It is the Waving of her Heavenly Hair!

To see Brit Marling is maybe to love her. She's so pretty! But I've seen both ANOTHER EARTH (2011) and THE SOUND OF MY VOICE (2011) and was disappointed both times. Their scripts feel way too workshopped, the male actors way too hipster (I want to rampage through the Park Slope Food Co-op like Randy the Ram on his way down the aisles after storming off his deli job in THE WRESTLER), but I'll probably see her next film, THE EAST, anyway. Why? just because I love Brit Marling, particular her hair... and her name.

First the hair: so long and shadowed, with dark blonde roots ranging up to sparking highlights to natural brown like some gorgeous ephemeral romanticist poem. She hides it a lot in these films, but mainly so when she busts it out it's like: whoa, here comes the sun. The last time hair carried a film this well was Sophie Marceau's in THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (see my disclaimed Elektra King Hair Complex). Second is the name, Brit Marling. It practically rolls off the tongue like a drunken kitten.

Brit's hair also reminds me of some I used to sit behind in class. I made sure. I would write love poems to her awesome hair while supposedly making notes. "Hair like whiskey" I wrote, for in the afternoon sun her brown hair glowed golden, as whiskey does if you hold a shot to the morning sun light. Whiskey and I had to part ways in 1998 but the girl, Kathy, is still a FB friend, and still looks like Marling, a bit, but is older now, of course. I guess I am older too, but I can watch these Marling movies and pretend.

Their sense of humor is the same too, as in... nonexistent!

Still, I always am at a loss to truly explain my rapture over the heavenly hair Lady Marling. The closest I came was when sending a poem on the subject to an AA friend whose hair was even more long and lovely. She probably thought I was quite mad, or creepy. I think I sent it on myspace, so it's long gone. You can barely even find yourself on there anymore. Or anywhere.

Co-written and directed by Brit's fellow Georgetown alum Zal Batmanglij (He doesn't deserve her!) THE SOUND OF MY VOICE starts out promisingly creepy as two smirky hipster documentarians infiltrate a secretive cult and must go through a barrage of preparations including a Silkwood shower, change of clothes, blindfolds, plastic strip handcuffing, white tunics and--here's where the douche chill air of Sundance workshopped contrivance starts to make itself known--memorizing and performing a bizarre playground-style secret handshake ritual of greeting. The leader is Marling, who's back in time from 2054 to teach and preach. The bulk of the film is her little basement workshops, punctuated by the documentarians and their dissolution as a couple, etc.

In the best scene, Brit is doing a workshop with her little following where she passes them all poisoned apples and then bids them vomit the pieces back up, to return to Edenic innocence by rejecting the fruit of knowledge. It's gross but a great metaphor for cult brainwashing -- the promise of spiritual bliss by trauma-based rejection of all suspicions these people are brainwashing you. The smirky documentarian boy is afraid to vomit along because he's swallowed the receiver to his eyeglasses camera (he's filming her on the sly), which is itself stupid, the first indicator of Sundance workshop mentality. Why didn't he just ask his girl to hide it in her vagina? And the thing is, the scene doesn't need that MacGuffin aspect to be effective. Instead the film could have focused on the real subject -- the need to create memories of incest to facilitate 'awakening.' Who knows what we have repressed from our childhood? How much of it can we remember? How much is real? Who knows what's holding us back? If we weren't molested, would it be necessary to 'remember' being molested anyway, for deep healing to occur? Is the unbearably smirky hipster documentarian really just making this up to go along with the group for the sake of his film, or is this something true? Does he even know?

With the awesome acting of Marling to guide the scene it's a true highlight in the realm of cult cult cinema. She looks awesome in her wispy gray-white shirt and gauze-y headwrap and she carries it off beautifully. She even makes being homeless look glamorous. When we see her walking around wearing a wrapped-up shower curtain like Ellen Page in The Tracey Fragments she seems to float along like Venus on the Asphalt L.A. half-shell.

But there's problems. The long white-haired dude who acts as her agent to the outside is creepy and odd but you're never really sure what his deal is. On some level it's a case of that weird unwritten law that says no strong woman character can exist without the enigmatic older male standing behind her, granting her this power through his patriarchal embodiment of Lacan's ultimate signifier. His role is never fully explained - is he the mastermind? We never really learn. The men in the film are all uniformly little pishers who clearly weren't beaten up enough in high school. Scenes between the smirking couple are dull and drag on too long. She thinks he's weak. We think he's weak. The whole thing with the older black woman federal agent is too convenient. We never learn why cults always ask their new members to kidnap children. (Do they really, Brit? Did you research this? No, you didn't). And the end resolution is all a bit too pat, albeit beautifully acted. Scenes of worm eating show Brit is daring, not afraid to be like Nicolas Cage in The Vampire's Kiss and eat a lower life form. She's right though, this is how the Japanese thrived in the Burmese jungle during WW2 while the British withered and died. The Brits only ate from their chipped beef rations, which went bad easily. The Japanese just dragged some creatures out of the air and earth and water and ate them, as nature intended. It is our destiny.

What's wrong the Sound is very similar to what's wrong with Brit's other Sundance hit sci fi film Another Earth, i.e. there's so much interesting raw material just from the sci-fi concept and the distant Zen beauty and MIT-graduated confidence of Marling that you really can't lose. Just look at that striking image above! But if you can't read the blurb atop it says the film "....opens up the vast, still largely unexplored terrain of the human heart." Yeeeesh. Don't they know some of us suffer extreme douche chills from reading such treacly blurbs? Brit, I don't think you and your friend are qualified. Stick to science... and grooming! Instead, in searching for 'heart, an odd interesting sci-fi concept (a second earth spins close to ours) is wasted for some dull tale of martyrdom and second chance love--not to mention dopey male fantasy, that falls close to pandering. In this case, it's that some hot drunk young thing with heavenly hair is going to run over and kill your wife and child and then--after she gets out of prison-- come clean your house anonymously and fuck you as repentance, and fall for you and give up the one thing that really matters in her life so you can-- oh man you can fool the average human heart terrain art film couple or critic or blurb writer but you can't fool me! Triteness and 'high concept' swamp the interesting elements like an incoming wave of insipid floatsam.

Here's what I wrote last year (in a review with Tiny Furniture):

Poetry journal conceits aside, the moral here is that actors love roles that require lots of emoting and screen time but less memorization of dialogue and if you let your cellist friend design your score for you don't be surprised if he drowns your every muted reaction shot in tired chamber sawing and wants to make a big production of serenading you by musical saw in an empty auditorium as you visualize old Sputnik photos. You're Britt Marling, damnit! You look gorgeous in front of a big blue Earth, and you're hip and this is your Darling, and this is what you're going to let yourself be seduced by?

She does grant herself a really good monologue about learning to love the things that annoy you if there's no way to change them, and there's a Tarkovsky-esque moment playing Nintendo boxing and a great final shot, but why care about a guy so selfish he tries to talk his girlfriend out of going to space after she wins the essay contest and gets approval from a Richard Branson stand-in? Imagine if Charlie's uncle tried to talk him into giving up his golden ticket because his bunions hurt and he didn't want Charlie to go without him! A guy that self-absorbed deserves to lose his Marling.

It's true, yo. In the end, the Hair of the Marling belongs to no man, only cinema. It hath claimed her. Long may she reign over the muted realm of indie 'heart terrain exploration' sci-fi. But Jeeze, please, get someone other than these Sundance Robert McKee-reading hacks to co-write with you, Brit! And let go of all that 'where's the story's heart' Sundance workshop malarkey. Read some old science fiction, some masters, and let your natural actorly grace lead you to explore these imaginative situations as they are rather than just saddling your last act with a bunch of tropes that were cliches back in the 1930s and then perfected in 1982. Let the heart develop from your acting and from 'awake' exploration of scenes as they are. Brit, your hair deserves a lot better. Try again, and again. I am with you.... just never go Rosemary Woodhouse on us. That would be a crime. And never get old, just lead us on with your intellect and charm when all the while you love only the moon, and  a good brush. The judgment of the worms turning in their beautiful graves, is that you're laden with stony promise. Give not thyself to emotions you know not of. Did Kubrick want to make soap operas?

Fool in the Flame: Lana Del Rey ("Ride")

Once upon a time, a back-up singer named Lizzy Grant was put to sleep by the witchy grind of endless touring and woke up with kisses from seven older bearded biker boyfriends--the dwarfs and princes and huntsmen combined--and was reborn as a Twin Peaks Roadhouse chanteuse with tear-stained eye-liner named Lana Del Rey. Singing lead now, alone under a single spotlight in front of a tattered crushed velvet curtain, clutching a vintage microphone like it's the ghost of her lover's neck, she was beyond witchy curses now, almost not human.

See video here.

I was kind of over Del Rey after soaking up the way too-Princess Superstar-influenced girly rap back stretches of Born to Die, but she's got a new EP out, Paradise, that redresses the balance. Now, if you cull the more anguished American gun-in-hand flag cape anthems from Die and add them to Paradise, then you've got some kind of awesome classic, the kind of album that might come tumbling full form from the ghost of a young girl who sledded past you while you were halfway up the bloody mountain of maturity, and invited you to hop on, marriage, career, SSRI regimen, sobriety and children be damned. So you did, and it was a great ride back down to the rocky base that nonetheless left you both dead and broken on impact ("and she didn't even have to stop..."). That's the country Lana Del Rey believes in, "the country America used to be," the rocks at the bottom of the bloody mountain. The bodies of those that sled before all still there, their ghosts giving you a thumbs up and an Elvis wink.

As an origin story for a semi-fictional second starter and ode to the open road expanses of the American southwest, Rey's 11-minute video for the song "Ride" transcends its Sons of Anarchy stock signifier list imagery (Budweiser shirt, big Julia Roberts hair, craggy faces, American flag, bikes, hand guns) with a deep sexy, druggy sadness current and molasses momentum. Haters and critics will sneer, of course. But when haven't they recoiled in knee-jerk loathing when a young, hot mess like Del Rey shows off her psychic battle scars like merit badges instead of hiding them in traumatized gentility?

Imagine you're waiting in line at the Levis Store, half-watching the video on the monitor behind the cashier. Is that Lana Del Rey, looking a little Lindsay Lohan-level fucked-up, hair now dyed black and long but curlier,  rocking the short-shorts-Southwestern noir Lolita streetwalker with a handgun, Budweiser T-shirt and American Flag shawl riff as her barely audible whispered voiceover rants through a good four minutes of intro? Sure it's very Americana, you think, and precociously pretentious, but it's something else too-- it's bona fide fearless. It clicks something in your brain and then suddenly you stuff the jeans you were going to buy under your shirt and race out the door, jumping on the back of the first passing motorcycle you can find. Maybe they'll find you dead in a ditch a week later, or the cops will pick you up for solicitation in the bad part of town, or you'll get a book deal. It hardly matters. As long as you can, if only for a few hours, feel true momentum, ain't that America?

No, it's not art, or trash, "Ride" is just the best film made about the American endless highway since Two-Lane Blacktop. Lana Del Rey proves that even if its an act she's got the truest sense of operatic-sexy-sad-dangerous nymphette razor-walking since ever. This is miles beyond Madonna's surface-deep bad girl charades. Del Rey embodies instead the real deal in all its tragic suffering: the self-cutting, anorexia, nymphomania, pill addiction, and nonstop traveling from nowhere town to nowhere town of a real hot mess, grandly and proudly rather than all 'help me please,' cautionary tale. Her madness survives via a momentum that keeps her one step ahead suicidal ideation the way constant acceleration can keep you from exploding in deep space without a pressurized suit. Del Rey goes boldly in where most coy lip biter pouter jailbait-poseur pop girls wouldn't dare, for all their navel piercing and wolf tattoos. Not that they should! Del Rey's archetype would definitely be the wrong choice to emulate, I guess, for most girls. But as Del Rey puts it in "Ride's" mystic monologue, "there's no use in talking to people who have a home. They have no idea what it's like to seek safety in other people." Or as Lou Reed said, "Some people never a voice to talk with / that they can even call their own / so the first thing that they see that allows them the right to be, why, they follow it / you know, it's called bad luck." I listened to a lot of Lou when I was in high school. He was my patron saint. If Del Rey was around then, I would be long dead by now.

As with all Lana Del's videos, "Ride" offers a heady stream of seemingly disconnected images -- found early 60s home movie footage from July 4th barbecues; old travelogue footage of L.A. and Las Vegas, suicide symbolism (for her great "Born to Die" video she and her boyfriend start making out while he's flooring it through the fog in his charger, both heedless of the inevitable crash, for much longer than any similar scene in other films, until its clear this is intentional, a reckless suicide pact and it's a beautiful, dangerous, delirious moment), druggy electric melancholy, Mad Men-era Americana, and Miss Grant herself, all decked out in an array of hot mess looks, eyeing herself in the tail fin reflection of the crystalline moment right before JFK splatters the American consciousness forever in the blood-stained denim of disillusion.

Other great lines: "No moral compass pointing due north. No fixed personality. Just an inner undecidedness that was as wide and wavering as the ocean." At various times in the monologue she seems on the verge of tears, then laughs at some private memory a second later, just like a true bi-polar... you can also hear the weariness when she whispers of having "a war in my mind." The point is, she's present in her whisper. Her madness feels real. It's contagious. It doesn't matter if it's real.  Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepherd, Lou Reed, Scorsese -- they all dress up in America's fringes like kids at a costume store. Then again they're boys, and old enough to be Lana Del Rey's grandfathers. They can be raw and real, but hose critics who have cordoned off their true northern courage get mad when a hot young mess walks freely past said cordon, barely heeding it or them, and they don't have enough self-awareness to question the jealous hostility they suddenly feel. It takes a near death, a Romeo and Juliet plunge sometimes, to get these haters to part their own velvet ropes and ride free themselves, ala the amazing Moonrise Kingdom. 

So you see, fake or real, cute and young or old and grizzled, I've felt the things Lana's talking about here, the fathomless, glowing gratitude for those 'wild friends you met along the road' who for some perfect storm of a reason allowed you for the first time in your twisted-up life to feel that you belonged and that you'd found, finally "your people," your tribe, your gang, your home wherever you lay your head, if only for a weekend. And then, still high and free, you ride on ahead without them and years later you pause from your long run down endless highways, and realize hey, where'd my friends go? "Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat," Bob Dylan once sang, remembering his own old tribe, "and I'd give it all gladly / if our lives could be like that." See? Would that song be bad if he made up the people he's singing about?  That song and feeling haunted me through the 90s as my college friends all got married and moved Westchester, and though Lana Del's video might superficially recall Fiona Apple's infamous porn ring shag carpet basement "Criminal" video, it's really Blind Mellon's video with the girl in the bee costume that rings the truest by comparison. Somewhere that gang of bees waits for thee-- shall your bee costume lay forever entombed in attic mothballs, or shall it buzz once more, even if it means your death?

Naturally there's a weird father figure issue draw for any older semi-grizzled American dream acid casualty like myself imagining one thing or another but cleansing the palette of any notions of mere titillation is a Josef Von Sternberg masochistic response-initiation, as Lana seems to be taunting we male viewers with these old bikers, like a cub luxuriating betwixt the paws of her giant lion fathers, treating us in effect like Marlene Dietrich treats Lionel Atwill in The Devil is a Woman, or Adolphe Menjou in Morocco, or Emil Jannings in Der Blaue Engel. In other words, don't throw stones, soak in the masochistic response! That's cinema!

And it's one of the reasons I resonate so strongly with Del Rey. She reminds me of girls I've masochistically pined for, and crashed with but never got all the way with, and lost in and around AA and the road. At the core of all their self-destructive exhibitionist/anorexic/self-cutting/nymphomaniac/coked-up thrill-seeking junkie behavior, I do believe lurks the chance for artistic transfiguration, from private pain into hunger artist self-destructive performance art spectacle, and "Ride" is an artist's attempts to find peace by hopping on the motorcycle of some old biker dude. Lana Del antagonizes some and exhilarates others because she's unafraid to show how real freedom comes from being "fucking crazy." It's the same crazy by which the men find sanity in The Ninth Configuration! 

As I wrote a few weeks back, sexycrazy is in - with Claire Forlani dragging us back into the closed bar for six AM nightcaps in those Dewar's ads; crazy Carrie in Homeland, and the Zulawski film, and so forth. I'm glad that the promise Angelina Jolie showed with her role in Girl Interrupted (but never followed up on) is at least finding its full flower elsewhere. I feel the sadness and the joy in self-destruction and the genuine crazy in this video, moth-eaten truck stop Americana minutiae or no, I support it, like the soccer mom supports the troops in a war she doesn't even understand, and like AA supports, and even sometimes heals, all the broken-down bikers and thrill-seeking Lolitas and squirrelly writers. We all end up there, if we're lucky. But we're still fucking crazy. 
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 (See vid here)

PSYCHO-poetics

This year's MY WEEK WITH MARILYN is clearly HITCHCOCK (2012), a transparent Oscar courtier whose commercials alone infuse me with dismay.  I've seen PSYCHO a trillion times! I own it! Saw it again just last night, at home, safely avoiding the shower --for other reasons! The water.... its fluoride inhibits my pineal gland's full third eye functions. I bathe only in grain alcohol and branch water now, Mandrake. And as a result I see deep into the black eye pupil drain of the curtain-ripping Crane...

But to all this tawdry bourgeois Hollywood self-praise: OY VEY! Now, ED WOOD and SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE, these were great in that they went to weird places, making arcane connections between the crazies behind the camera and the supernatural-ish magic of the screen. If you were going to make a movie about Hitchcock making SABOTAGE, or even SABOTEUR, that would be great, maybe, because they're more obscure. But PSYCHO? Making showers safe for the whole family? I mean, there's a goddamned make-your-own-shower-scene Universal 'ride.' And to make it relevant the best the commercials can do is have a mildly portly Hopkins say "try the ladyfingers... they're made with real fingers," reducing his genius down to mere macabre bad taste.

So what indignant bastardization of the artistic process is next? A Nirvana biopic with Edward Norton as Kurt Cobain, directed by Ron Howard and starring, of course, Amy Adams as Courtney Love?

There's a reason PSYCHO should stay off the Academy-self-congratulatory Oscarbait table: as the bloody mile marker between 50s repression and 60s drive-in liberation it needs its disreputable patina, what Pauline Kael would call it's 'dirty kick' to stay relevant, and the makers of HITCHCOCK have turned it into a family-friendly "aren't we being naughty" pasteurization. Give it a few more years and Hollywood will be nominating films about the importance of the Oscars as an American institution (PS they already did) eventually strangling their own self-strangling to the point where they can only award Oscars to films about the awarding of Oscars to films about the award... and then finally it will crash through the mirror screen floorboards and behold its own hideous heart and that, alone and finally, will be worth filming.

You can't buy off unhappiness with pills

I understand the need for vainglory and idolatry and I don't judge so much as sympathize, because it's universal. Anytime there's a Zen master pointing a finger at the moon, Hollywood makes a film about a finger... and a boy who wanted the moon... together on an incredible journey! The finger gets paid millions and the moon is forgotten. Or at the very least, the beauty of the moon as seen by the Zen master is forgotten. The moon is way up there and doesn't take direction so they hire a young actor named Tyler Zachary to wear a moon head. He's such a hit that his moon make-up and angular face are how people think of the moon from then on. They don't look at the moon anymore at all. Why would they? They have Zachary. The moon is just so.... I don't know, Zacharyless? They try to project Zachary's face on the moon but it's just too far away, so.... what is the phrase, 'public domain'?

Is there some way, they ask their legal team, that we could block the moon from the sky while the Zachary moon is in theaters, or sue it for copyright violation?

...they all cluck their thick tongues...

But 20 years later, Zachary's forgotten, just a VH1 has-been; his moon head prop is sold at Christie's for $40,000 while no one even wants him in a Blue Mountain Dog Food commercial.

Another 20 years, and finally they make a movie about the beautiful dreamers who made this movie about the moon all those years ago, and Zachary gets a cameo as a street bum gesticulating furiously upwards but no one will look. And in this films about the dreamers who made the movie about the finger pointing at the moon, Hollywood celebrates its ability to celebrate itself in a showcase galleria setting.

Who needs anything to say about the actual moon, the one that started it all, when the finger, in its trajectory of upwards pointing, is so perfectly lit?

We're all trapped in our private prisons

The process of shooting movies may be fascinating but it's hardly relevant to the final product and its effects on our national psyche. Would Mona Lisa still be a masterpiece if we learned it was painted in some haphazard way? We'd have to watch the artist through every step to adequately judge the final result, to make sure Da Vinci wasn't on steroids, or the artistic equivalent, shrooms.

If we forget that need to analyze the making of vs. the need to experience the film as a film in and of itself then we forget PSYCHO was a lot more than a shower scene. We forget the movie and just think of the one image, the one iconic shot that makes it to the postcards, T-shirts, Oscar montages and DVD reissue covers. You can shoot the shower scene all you want, over and over--and they have--but it won't mean a thing without the surrounding scenes, and the movie as a whole. Without the slow weird fake-out embezzlement afternoon tryst build-up, the paranoid voiceovers in the brain of Marion Crane, her eyes wide as the moon, or the touching sandwich in the taxidermy room, the shower scene is just an avant garde surrealist shock short. It's like you're half asleep watching TV's ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS and suddenly a phantom TV signal (from Samara's art film repertoire in THE RING, or the VIDEODROME channel, or the eye-slitting sections of PERSONA, LA CHIEN ANDALOU) comes through, shattering the peaceful broadcast and ensuring entertainment will never be the same.

That's what the shower scene should be, NOT a ride at Universal Studios, damn it. It defeats the whole purpose!

"You can't buy off unhappiness with pills" Marion says to Pat Hitchcock early on, and isn't that what the makers of HITCH are doing, trying to buy off Oscar with pills? Better they should remake LA CHIEN ANDALOU as a color mini-series, starring Naomi Watts... and with liquid pianos oozing from the CGI bullet holes

As always with the great films, no matter how many times you see them, each time is different. For me this time it was the way the events of the film's progressive diegesis are encoded throughout its framework, like fractals. What, is that kind of talk too fancy for reductivist Oscar? "HITCHCOCK's about ADDAMS FAMILY-style ghoulish delight in sadistic killing, but it's okay because the ghoul is portly and thus sexually unthreatening" -- that's the HITCHCOCK promotional subtext. I can bring diegesis encoding down to earth too. Zachary, get ready with that finger!

You know how, in VERTIGO, you get the feeling that Stewart is somehow always still on the ledge, all through the events of the rest of the film, that it's all a nether region between life and death, that his hanging there corresponds to an ancient alchemical realization about the true nature of life and death and all art and searching as a distraction from the void?
It's in PSYCHO , too.  The Fra ct a l s . . 

From the skull-like shades of the Charon-like cop gatekeeper, who wakes up Marion from her nap by the side of the highway (into the dream), to the shower curtain-like bars on the hotel headboard behind Marion in the opening sex scenes, or the way Marion goes through a whole scene without blinking while driving, Hitchcock's every shot reflects the whole: every pattern and motif repeats, encoded throughout. A story of small scale murders and crime is revealed as an example of kaleidoscopic macro-genius that's so much more than "the ladyfingers.... made from real fingers." It's about the impossibility of linear time and how if you're going to die sometime over the course of your life--even if only at the very, very end--then you are dead already. You can take as many MULHOLLAND DRIVE pictures as you want, Jake-- it's always snake eyes. You lose, again.

But there's always rewind.

The I Ching answers questions about THE MASTER

I just read an interesting review in the CUNY Graduate Center's Advocate about THE MASTER (2012) wherein Mike Phillips says: "It would seem that the impetus to shoot in 70mm is a fascination with film itself" (Nov. 2012, p. 41), but isn't that kind of... I don't know... both too concise and too vague? Are we sure that's why he did it. That's like saying Mad Men is about the collapse of print media. Maybe it is, but that's just one layer. Then again, how does one deconstruct a film like this without missing some of its broad panorama of meanings? If the film is really about film itself, and the transition from film to video, the loss of clarity, the refraction of image, etc., mustn't it be also about some larger issue in which such a transition figures? You could argue anything is about anything, if you were a master bullshitter, as my dad used to claim I was. Hmmm.

So why not ask the I Ching? Sure, it's kind of similar to those weird pieces like "Ask a Gut-shot cop" in The Onion, but they didn't write the book on it. Who did? Whomever wrote the I Ching. I would guess that true art is without an author, for it comes from our collective unconscious. The artist gives it shape and form, but it's ours, in the end. Aummmmm

The following questions were asked of the I Ching Online: 
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So... what is THE MASTER really about?

You are a stranger to this situation. It is your attraction to the exotic that has led you here, but you will move on to a new vista when this one has lost its mystique... You don't know the custom here, and it's too easy to cross a line you don't know is there. Because you are the foreigner in this setting, you have no history to acquit you. Watch, listen, study, contemplate, then step lightly but decisively on.

Critics have compared Dodd's cult to Scientology and charlatanism, others believe charlatanism is important to spiritual development since we can't accept new ideas without a little side-show razzmatazz. One which side of the fence do you think Paul Thomas Anderson's sympathies lie?

Heaven and Earth move away from each other. In the ensuing void, the small invade where the great have departed. There is no common meeting ground, so the Superior Person must fall back on his inner worth and decline the rewards offered by the inferior invaders.

A lot of critics were confused by the film, although many were initially put off by There will be Blood as well and now they say that it's a classic by comparison. Do you think they are insecure bourgeoisie to respect only past work that's already stood the test of time and Oscar, rather than going out on a limb in passionate defense of immediate, new work that challenges their way of seeing, their way of thinking? Am I being snobby even asking this question? 

Gentle persuasion is the key in this instance. Though the words are soft, their speaker must be firm, calm and confident. Gentle words are worthless if spoken with trepidation. Wordless influence by example is also effective in this situation. All persuasion should be almost unfelt, yet consistent and persistent.

Is there a difference in the end between our 'found' meanings in analyzing a film like THE MASTER and the artist's intention? Shouldn't an artist be a little unconscious of their own work's deeper subtext for it to be successful? Or is it really a cut and dry issue - the Rorschach ink blot is either a woman's sexual parts or its not - where there is no division?

A playful Zephyr dances and delights beneath indulgent Heaven:A Prince who shouts orders but will not walk among his people may as well try to command the four winds. A strong, addictive temptation, much more dangerous than it seems.
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"There can be no outsiders because there is no outside"


If you have questions about THE MASTER, send them to me or leave comment and I will put them on this post - or you can consult direct with I Ching Online 
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