mothers at the supermarket judge Him for having such brats as we. Our complaints that it's not fair and we didn't ask to be born--and all the evil, suffering and destruction in the world--is all heard by Him as whining about an early bed time or booster shoot, or ye auld yucky Brussels sprout.

As far as God's concerned: the phrase 'no atheists in a foxhole' justifies war's entire existence.

And when we take off our straw demon masks at the end of our shitty elementary school play, we receive His indulgent applause. He plays the patient mother, with only the merest of notes. Godard would know how to save QUEEN KONG: Have Kong slap the pterodactyl's head off (above), or rather the headpiece, to show a saucy human girl inside (ala Ms. Dietrich in BLONDE VENUS) but THEN --have the fight still go on. The girl rampages through the jungle, as if still gigantic. She slings Ray over her shoulder and hauls him up into the sound stage catwalk. Queen Kong looks up as they disappear into the shadows, shrugs, sits down on a screaming native and starts smoking a cigarette, pausing to smash a miniature tank which explodes in a ball of fire. All meaning is meaningless once exposed to the meta. Through this alone, salvation. Don't believe the man behind the curtain is real or fake. It's in the ambiguity alone that we finally get to CUT!

NOTES
1. Shrooms were briefly legal at the Street Fair due to loophole that was soon closed - I nearly fainted when I saw all these massive purple stems right out in the open at one of the booths, but I was only a few years sober and very AA (c. 2004) so I didn't get any; but that image, straight out of Cronenberg's NAKED LUNCH, of those fat purple stems on that black tablecloth right out in the street like that, still haunts me. 

The Rutting Season: Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones

The new DVD set of Boardwalk Empire provides a chance for the HBO-less (like me) to finally see if Steve Buscemi can really pull off being a mob kingpin mayor (PS - he can't). Didn't anyone try and direct him? He looks and acts like a hermit crab bewildered at the loss of his shell. The real Nucky was presumably tough. Look at his shark eye stare (in pic below/left). There's only one or two actors in the whole series who seem genuinely menacing, who could ever convincingly threaten (naturally they're the unknowns): Stephen Graham, a terrifying but adorable Al Capone; Vincent Piazza, a poison breeze as Lucky Luciano; Michael Stuhlbarg, growing larger with every inhale as Arnold Rothstein ("ever since Rothstein 'cough' fixed the world series...'cough'")

the 'real' Nucky

 But the 'main' protagonists are a bore. Somewhere one of the show's creators felt there needed to be some moral lip service, so Nucky helps A poor widow and attends temperance meetings; dirty rat layabout Michael Pitt occasionally goes home to make idle promises to his wife and kids; obsessive fed Michael Shannon's bug-eyed mask of a face clamps down in self-righteous lock around his anti-booze assignment; self-appointed narc Kelly Macdonald (the Irish widow / temperance league member / all-around 'saint') flinches at every loud noise (she could use a freaking drink) and sleeps angelically with her two children instead of carnally with her lout husband, in such a icky faux-Fordian blarney way as we're forced to wonder what seedy motive is behind it all: is it male jealousy over the perfect bond between infant and mother or is she sanctifying herself in religiously sentimental poses to put the husband off his night's rutting?

And then, on the other side, the premature baby Buscemi, underloved, raised in an incubator, seeing in Macdonald a kind of moral mother he never had. So while Goodfellas was about brotherhood and Godfather was about becoming the Dark Father,  Boardwalk Empire is about being an infant all over again, i.e. gettin' boozed up at the teat whorehouse then feeling bad about it when mom drags you to church the next day. And that's all. 

Ah Margaret, and of course her husband beats her, for all saintly mothers are beaten by their drunk Irish laborer husbands in these sagas--so that Nucky can be saintly by thrashing him (via remote control) near to death-- and a whore gets cut up because Michael Pitt is sleeping with her (so his cocky idiocy is paid for by female suffering, as usual) and we're forced to behold concave Buscemi wheezing his way through doggy-style sex with La Huerta like he's Red Hot Ryder in 1944'a "Buckaroo Bugs." There are endless elaborate adult-themed strip shows in old theaters with far too little cigar smoke and talk of whores even when whores are not present. Just women. Who deserve more respect. Just for surviving and putting up with all these lout's infantile asses.

This is the kind of show HBO specializes in, giant violent grown male toddlers rutting via smash cuts that preclude all foreplay, delivering sudden tableaux of rough sex and domestic violence in attractive period settings, all but daring us not to wince in embarrassment as women are all either naked floppy-breasted prostitutes or floppy hat-wearing saints. Sure maybe that's how it was, in the post-code movies anyway, but these people's lives have lots of incidents they can pick from--why not go the Mad Men season one route and really get into the nuts and bolts of the business side of bootlegging? There is some of that, but none of it feels researched or lived-in, when you unwind the fancy ribbons, the non-sex incidents have no purpose other than to build up to brutal misogynist violence or more mutually demeaning rear guard rutting (which amounts to the same thing). An equal opportunity offender, if we meet a black bootlegger and see his operation, we can be sure it's only so he can be killed or tortured, his whiskey still burned down, in the next scene, in racially-motivated violence. Why else? Black characters exist for only this purpose in period HBO shows, Anything more complex would be too complicated.... But more complicated for whom, HBO? 'Adults?' They can't really say "adults only" for shows like this, now can they? Only "Parental discretion is advised" - and as HBO illustrates, they are nowhere near the same.

Marty Scorsese directs the first episode like he's still trying to capture that old Goodfella's momentum, but as usual of late he's mired in sumptuous period detail (what happens when you let your art director and cinematographer have too much input) and his insecure streak manifests in not one but TWO suspense-deadening multiple violent scene crosscut climaxes, the sort that were new and weird in the first two Godfather films, but have grown awfully trite since in the intervening dead horse kicking decade/s. Even if Scorsese scores these murders and gunfights to a vaudeville comedy routine replete with drum rolls or a tacky 20s novelty song instead of 60s rock, it's still old and overdone and doesn't work, just like it hasn't worked even for Coppola since he drew from the hell three times too many for Cotton Club.
 

Now, I only watched five episodes so far, but how much is enough?  I stopped because I hated freaking Margaret Schroder's smug decision to rat out the St. Patrick's green beer keg stash to the feds in E5. I subscribe to the Over the Edge credo that a kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid, and so she should have been the one who should have got cut up, not that sweet-ass Pitt-lover. And then there's the Buscemi miscasting. He can be mildly impressive, but when he has to deliver lines like "I could have you killed!" he sounds like even he doesn't believe it.

In other HBO News, confirming my dark fears, Game of Thrones is just like Boardwalk Empire and Rome before it, existing in the murky realm where all the violent sexual ravishings that have occurred off-camera in every costume period movie made prior to 1970 finally explode from under their shaggy peat moss burial kilts and into their rutting medium shots. The go-to position in all these HBO series is doggy style, for maximum doggy-style shock-erotic value. On this dark channel, the strong survive and the strong don't woo --they bend their bride over and let fly while all their friends are still drooling in the corners like the no-good brothers in Ride the High Country). God knows how these women ever managed to become lubricated. And as Leonard Maltin notes of Watchmen: "deliberately extreme violence and sexuality seems pointless in this stylized but overly long comic book saga." That could surely apply to every show HBO ever made.

I know, I know: the missionary position is not friendly to the voyeur as the sexual displays occur sandwiched between two wall-like backs but the doggy style is very public and bawdy, and very much about power and submission: the man triumphantly ruts away from a kneeling position, both hands free so he can wave to the cheering throngs or sign important documents using her back as a writing surface; the woman, facing forward, all but paraded in chains down the streets of Carthage, head bowed in submission, the way sleazy HBO and misogynistic jack-o-napes like Scorsese and George R. Martin like it.

Plus, the HBO modus operandi for delivering these sex scenes is the genuinely ingenious use of 'uncanny Oedipal shock'. Instead of the long, tedious build-up to softcore action set to smooth, slow soulful muzak like we used to get in late night Cinemax, these HBO sex scenes do what I call the "smash cut rut" - where the boy and girl meet casually in some public space along the "Hey, Cheryl. How's things?" variety and then smash cut to anout five seconds before the man comes, from behind, camera forward, so we can see the nonplussed/exploited OR passionate/frustrated look in the eyes of the woman but not have to see the dead-eyed animal emptiness in the man's. The cut is so jarring, so contrary to our expectations, it takes a second or two for our objecting/objectifying defenses/senses have time to activate. The effect is jarring, like accidentally walking in on your parents, or accidentally opening the door on a massive coke-fueled orgy while trying to find your coat to leave a party, or being suddenly sexually groped on a bus stop or book store, where it takes a few seconds to realize even what just happened and for the shame and fury (or playa regret) doesn't have time to come roaring up before it's far too late to do anything about it. 

I don't mean to sound too militant feminist, but this raunchy HBO sudden shock sex stuff poses a problem for me because it is so well acted, so artfully and so skillfully rendered.  What on the page is a lewd fantasy imagined in the privacy of one's mind becomes a traumatizing 'adult' reality. It's not 'real' in a novel. I haven't read either the Game of Thrones's or Girl with a Dragon Tattoos, but I imagine they probably come off much less traumatic and degrading in the privacy of the printed page. The French know these things and as Acidemic's French correspondent Severine Benzimra writes:

Sexual scenes aren't supposed to, on this side of the ocean, attract the audience. They represent a part of the life of the character that it is necessary to represent. They aren't meant to excite. Sexual excitation is linked to imagination, which can't be provided by all-audience movies (meaning not the audience of pornographic/erotic movies). This is an idea on which French people wildly discuss and disagree. Most French people would tell you that the image neutralizes the imagination in this field and suggest you to read, or ask someone to read you erotic littérature.

I feel these kind of things should always be poorly acted, or narrated in an affectless tone by one woman to another in the privacy of a Fårö boudoir. Writ in vivid Blu-ray they are simultaneously indulgent and a reprisal against indulgence. They are where the consumerism's frenzied promise of bling and commodified sex and indentured bitches sippin' Cristal go-- not to die but to see the ugly traumatic exterior of such an ugly, antiquated macho fantasy. From the inside out it's all Playboy hot tub fantasy, from the outside in it's tawdry and mutually demeaning. 

This is why a good moral center is so essential for sports teams. We only have to look at the whole Joe Paterno situation to see how the hierarchy of a team mentality can obliterate the feeling of responsibility to the larger society... that's why I'm glad Eli Manning is such a good boy! He-a-writes-a home-a to-a his-momma! That's why I blame HBO. 

 Some things are better as dreams --this we know, we decadent shaggy artists. We know because we tried it all, every pose, every drug, and even when it led us nowhere but depression and despair we kept doing it, til the wheels fell off. And then, finally, we realized art was the only thing that didn't hurt someone else (or ourselves) and leave us feeling skeevy at the end of the day. Despite our libertine credo, our belief it was only social conditioning that made us feel cheap, feeling shitty about it five years too late is who we are. Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire (and even Mad Men) point to a deep-set oral fixation in our country... we're looking back into past for our lost sexual freedoms, because we sure can't find them in the world of today... and this allows us to forget that we lost them on purpose, and deliberately hid them so we couldn't just go back and find them during our later addict mood swings.

Now if a girl likes these sex/rape scenes in these HBO shows, that's fine, let them be turned on. They're allowed to. But I scoff at the argument that it's not sexist since later the girl gets even or rapes back or learns to control her lusty mate to win a kingdom. And we who haven't read the Throne books or seen more than one episode have a right to our shocked response. I liked this response from Carla DiOrio James on Think Progress:

Rather, holding the subject in a deeply personal space, I worry what good these images can do in the collective subconscious of American males. Since the spike in sexually violent images of our Hollywood culture in the 1980's, date rape has spiked accordingly. This spike has not been proven as dramatically in any other country as it has in the US, where male sexuality has become increasingly linked to hyper-violent images.

In some crappy Jess Franco or Jean Rollin movie, rape and sadistic torture can be titillating mainly because it is so fake-looking. In a 70s sex-horror movie, the whip bounces harmlessly off a girl's back leaving a slight trace of pinkish food coloring that's supposed to be blood. The scenes scan as liberating, even paradoxically joyous, because the trauma isn't 'real', and therefore a sense of play coheres - pain and death burlesqued to ease the anxieties of our age. As the great Joseph A. Ziemba of Bleeding Skull wrote in his review of The Possessed: "Blood and mean-spirited torment become instantly hilarious when the torturer can’t keep his wig on."  But etched so vivid by the expert and well-funded HBO craftsmen and acted by solid professionals giving it their all, the rough trade rutting and demeaning sexual servitude of Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones are just sad signs that HBO has finally exhausted the stash of sleazy taboos it looted from its now destitute grindhouse neighbors, and it still / hasn't found / what it's looking for. God knows what it will overdo next. What else is even left, outside of being real, real gentle?