In light of recent posts, random shit like this has psychick resonancy, boy. Kaos magick, wot?
Showing posts with label cinema. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cinema. Show all posts
Friday, July 7, 2023
Sunday, February 27, 2022
Cute Dog Sneezing (2127 A.D.?): A.K.A. "being outside in the sunlight to smell a magical cure for spring"
Dear Laws of Dickheads:
As you can see, that which:
A) talks the talk,
B) walks the walk, and,
C) squawks the squawk,
Can be properly be called:
A) an unoriginal,
B) an a-hole-space monkey,
C) A slob-dobbler (ca. 1990 "knob-gobbler").
Your paltry and simplistic output has lasted for years....years!! And you have, what? Resigned yourself to splotchy blurbs with nary a Neanderthal pun in which to find something, anything, that is, shall we say, intelligent, or at the very least, "sharp?"
Get with it, shysters. Faith is gonna move ya. Brothers gonna work it out. God Save the Queen!
You runt-nuts!! Dare I say: Russian warship, go fuck yourself! Get, with it, "blog!!" Do some ding-a-ling à la a no-bling, flava flav, 'larm clock: Wake up, bitches!!! Wake the fuck up!!!"
And so on. Word to the wise, shit-heels: Stop phoning it in. At least have the balls and realpolitik 'nuff to know ya gotta make some bank, yo.
And, oh yeah, at the top of this page there's this weird, looped image of what appears to be a so-called "Border Collie" sneezing, with a demeanor that betrays a feeling somewhere between cute chagrin and total terror. The striated B+W, 1970's TV-like image could come from 1957, 2047, or today, but it's a transmission, baby, and it was beamed into my head by the pedophile "coronavirus cabal" that has infiltrated the world: the G-7, NATO, the Bilderbergs, the CIA, FBI, KGB, Star Fleet, the Deep State, the Scottish Rite, the Order of the Arrow, the Rotarians, the UN, etc. et. al. ad nauseum.
Remember, I love you. But these other chain-yankers do not. By any means necessary, one way or the other, you must survive this war, and well, so far, you have been getting your asses kicked six ways to Sunday by the brutal boot-heel of everyday living. Simple shit.
Like I said: You suck. Your blog sucks. Your life sucks. Close up shop. STFU. Give it up, wusses.
Kind Regards,
Théophile Prades
Beaupuy, France
Thursday, September 25, 2014
CLASSIFIED
Another short experiment. The first in a series of films which will tell the story of Loïck Gallo, aka "The Rooster", a commander of child soldiers who, aside their robot companions, fight to liberate Earth from an alien race which has secretly occupied the governments and corporations of the world.
Something like They Live, The Wild Boys, The Iron Giant and The Tripods trilogy thrown into a blender now that I think about it!
I found a random video clip in my "Documents" folder, essentially without any artistic value and challenged myself to see if anything interesting could be done with it. This is the result.
Saturday, March 22, 2014
Queens of the Ice Age
As every decent American knows, or should know, Baseball is a kind of elaborately coded symbol
for Freemasonry. I believe this was first revealed by Occam-sharp scholar
Randy Lavello, who wrote an article on the topic entitled Occult Symbolism: As American as Baseball (date unknown).
Unfortunately the article is mostly a sad rehash of the usual band of accumulated factoids about the Illumino-Masonic "hell bentery" (Davidson, Tautology by Candlelight, p. 27) regarding world domination. Yet among the chaff, one may still find some wheat. This is brilliant poetry:
Baseball was obviously created by Freemasons, as it bears the unmistakable marks of Freemasonry. The field, from home plate to the left and right field wall forms a compass; the entire outfield wall is the semicircle which this compass draws. Upside-down, overlapping this compass, the bases form the square. Thus, the baseball field is the emblem of Freemasonry. Three strikes and three outs were assigned because three is the principle sacred number of Freemasonry. Four is a number of significance because it represents a square (the shape) and deals with the four directions, thus: four balls, four bases.
And then, in the immortal words of the King of Siam: "Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." Or, as the "Free-Mason" might cry into the four dark corners of the Lodge Room, its floor a checkered field of play:
"Owa Tagoo Siam!"
(Say that, three, five or seven times aloud and see what happens).
At the climax of the sex-rituals conducted in such places:
"Shāh māt!" (شاه مات): "The King is Helpless."
Lavello concludes: This further explains the near obsession with numbers surrounding baseball averages, home runs, ERA’s, etc. It is truly a game for numerologists. One might even add a game for practitioners of the Assyro-Babylonian system known as gematria, which so enthralls Kabbalists steeped in the Mishnah and Talmud.
Needless to say the baseball bat is the lingam (लिङ्गं,) and the glove, the yoni (योनि). Hand in Glove?
Baseball isn't the only sport used by the Illumino-Masonic conspiracy to indoctrinate us through dazzling veils of numbers and distraction. Freemason Neil Laird (Kneel, Lord!) details the early "links" between the Craft and Golf. Somewhere along the line these "links" will undoubtedly lead us to sausages and shirt cuffs, but for now, let it suffice to say that yes, early golf clubs (the social organization and not the tool) had their origins in Masonic Lodges. As a Tiler might ask a suspected cowan (but not a Cohen (כֹּהֵן)): "Are you on, or off?" Links in a chain like the cars of the Express Kundalini, links in a chain chugging through the same cross-referential mirror-system in which the chain is the cable-tow, the serpent around the spinal column and the rod of Aesculapius. And more. The un-schooled hobo gives the bull the wrong response and is sent hurtling off into the speeding darkness.
But the Masons have a tool to revelate the method even more insidious than Twilight Language, Lady Gaga or Sports.
Snowmen.
You may have heard of A Well-Behaved Mormon Woman's brilliant take-down of Frozen (Feb. 2014):
The gay agenda to normalize homosexuality is woven into Disney's movie Frozen not just as an underlying message - it is the movie.
She discusses some of what I will extrapolate upon in this post; what
she glosses over, however, is the snowman. I pegged that dude as gay
from the moment he first opened his swishy mouth. A discussion at Film Colossus tries to answer the question: Is Olaf, the snowman, in "Frozen", gay? No one actually seems to be discussing it though, which proves that there is no need to discuss it.
Let's start with the name of the snow golem: Olaf. An anagram for "Loaf". This brings us immediately back to
golf and baseball, hours of which are televised and broadcast across the planet in order to ensnare the idle spectator. Lulled into a lazy hypnotic state in which the
"imprintability [sic] of Masonry's numerological symbolism can be facilitated and homosexuality inscribed behind the eyelids, the dark side of the liminal" (Ronson, The Nine-Inning Ritual, p. 72).
"Olaf" also a palindrome: Falo. As in
"phallus" or "fellatio." Is it any surprise that in one scene of Frozen, "Falo's" penis-like carrot nose ends up in the grinning mouth of the male reindeer, Sven? (A clear allusion
to "seven"--yet another Masonic programming number).
The
Masonic invention of sport and structured "loafing" given homage in the name "Olaf" is like
totally, I mean so over-the-toply revelated in the following
cartoon. Dig this evil bit of
mind-fuckery:
Have the masons no shame? They're waving this stuff in our faces like a cock bulging in leather Speedos at a Gay Pride parade. Clearly these phallus-nosed monstrosities with "frozen" hearts are lures to "reel in" children (no coincidence the word applies both to fishing and film). Illuminati psy-ops experts used the love of adorable snowmen in Frozen to encourage "loafing" and "fellatio" and then had the gall to joke about it in a homoerotic cartoon with genocidal symbolism. Look at the lower left of the pyramid: KAR. K.A.R.
Kill. All. Religion.
Wake up sheeple! Before you know it they'll have your children spitting on the cross and buggering one another like Knights Templar. Led to the gay bar in (trance-) formation by the cable-tow! Those who cannot be converted will be led instead to the killing fields. Blood is thicker than water and the evil tree bears fetid "fruits."
Speaking of Templars, both Walter (meaning "rule" or "warrior") Elias (אליהו, Eliyahu, meaning "Yahweh is my God") Disney and Mickey (as in "slip someone a") Mouse were members of DeMolay. DeMolay is a Masonic youth organization (for male youths aged 12 to 21--again with the mirrors) named after the leader of the "heretical, sodomitical [sic] Knights Templar known today as Freemasons" (Werther, Baphomet's Sucklings, p. 9). About Jacques (Jock) DeMolay himself, noted web board poster StarLandVocalBand mentions that, "the least sympathetic [Non-Masonic historians] portray him as a power-hungry, bloodthirsty pedophile." DeMolay, or Demon lay? Disney's roots are in French soil; he was descendant of one Robert d'Isigny, reputed lover of William the Conqueror. During the First World War, Disney would contrive to "return" to France, homeland of Jacques DeMolay, at the tender age of 17.
DeMolay, "the boy-love Internationale" (McCaw, Sinarchy, p. 13), programmed Walt Disney, Cathy O'Brien-like, with Masonic and Templar ideals from a young age, which helps explain why Disney ("On your Dis knees, boy!"), created Club 33 in the heart of Disneyland. 33 is the highest degree of Scottish Rite Masonry, which in America derives its cult practices and dogma from one Albert Pike, Confederate general and admitted Luciferian. The highest six degrees of this Rite--including the 33rd--are Templar Degrees: "Conferred only by the Supreme Council, 33°, the Degree of Inspector General is a Templar degree throughout, in both substance and symbolism" (here). The final body of the York Rite is known as a Commandery and is comprised of three Templar orders and one degree. Independent of both of these Rites, Templar Preceptories award yet three more degrees. The Rite of Memphis (1838) was a blend of Templarism, alchemy and Egyptian occultism. It merged with the Rite of Misraïm (pre-1738) in 1881; the resulting The Rite of Memphis-Misraïm exists to this day.
Masonry is not only at the heart of Disneyland, but of all Disney productions. A club hidden in one of the most visited parks in the world, hidden in plain sight, is a metaphor for a club hidden at the heart of the world and a message hidden at the heart of its propaganda. All the better to implant their message at the liminal line between consciousness and unconsciousness. Club 33 is the only place in the park where alcohol is freely served, just as early Lodges first met in taverns and were infamous dens of drunkenness. And in the Middle Ages, "Drunk as a Templar" was a common phrase. The club's name refers to the 33rd degree of Freemasonry, but also to the 33 sponsors of Disneyland when the park opened; one look and you'll see this represents a cross-section of America's most powerful companies.
Perhaps this is also why two popular Disney Rides, Pirates of the Caribbean and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, are, as former Church of Satan High Priest Boyd Rice points out, symbolic voyages of death and resurrection, like Masonic ritual.
"Shāh māt!" (شاه مات): "The King is Helpless."
See Children’s shows are exploding with hidden penises (LoS 10 Aug. 2013) for an introduction to a less veiled glorification of numerology in Disney's Donald in Mathmagic Land.
In Frozen, Olaf the snowman will never melt; he has his own personal climate, a control over nature that allows him to defy the effects of heat and time. This is the ultimate goal of Freemasonry. Immortality (immorality), with no more need to procreate and thus no real need for women: an occult agenda which will encourage men, no longer subservient to the dictates of nature and biology, to become homosexuals.
The doctrine of mastery over nature is in full praxis in the construction of the city park, nature brought to leash....or cable-tow. It's no coincidence that baseball, our numerological ritual, is played in a park. Progress and mastering nature were major themes in the 19th-century zeitgeist, a result of the same Enlightenment ideals most perfectly embodied in Illumino-Masonic doctrine. The first park built for the public is Princes (Disney films are rife with princes) Park in Liverpool, built on land purchased by Richard Vaughan Yates. Yates is memorialized in the park by an obelisk that describes Yates as "Enlightened." So very Masonic. So very phallic. And to top it off, it's a water fountain. One bends over before an enormous penis and drinks deeply from the fluid which shoots out when the "knob" is turned. One isn't drinking from Farrah's faucet here; this is Adam and Steve, not Adam and Eve. In the mirror language we've previously mentioned, it's worth noting that the first verbal exchange on the planet was a pair of palindromes:
"Madam, I'm Adam".
"Eve".
Back to Frozen. Olaf is a flamboyant swish, but the other male figures are also homosexual. First we have the the villain, Hans ("John", or a whore's customer), a Lothario who feigns to have feelings for Anna (a name meaning "Grace" in Hebrew, as in God's grace). Hans' false feelings for Anna are such that he's willing to let her die in order to assume power. Through his actions, Hans rejects women and God's grace simultaneously. Kristoff, the rustic, was raised outside of normal society, among hermaphroditic trolls and anthropomorphized animals. The film not only tries to legitimize this queer world but valorizes it above and beyond the normal, i.e. straight world! Kristoff (Christ-off!) also rejects God because of his unnatural communion with the reindeer Sven. He is shown serenading the animal to sleep before they share a bed. "Sven" is the origin of the world "swain"--a young servant boy! Masculinity is further undermined by to total inutility of Kristoff's profession: he is an ice seller in a world of permanent winter. He is redundant, impotent and unnecessary.
What about the female characters? The homosexual thread marking our voyage through the labyrinth begins with the Queen. Elsa (from the Hebrew for "My God is an oath") has shut out all suitors--a thorough rejection of men. She is an Ice Queen, an expression we often use to describe a woman who has, like Elsa, shut out all love and warmth from her heart, especially for men. Incidentally, a "snow queen" is a gay black male who favors white partners, especially Nordic types! The latter half of Frozen is built around the attempts of Christ-off to reunite with Anna, (Grace), so that she, and he, may be saved. This is described as an act of "pure love". Saved? Pure Love? This is clearly a reference to Christ's role as our savior. But the act of pure love never occurs, because for ersatz Antichrist Christ-off, "grace" remains frozen to his touch, dead. The movie manipulates the viewer into thinking that Anna will be revived by Kristoff's kiss. But no. It is Elsa, her God an oath, who saves Anna in an incestuous act of lesbianism made all the more vile by it's cloak of innocence.
Frozen, regaled by many critics as one of Disney's best recent films, has its origin in an aborted biography of Hans "Christian" Anderson. The real Anderson had a history of falling in love with unattainable women, frozen to him so to speak, so that he never actually had to get together with one. In life, he seem to have expressed more desire for men. Is it any surprise that so many Disney films are based on Anderson's work? The Disney world is one of talking animals, "bromances" and the normalization of eccentric and deviant behavior, of accepting those who are "different".
The Mormon I referred to a the beginning of this post lady is right. To use the revelator words of Pink ("gay") Floyd bassist Roger ("sodomy") Waters, we are being "amused to death". From the mincing and singing homos of Frozen to the homosocial domain of sport, from snowmen to the Georgia Guidestones (see population control), we are being programmed to accept the "sterility ideal" of a Malthusian zoo, one big Grand Lodge watched over by what Richard Brautigan ironically called "machines of loving grace". No need to sterilize, no need to cull, when the park animals are programmed into homosexuality.
* * * *
I hope that at some point, preferably from the get-go, you realized that this post is a joke.
What you've just read is not the post I intended to write and it kind of mutated into what it is as I was writing it. Which is just a fancy way to say I made it all up as I went along. Hence the abrupt and rather nonsensical transition from sport into a discussion of Frozen. I was being ironic, but not sarcastic, which can be a thin line. I wasn't making fun of people who might see a gay agenda in this film. This might sound ingenuous, but it's true. I was pretty much just goofing around in a Downard-esque mode and poking fun at synchromysticism.
While it's not something directed by decree from the offices of GLAAD, I think it's fair to say there is something of a homosexual agenda in Hollywood. Like the military is a bastion of conservatism, Hollywood is by and large a liberal sector of society. A Hollywood villain may actually have some likable qualities, but if they really want to portray an incorrigible baddie, writers make the villain a racist, or a homophobe. Discrimination against homosexuals is generally attacked and gay characters are portrayed as sympathetic. I don't know if this qualifies as an orchestrated "agenda" but it does demonstrate a kind of solidarity between the Hollywood and the gay community. Stating this does not imply a criticism of those efforts. On the contrary, as far as I even care about the issue, I wince at anti-gay slurs and support the legislative efforts to legitimize civil unions, marriage or otherwise, secure rights for homosexual partners and allow gay couples the right to adopt. In music, cinema and on TV, the trend is clear: homophobia is seen as cruel and petty, while acceptance of homosexuality is lauded. (Hip-Hop culture, for the most part, being the exception to this rule). I think here of Dallas Buyers Club as a perfect example, in which the crudest homophobe's transformation into a tolerant and compassionate supporter of his homosexual clientele is an important part of the film's message. In reality, the person depicted in the film was apparently not only not a homophobe, but was himself bisexual.
So maybe fiction is at times stranger than truth, but not always. I had obviously read about the Mormon woman's theory (without actually reading the entirety of her text) before starting this post. My post, a fiction, was largely written over two weeks ago, much earlier than when I first saw the following story, which was about a week ago.
Apparently some pastor with a podcast, invariably described as "conservative" or "right wing", denounced Frozen on his show. Using some of the exact same points I did, this pastor expressed his belief that the film promotes homosexuality....and bestiality to boot. Hey, I said that too. But I was joking.
Pastor Kevin Swanson and co-host Steve Vaughn haven't seen the film but have criticized its "progressive" agenda anyway.
TIME describes it like this:
The two claim that the movie’s Oscar-winning song “Let It Go” is a coming out song, marking the moment when Elsa realizes she was “born that way” and accepts who she is. [The Mormon lady also says this about the song.] They point out that the fiercely independent Elsa never considers a male suitor and assume she is therefore probably gay. They also say that Jonathan Groff’s character has an “unnatural relationship” with his animal buddy, Sven. All these plot points, they say, open children up to homosexuality and bestiality at a young age.
The podcast has the following summary:
Did millions of parents and children catch the homosexuality and bestiality reference in the last super popular Disney flick, Frozen? We wonder. Kevin Swanson quotes from a few websites maintained by our liberal friends. They're ecstatic over Disney's directions. But what about Christian parents?
(It appears that first link requires a log-in now, but you can hear the podcast here).Further context can be found in this transcript, where Swanson describes the film as "evil" and a form of "indoctrination". Honest, none of this was on my radar when I wrote my own post.
I thought I was just making stuff up. I actually did get a feeling from this film that the snowman was a vaguely "gay" character, which is probably an indication that I'm falling prey to stereotyping more than anything else, but clearly there is some vibe in the film which leads other people to think this as well. The Mormon woman is real. Pastor Swanson is real. The question posed on Film Colossuss (Is Olaf gay?) is real. And oddly enough, I jokingly wrote about homosexuality and bestiality in Frozen before I'd even heard of Swanson. My impressions about Olaf's "gay" personality came before I saw the question posed on Film Colossus. All of which puts me in some odd company.
I don't know if there is a specific "gay-friendly" undercurrent to Frozen, but it is not entirely inconceivable. Disney films tend to celebrate the underdog, the pauper, the outsider and people (or animals) who are "different". All of this is a part of Frozen's message. I don't object, but some people do; they are not on board with the program.
Anyway, I'd vowed at some point to avoid politics and synchromysticism because I either sound too strident or too goofy. Plus, arguing about politics over the Internet is always a depressing and pointless endeavor. I've even created another blog (unused for now) to serve as a vehicle for over-the-top, satire-oriented pieces, but eventually decided to place this one LoS. It does reproduce the methodology of the synchromystic and, as it turns out, just proves the old saw that if you can imagine it, it's already been done. To have posted this stuff without addressing the fact that someone really believes it would have been impossible, hence this coda that undercuts the question ("Is he for real?") that might have been floating through your head.
On a related note, apparently there's a culture of Disney fans that trying to figure out how to place all the films into space/time continuum of the same universe....
Friday, March 21, 2014
"CULTure" by guest blogheur, Jon Frankel
While doing some research on Philip K. Dick’s Valis I was struck by the fan response to even mild criticisms of his work. These fan comments reminded me of comments I have read on the Internet Archive for Grateful Dead concerts. I am not a Deadhead, any more than I am a Dickhead, but I do like to listen to mid to late 60’s acid rock when I write. The Internet Archive has about every Grateful Dead concert ever recorded, which you can stream for free. Occasionally (very occasionally) someone will say a show is not that good, and the response can be asymmetrical, to put it mildly. Dick and the Dead are examples of Cult Art. The Cult Art fan believes in the work the way a Freudian believes in Freud or a Communist Party member believes in Marx. The Dead are hardly the only cult act in rock history. The Velvet Underground also owe their success to cult fans, but the influence of the Velvet Underground is vastly more important than that of the Dead. But you can’t blame either of them for their fans, any more than you can blame Philip K. Dick.
PKD is a fascinating case because of course he was a cult writer, who was widely recognized within his genre (and, eventually, outside of it), whose fans are conspiratorial, paranoid, and fanatical, just as he could be. He wrote about cultic phenomenon, conspiracies and paranoia. He elevated them to world, even cosmic systems. But he was impish. There is always a sly look in his burning eyes. And the books themselves can be laughably bad and still, somehow, charming, funny, and intelligent. The Dead too, with their dimestore mysticism, psychedelic iconography, improvisational music, and connection to the most cultish of all the Beats, Neal Cassidy, encouraged a tribal worship of all things Dead.
There is also a cult of cult art. People set out to be cult writers and musicians because cult obscurity and eccentricity are cool. But most of the great, true cult artists set out to be successful. I’m sure Samuel Fuller wanted to make successful movies, he was just too wayward to knuckle under. Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford would have taken unabashed, big time success in stride. Thompson was probably limited by personality (and lack of charm, and ability, beyond the precise, minimalistic delineation of psychopathic violence), but Willeford was a cheerful, successful man. The Burnt Orange Heresy is a great book that few people will ever read, and those who do will probably love it immoderately.
I think Jonathan Lethem is a writer who would love to have been a cult writer, and ended up the darling of The New York Times set. Darlings of The New York Times set don’t get to be cult writers. Sometimes a cult artist will hit the big time. Scorsese started out this way, and he, like Lethem, really loved the cult movies of his childhood, and seems, with Mean Streets, to have set out to make a cult movie. Many of his less commercial work fits the feel: After Hours, The King of Comedy, Kundun, The Last Temptation of Christ. And Willeford had his Hoke Mosley books, brilliant, off beat Florida police novels that were published in paperback and marketed as mainstream work and were quite successful. He got tired of that success at one point and produced the ultimate, self-destructive, cult writer kind of book: he has his cop hero kill his own daughter! His editor (or agent) refused to publish it and sent him away to write another Hoke Mosley novel, sans child murder.
Freud and Marx are examples of the cult in social science. Freudians are renowned for reducing all criticisms to resistance. Marxist have all kinds of ruses for negating anything that would question their political dogmas, including the tantalizing, disturbing concept of false consciousness. But if the ‘ists’ have fetishized their masters’ theories, there is of course a sound, wonderful tradition of Marxist scholarship and thinking, and Freud himself is a nutty, but fascinating, and persuasive author of a descriptive anatomy of what it feels like to be human, solidly in the tradition philosophical and wisdom literature. Yet Freudians and Communist Party members continue to BELIEVE in a way that say, Darwin and Einstein don’t require of physicists and evolutionary biologists. And the effect in the real world of both theories, to the extent that they are cults, has been terrible. Freudian thinking exacted a toll on everyone who was ground up in the psychoanalytic machine. And the disaster of Marxist thinking enshrined in state power might be greater than that of those other massive cults, Christianity and Islam. I know both have produced great civilizations and important ethical, intellectual traditions. Both also converted with the sword and fire, for which there can be no forgiveness. In the end I suppose the cults of Marxism, Christianity and Islam yielded to the larger, pan-human cult, that of the Cult of Violence.
Cult thinking is warm and comfortable. I have always flirted at its edges. For years I was a Jungian. Jung is considered more cultlike than Freud because he was never picked up by The New York Times crowd. I don’t find his theories or ideas to be any more crackpot than Freud’s, but I can see now that he was not as great a writer or thinker, despite a feeling that he is in some sense ‘more right’. I think the Velvet Underground is a great band, beyond all measure, while the Grateful Dead played really cool fast amphetamine and acid music from 1966-1969, and that’s it. But Lou Reed and John Cale are not Gods, nor is Jerry Garcia. Genius in whatever thing, when somewhat or completely neglected, easily becomes cult. And sometimes, like Freud and Marx, the cult erupts into the world.
I’m sure I am someone who set out to write cult literature and failed, as one has to do, when setting out to accomplish something that is out of your control. I have however noticed that there are people, few in number, who really LOVE Specimen Tank, unaccountably. With cult work you succeed by failing. Cult work is a little like the difference between being educated and trying to be smart. You can’t really try to be smart or funny, and often only are unintentionally so. You set out to be Alfred Hitchcock, and end up as Ed Wood. But this is also a function of personality. I’m doubt the Velvet Underground would ever have been an arena rock act the way Bowie was. With John Cale and Lou Reed there was always one too many geniuses in the room. The Cult in Art has two faces, one benign, attractive, and one that of the Lothario.
Jon is a poet and novelist based in Ithaca, NY. His novels include Specimen Tank, GAHA: Babes of the Abyss, The Last Bender and The Man Who Can't Die. Please visit his "blogh", Last Bender, for more information about his work and his always interesting musings on art, literature, history and cooking.
PKD is a fascinating case because of course he was a cult writer, who was widely recognized within his genre (and, eventually, outside of it), whose fans are conspiratorial, paranoid, and fanatical, just as he could be. He wrote about cultic phenomenon, conspiracies and paranoia. He elevated them to world, even cosmic systems. But he was impish. There is always a sly look in his burning eyes. And the books themselves can be laughably bad and still, somehow, charming, funny, and intelligent. The Dead too, with their dimestore mysticism, psychedelic iconography, improvisational music, and connection to the most cultish of all the Beats, Neal Cassidy, encouraged a tribal worship of all things Dead.
There is also a cult of cult art. People set out to be cult writers and musicians because cult obscurity and eccentricity are cool. But most of the great, true cult artists set out to be successful. I’m sure Samuel Fuller wanted to make successful movies, he was just too wayward to knuckle under. Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford would have taken unabashed, big time success in stride. Thompson was probably limited by personality (and lack of charm, and ability, beyond the precise, minimalistic delineation of psychopathic violence), but Willeford was a cheerful, successful man. The Burnt Orange Heresy is a great book that few people will ever read, and those who do will probably love it immoderately.
I think Jonathan Lethem is a writer who would love to have been a cult writer, and ended up the darling of The New York Times set. Darlings of The New York Times set don’t get to be cult writers. Sometimes a cult artist will hit the big time. Scorsese started out this way, and he, like Lethem, really loved the cult movies of his childhood, and seems, with Mean Streets, to have set out to make a cult movie. Many of his less commercial work fits the feel: After Hours, The King of Comedy, Kundun, The Last Temptation of Christ. And Willeford had his Hoke Mosley books, brilliant, off beat Florida police novels that were published in paperback and marketed as mainstream work and were quite successful. He got tired of that success at one point and produced the ultimate, self-destructive, cult writer kind of book: he has his cop hero kill his own daughter! His editor (or agent) refused to publish it and sent him away to write another Hoke Mosley novel, sans child murder.
Freud and Marx are examples of the cult in social science. Freudians are renowned for reducing all criticisms to resistance. Marxist have all kinds of ruses for negating anything that would question their political dogmas, including the tantalizing, disturbing concept of false consciousness. But if the ‘ists’ have fetishized their masters’ theories, there is of course a sound, wonderful tradition of Marxist scholarship and thinking, and Freud himself is a nutty, but fascinating, and persuasive author of a descriptive anatomy of what it feels like to be human, solidly in the tradition philosophical and wisdom literature. Yet Freudians and Communist Party members continue to BELIEVE in a way that say, Darwin and Einstein don’t require of physicists and evolutionary biologists. And the effect in the real world of both theories, to the extent that they are cults, has been terrible. Freudian thinking exacted a toll on everyone who was ground up in the psychoanalytic machine. And the disaster of Marxist thinking enshrined in state power might be greater than that of those other massive cults, Christianity and Islam. I know both have produced great civilizations and important ethical, intellectual traditions. Both also converted with the sword and fire, for which there can be no forgiveness. In the end I suppose the cults of Marxism, Christianity and Islam yielded to the larger, pan-human cult, that of the Cult of Violence.
Cult thinking is warm and comfortable. I have always flirted at its edges. For years I was a Jungian. Jung is considered more cultlike than Freud because he was never picked up by The New York Times crowd. I don’t find his theories or ideas to be any more crackpot than Freud’s, but I can see now that he was not as great a writer or thinker, despite a feeling that he is in some sense ‘more right’. I think the Velvet Underground is a great band, beyond all measure, while the Grateful Dead played really cool fast amphetamine and acid music from 1966-1969, and that’s it. But Lou Reed and John Cale are not Gods, nor is Jerry Garcia. Genius in whatever thing, when somewhat or completely neglected, easily becomes cult. And sometimes, like Freud and Marx, the cult erupts into the world.
I’m sure I am someone who set out to write cult literature and failed, as one has to do, when setting out to accomplish something that is out of your control. I have however noticed that there are people, few in number, who really LOVE Specimen Tank, unaccountably. With cult work you succeed by failing. Cult work is a little like the difference between being educated and trying to be smart. You can’t really try to be smart or funny, and often only are unintentionally so. You set out to be Alfred Hitchcock, and end up as Ed Wood. But this is also a function of personality. I’m doubt the Velvet Underground would ever have been an arena rock act the way Bowie was. With John Cale and Lou Reed there was always one too many geniuses in the room. The Cult in Art has two faces, one benign, attractive, and one that of the Lothario.
Jon is a poet and novelist based in Ithaca, NY. His novels include Specimen Tank, GAHA: Babes of the Abyss, The Last Bender and The Man Who Can't Die. Please visit his "blogh", Last Bender, for more information about his work and his always interesting musings on art, literature, history and cooking.
Specimen Tank
is available on Amazon.
As one (of two!) reviewer puts it: "There's more truth in this book than anyone in the biotech industries would care to admit. Plus, it's funny as hell. If you don't like it, hand-deliver it to my house, and I'll buy it back from you."
is available on Amazon.
As one (of two!) reviewer puts it: "There's more truth in this book than anyone in the biotech industries would care to admit. Plus, it's funny as hell. If you don't like it, hand-deliver it to my house, and I'll buy it back from you."
Friday, April 5, 2013
It's not just who YOU know, but who knows YOU: An interview with Dimitri Diatchenko
You may not know Dimitri Diatchenko by name, but if you watch TV and go to the cinema there's a good chance you've seen his work. At 6'2", with a powerful voice to match his build, he's hard to miss. Dimitri has worked on dozens of productions including big Hollywood films such as G.I. Jane, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Chernobyl Diaries--as well as independent films such as Clubhouse, his most recent film, and Goiterboy, his first. His TV credits include Walker, Texas Ranger; CSI: Miami; Family Guy; Sons of Anarchy; How I Met Your Mother; and a brief stint on General Hospital. Avid gamers will have heard him put his voice to good use in titles including Call of Duty: Black Ops I & II, Ironman 2 and Wolfenstein. He also has a string of national commercials under his belt. Whew! The man stays busy!
(See IMDb and Dimitri's personal website)
I met Dimitri at Stetson University, where he was studying classical guitar (he has four solo CDs to his credit), and I'm fortunate that Dimitri agreed to this interview, thoughtfully responding to my questions by email. What emerges is an interesting story of how one man got into making pictures and makes a good living doing it. Dimitri isn't one of these actors who spends most of his time waiting tables and doing fruitless auditions. He is a full-time working actor--not a superstar by any means, but he's working on it.
Over time, Dimitri has managed to create a space for himself by playing "heavy" or villainous characters, often as a Russian--calling on his Ukrainian roots to perfect his dialects and his experience as a former heavyweight champion in Taekwondo to deliver credible ass-whippings. He also has quite a few comedic roles on his résumé. Multi-talented, professional and a nice guy--he's out there travelling the world getting international exposure yet still takes the time to respond to questions for an obscure blog. Very cool indeed!
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.LoS: You started out studying classical guitar. 20 years later you’re acting in Hollywood. Did you always want to act in addition to playing music, or is it something that came about later?
DD: I always had a penchant for acting, but never did anything until Stetson University. I had to take a non-music elective as part of my course requirement and I chose the two classes where the hottest girls in the school could be found….acting and dance. Then I took an on-camera acting class in Orlando at a talent agency who soon represented me. They sent me out on auditions for student films and locally produced shows and commercials.
LoS: I know you’ve answered this question in other interviews, but how did you get your start – what was your first paid role?
DD: My first paid role was as a featured extra on G.I. Jane, the Demi Moore/Ridley Scott film. I drove six hours that day for a 5 minute interview in Jacksonville. I got bumped up to a day player and then to utility stunts during the next few months of shooting which started in Florida and ended in Los Angeles. It worked out well because I was planning to move to LA anyway.
LoS: At what point did you seriously think you could make a living as an actor and at which point did you get an agent?
DD: When I moved to LA my main intention was to be a working actor and eventually an A-lister. I had a few interviews with agencies when I got to LA that were set up by some actors from G.I. Jane. They were very helpful to me and I was being represented within a few months after my move.
LoS: Does your agent seek out all your roles for you, or do productions call you up to ask after you based on the strength of your previous work? This is a variation on part one of this question: Do you have to read for every role, or do you get offered parts without an audition?
DD: At this stage in my career I get offers sometimes, but most of my roles I get through the auditioning process.
LoS: Hollywood has its mega-stars who get paid millions per picture or hundreds of thousands per episode, but I assume you’re part of what Bruce Campbell refers to as “working-class Hollywood”. You work regularly on popular shows, including How I Met Your Mother and Sons of Anarchy. This may be an impertinent question, but what kind of lifestyle does your career afford you?
DD: Well my goal is to be one of those millionaire actors with my own production company and all the perks that come with that lifestyle. Right now I would consider myself a working-class actor. I live off of my acting work entirely. I've hit six figures a few times. I live pretty conservatively. It's feast and famine sometimes. LA is an expensive town to just live a normal life. I also put a lot of money back into my career needs. I have steadily increased my living standard every year for the past 6 years.
LoS: In Chernobyl Diaries, I remarked to a friend that your character Yuri knows more than he’s letting on to his customers. Even though this isn’t ever made explicit, it can be inferred from some of Yuri’s expressions and statements. Is that an accurate reading, and if so, is that something that came from the director and the script, or did you bring that to the role?
DD: For the sake of keeping the suspense in the film, I played Uri with a little mystery in his expressions, and tone and color. Brad Parker and Oren Peli liked what I was doing but we discussed every scene we shot as building the audience suspense.
LoS: Do you create a back story to your characters, in your head or on paper, in order to enhance your performance, or do you work only from what’s on the script?
DD: I spend quite a bit of time just thinking about the role I'm playing. A bit of a background story on them that either the script reveals or just my own take on the character. Keeping it as simple as possible, but layered.
LoS: You mention in one interview about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that you spoke a little bit with Steven Spielberg about some ideas for your character you had that he then integrated into the film; do directors often confer in this way with their actors and/or are they usually receptive to suggestions? Do you ever improv lines without clearing it with the director first, or is that considered unprofessional?
DD: Some directors, usually the ones who have acted, are very receptive to what their actors are thinking about their roles. Spielberg was great like that. Most of my lines in IJ4 were improvised….and in Russian. I will improv for a purpose if the scene we are shooting dictates. I like living in the moment. If it works, we move on, if not, we do it again.
LoS: What would be your dream role….and cast?
DD: The role I play in Company of Heroes was a dream role and the cast was pretty awesome too. I'm starring in a WWII action film with Tom Sizemore, Vinnie Jones, Jurgen Prochnow, Chad Collins and Melia Kreiling. My relatives did the same thing that Ivan, my character's name, did during WWII. I am Ukrainian from my dad's side of the family. Playing Ivan brought back memories of the stories I would hear from my dad, uncle, aunt and babushka. I had the coolest role in the film. The only way it could have been better is if I got the girl at the end of the film. That may still happen. I hear they want to do another one.
LoS: Is there a role or kind of project you’d never accept?
LoS: Is there a role or kind of project you’d never accept?
DD: That's a tough one. The only thing that comes to mind is the role of a pedophile. I can't see me EVER playing that. It's just too horrible an energy to live with as I'm preparing for the role. My mind just will not go there.
LoS: You’re an accomplished martial artist, which can only be of benefit to an actor. Has that ever clinched a role for you?
DD: I made it a point to not market myself as a martial arts guy when I arrived in LA. I've had many a fight scene in roles that were more action oriented. I do all my own fight scenes. I think my acting skill is what propels me, but I'm a physically imposing guy at 6'2", 230lbs, solid. It probably helped that I was a highly skilled martial artist for my role in Walker, Texas Ranger. I had to fight with Chuck Norris in the episode. That was a great gig. One of the best experiences I've had so far. Chuck influenced me as a kid to start Karate.
LoS: You’re also a classically-trained musician; what skills cross over into acting? I know you’ve actually played for one of your roles; any chance we’ll see you play again on screen?
DD: Music and the written word are closely related so closely in my mind that often when I read through a monologue, a group scene or an entire script, I digest the material as I would when learning and performing a piece of music. An example is if you take a monologue and break it up into sections as you would a Sonata. You have a theme, development of the theme, a second theme that is related to the first theme and it's development and then a recapitulation. An essay or a monologue breaks up into sections that can be realized in the same manner. Furthermore, your interpretation of the written or musical performance should be realized with your own life experiences. This is what makes the material YOURS and special.
LoS: Is there anything you feel you'd like to add? Words of advice for budding young actors?
DD: The thing that is most UNTAUGHT is the acting business. These days you have to have a social media presence to help boost your following. It's good and bad. The good is that I have a fan base overseas that I never would be able to communicate with, real time, had I been a generation earlier. The bad is that it is so ever-changing. You have to stay on top of everything.....e.g. personal website, Twitter, Facebook, and whatever else is out there that the social media companies are coming out with. The ART of acting is only the very beginning of having a career as an actor. Creating your fanbase and creating your BRAND is the most important thing these days. It's not just who YOU know, but who knows YOU.
****
For a more complete view of Dimitri's work, check out the playlist of clips he's created from some of his roles, with a brief intro on how he got into the business:
P.S. I'm sad to report Dmitri died on April 21, 2020 at his home in Daytona Beach, FL, a few miles up the road from where we attended Stetson together. Initial reports suggested his death may have been linked to an electrical shock he'd received a week prior, although an autopsy declared his death to be an accidental overdose of prescription drugs. Dmitri's career had dipped somewhat after he was accused of killing and eating his girlfriend's pet rabbit in an act of vengeance. I asked him about the incident and he claimed that while he did pretend to kill the rabbit, he'd actually let it go, and the rabbit he did eat came from a butcher's shop. I believed him then and I believe him now. His "prank" was stupid and cruel, but I really hope that his lapse of judgement did not have a negative effect on his career, and that this downturn didn't lead to his accidental (?) overdose. Dmitri always treated me decently, and I liked the guy. His death was unsettling; he was 52. I'm 51, and well, he's the third of my college-era circle of friends to die: Dmitri, Wickes, and T.J. Tempis fugit. You all had faults, but don't we all? You are not forgotten....So why wait til 2022 for this brief post script? Well, it's because Dmitri was the child of Ukrainian immigrants, and if you're reading this in the future, look at what happened in February, 2022. Shock, death, memory. Whose is the hand that covers the candle's flame? RIP, my friends. I, for one, will not forget.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Cut!
I haven't updated the blog for a month now because I'm on the road, a traveling man as it were. Currently I'm in Rio de Janeiro, but before that I was in Argentina and made a brief jaunt to Uruguay. I've got lots to post about folk saints and Masonic monuments, but that will have to wait until I get home....which will be soon as my flight leaves in about 11 hours.
Just a brief blurb. My pal Tim turned me on to a film called Severed Footage about the mystery of the feet washing ashore off the coast of British Columbia and Washington. It's a found footage piece a la The Blair Witch Project, which makes the title a pretty clever pun. The story is....
In the fall of 2007, a student had been videoing his history project on “Kanaka Pete the Axe Murderer”. In January 2012 that same video was leaked from the local authorities. You decide if this video finally exposes the "Mystery of the Severed Feet".
The Kanaka Pete link is in in the original text. I was a bit skeptical, thinking maybe it was a clever way to fabricate evidence for the back story, but you can view a PDF version of a short history written in 1972 on the University of Hawaii library's website.
I haven't seen the film, but since we've been keeping abreast of what's afoot in Canada, it seems logical to make a short post about it. You can see the trailer on YouTube or on the film's website.
BTW, this is the second time we've come across a a history of violence on an island in association with this Canadian mystery. See Who stole the sole?
Just a brief blurb. My pal Tim turned me on to a film called Severed Footage about the mystery of the feet washing ashore off the coast of British Columbia and Washington. It's a found footage piece a la The Blair Witch Project, which makes the title a pretty clever pun. The story is....
In the fall of 2007, a student had been videoing his history project on “Kanaka Pete the Axe Murderer”. In January 2012 that same video was leaked from the local authorities. You decide if this video finally exposes the "Mystery of the Severed Feet".
The Kanaka Pete link is in in the original text. I was a bit skeptical, thinking maybe it was a clever way to fabricate evidence for the back story, but you can view a PDF version of a short history written in 1972 on the University of Hawaii library's website.
I haven't seen the film, but since we've been keeping abreast of what's afoot in Canada, it seems logical to make a short post about it. You can see the trailer on YouTube or on the film's website.
BTW, this is the second time we've come across a a history of violence on an island in association with this Canadian mystery. See Who stole the sole?
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
20 rosy fingers
The Aurora shooting on July 20th has excited a number of conspiratorial musings, which is par for the course, of course. What has caught my eye in these speculations is the recurrence of two themes which seem to have become almost requisite elements for any high-profile assassination, killing or mass murder.
The first theme is that of the body double, known in the trade as a political decoy; that is to say the alleged perp paraded before us on TV is not the real thing.
The second theme is the idea that the killer is a product of mind control.
These two themes are often brought together, as I've seen in the Aurora case, to construct the figure of the mind-controlled patsy.
The idea of the political decoy doesn't originate with the Kennedy assassination, but I think that as the über-myth of 20th century conspiracy literature, the assassination of JFK has become the source for the idea's subsequent application to various mass murders and killings. In what I've read about Aurora so far, an explicit connection is made to the JFK assassination--the body double is a typical tactic of a nebulous cryptocracy orchestrating events in order to further their own agenda. In this case the timing coincides with an important UN vote on an arms control resolution. Drudge actually plays into this; for several days running his page had links to articles about how in the wake of this tragedy, gun sales are actually increasing, contrary to the expectations of....(insert bugbear here). Conservative friends on Facebook have posted about how if everyone in the theater had been armed, the death toll would have been lower, also explicitly alluding to the UN vote. The conservative press, typified by the Examiner article linked to above, has been making the link unuambiguously.
The Gid, my fellow writer on this blog, provided his own take on this topic:
....it strikes me that neither Obama nor Romney nor any other big political figure in the US seems to making a gun control issue of the event (unless I've missed something). In that light, it's almost a bizzare twist on twilight language--it's totally in your face that politicians ought to be all over this in terms of gun control, but they aren't, as if it has noting to do with the topic ... The politicians have evoked The Law of Silence on the topic. It is, however, totally possible that I'm wrong since I haven't paid a lot of attention to the news over the last couple of weeks.
I first heard about the "second Oswald" in Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger in relation to countercultural mystery man Kerry Thornley. Thornley knew Oswald and had written about him before the assassination. Because of this he actually testified before the Warren commission. The first book on the topic was by one Richard Popkins appropriately titled The Second Oswald (1964) (review). There is also an alleged memo from Hoover stating "there is a possibility that an imposter is using Oswald's birth certificate."
In 2004, conspiracy theorist John Armstrong published a book entitled Harvey and Lee, which claimed to have identified a Lee Harvey Oswald double who had impersonated Oswald as part of an intelligence operation. Armstrong bases his claims on photographs which appear to show discrepancies in Oswald's physique and facial features. Armstrong cites contradictory eyewitness testimony from the Warren Report, placing Oswald in two different locations at the same time. (Wikipedia: Political Decoy)
Which is exactly how I first heard of the James Holmes patsy theory--a photo comparison. The only inexplicable difference I can make out in this photo is the shape of the nose, which is much more flared in the first picture. This could in fact be due to the angle of the head and the lighting. The general contours of the face, the eyebrows, the ears, the slope of the shoulders....all look pretty much to same to me. The mouth and eyes can be explained by the different expression. I concur though that the overall impression is that we are looking at photos of two different men, albeit very similar in appearance. I'm not going pass judgement, but the idea is out there whether I pass judgement or not!
My co-blogger, the Gid, looking at the same photos, was more judgemental:
I have to say that they look like different people to me. I find myself trying to convince myself that, yeah, sure those might be the same eyes, laughing then afraid, even though they look so different; that might be the same mouth, the same beard pattern, the same cheekbones, etc. Quite frankly, it's a lot easier for me to see these as two different people than as the same person.
On LoS, the political decoy has come up in the context of the death of Saddam Hussein and the death of Bin Laden. In the latter case, the internet was awash with forgeries rather quickly; total confusion and further conspiracy theories were spun off of the evidently faked photos of the dead Bin Laden.
While not exactly the same thing as a body double, the idea that Oswald acted alone is doubted by even the most non-conspiratorial of people. Likewise, some doubt has been cast on Holmes' lone-nut profile. According to one witness, some minutes before the shooting, a guy got a phone call inside the theater and went to the emergency exit, propping it open. A few minutes later, Holmes burst in and opened fire. This would suggest a partner. The name Holmes is evocative in this regard, for where Holmes goes, his partner Watson goes. Kind of like Batman and Robin.
(That said, the Police narrative is that the person who propped the door open was Holmes, who'd entered legally after buying a ticket. One would imagine this was so he could prop open the door, retrieve his weapons and return to carry out the attacks. The police believe he acted alone. The cell phone story could easily have been a ruse used by Holmes--an excuse to get up and go to the door. I think this is very plausible.)
John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy kind of bookend the period of major sixties' assassinations; both were noticably similar in appearance, both excited wild optimism. In and of itself, the brothers reinforce the theme of the double. Bobby was like a reincarnation of his older brother....and met the same grisly fate. This leads us to the second theme: mind control. It's with RFK that I recall first hearing mind-control allegations against an assassin. Sirhan Sirhan, his own name a double, is often seen as a kind of "Manchurian Candidate" a term taken from a 1959 novel by Richard Condon of the same name. In his novel (first adapted to film in 1962), a man is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist plot. Conspiracy theorists have had a field day with the "coincidence" that a book about a brainwashed assassin would appear in print a year before a real assassination so rife with suspicious inconsistencies that even the least paranoid among us smell something rotten in the official story.
In Holmes' case, people cite three things to build their case for mind control. The first is that Holmes acted inconsistenly. Why go on a murderous rampage and then meekly surrender to the police? Why rig one's house with explosives then warn the police that they are there? I've read it suggested that this indicates a kind of mental struggle in Holmes' mind, that his programmed mind was in conflict with the part of him that knew his actions to be wrong. I'm no mental health expert, but let's use the razor here. A man walks into a cinema and kills 12, injures dozens more, dressed like a character in the film about to play. I think it's fair to say the man is mentally unbalanced. So do we really need to ask why he was acting inconsistently to our rational minds? I mean, really? A crazy man acting odd? You don't say!
Other "evidence" is that Holmes was a student of neuroscience and that Aurora is home to a large military community. Although these are tantalizing facts, their presence in the story is indicative of nothing unless some concrete info can be found which makes it relevant. I've heard that suicide is quite high among psychologists; this doesn't mean they've been mind-controlled. To me it indicates that troubled people might actually want to go about investigating the way the mind works. Could this also be true for neuroscience? Was Holmes pushed in that direction by inner doubts about his own mental health? Who knows at this point.
As long as we're hound-dogging untenable theories, let's pause to make some connections between the movie and real (or least our conspiratorially-imagined versionion of real) life. The second of these three Batman flicks included the bad guy Two Face. Half his face was normal; the other was twisted and evil. He flipped a coin to decide who would live and who would die. Note, too, the "Sons of Batman", vigilante killers in Miller's Dark Knight Returns comic--surely nightmarish dopplegangers.
Two Face also appears in the Dark Knight Returns storyline, his face repaired and to all outward appearances, normal; he does remain Two Face in his head though, and he continues to terrorize Gotham City in disguise.
But that's not all! Consider, too, that Batman was a doppleganger of Bruce Wayne, created by death, the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents, who were murdered returning home from a movie, a Zorro film. Zorro is, of course, a doppelganger of Don Diego de la Vega. Bob Kane has described how Batman was influenced by Zorro in both look and mission.
As a last note along these lines connecting the films/stories with these conspiratorial musings, The Gid mentioned to me that he's always wondered if Bruce Wayne didn't kill his own parents. He seems to think that the whole mythology works much better that way. Of all the superhero franchises out there, Batman writers question the sanity of the hero the most. In the second installment of the Nolan trilogy, Batman comes across as crazy as the Joker, something alluded to in other stories as well I think. Batman is a man obsessed, leading a double life, one identity slipping into another. What is Two Face but a more grotesque version of the Batman? The Joker doesn't seem to have this inner dichotomy, however, being simply bat shit crazy.
Let's go back to the Manchurian Candidate and consider the question of why conspirators would go around announcing their intentions. In the synchromystic strain of conspiracy theory, the cyptocracy uses cues (called twilight language) to activate certain ideas and feeling to create a sense of recognition; they're fucking with us, basically, in order to heighten the fear and increase a sense of powerlessness before them. Another example cited is the Dark Knight Returns, a graphic novel which greatly influenced film director Nolan's vision of Batman in The Dark Knight Rises. In the comic, a red-haired guy goes into a theater and starts shooting people up, killing three. Of course, reason would suggest that Holmes was life imitating art. For others, the book was a blueprint, a kind of forewarning of what "they" had planned.
Aurora would actually be a good choice for "them" to execute their plan if this were (is) true. Aurora is the Goddess of Dawn. I, like many other Americans who were obliged to read it as kids, will no doubt think of Aurora in the Odyssey (recalling Odyssey Dawn, the name of the US operation in Libya), the rosy-fingered one who appears at transitional moments in the epic; symbolizing our hero's ongoing transformation. What better way to evoke a sense of awe than to subliminally trigger thoughts of a story where human strength is often crushed under the weight of divine intervention? In God(s) We Trust. And just as the gods control peole in the Greek epics, so do people mind-control people in the conspriatorial-epics of today. Aurora is also the name of dozens of municipalities across the US and the anglophone world; what better way to bring a distant event a little closer to home?
The title of the film is evocative in a similar sense to the name of the town, evoking the transition between night and day. The Dark Knight Rises could be read as a pun....dark night rises. Yet it's day which usually rises, with Aurora Night usually falls. These metaphors stem from what appears to the be the literal rise and fall of the sun each morning and evening--which coincide with humans rising and falling from sleep and from beds. Of course this inversion within the title of the film could mean just about whatever someone wanted it to mean....the world tuned upside down, for example. My co-blogger, The Gid, suggests that the title of the film is also meant to evoke the title of Miller's 4th book, The Dark Night Falls.
Dawn is of course a symbol we've looked at many times: the rising sun is a new day, a new world order, Luciferian illumination. Another god LoS has examined is Janus, in a post we called Blood and Fire. Janus was a two-faced god, a god of doubles. Like Lincoln's double visage in our last post, like the double-headed eagle we keep running across linked to black-ops by private mercenaries, it's an obssession of ours. As we said in the last post, the body-double idea evokes Janus, who in addition to his doppelgänger role, also served as the god of gateways; what is dawn but a kind of gateway?
Indeed. Aurora is called "The Gateway City". The interview with the guy claiming to have seen someone prop open the door was interviewed at Gateway High. Not so far from Columbine, as initial reports reminded us. And Columbine is the mistress of Harlequin....a kind of clown. And Harley Quinn, in some versions of the Batman story, is the female sweetheart of....the Joker. This female villain incidentally, was once Harleen Quinzel, Arkham Asylum psychiatrist....
Michael Hoffman, whose essay with James Shelby Downard entitled King Kill 33, is a classic of the twilight language texts, proposes that the JFK assassination was part of an elaborate Masonic Killing of the King ritual which culminated in the moon shot a few years later,. He's now written an article on the Aurora shooting entitled Predictive programming and ritual stagecraft: Batman movie shooting synchronicity. (The comments are intriguing as well).
In this essay he asks: Where's Watson?
Where indeed? At least, the conspiratorial rumblings suggest that Holmes did not act alone. The use of mind control and political decoys is a more fantastic proposition, the kind of stuff that in times past was grist for the fringe elements of the frings. But with the internet, the fringe has lept into the center. More correctly speaking, there is no more center, it's all fringe, arranged like knots in a vast net which is cast wide and harvests every detail, no matter how trivial, and hauls it into the boat. Looking at the squirming mass before us, it doesn't make "sense" in the traditonal way; merely appearing together is a kind of proof of something. History and journalism, the documented and demonstrable, are no longer part of the process. We simply throw around ideas, half-elaborated "facts" and hearsay, then run with it. There are so many narrative threads we can pull out of the tangle of facts, whatever suits our fancy.
The idea of twilight language is convenient because if nothing concrete ever comes of it, the ideas are still planted, the lack of follow-up is part of the process. As the theory goes, the plotters show us just enough to remind us they are there, but not enough to do anything about it. There will always be reasonable doubt. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, just as sometimes there are crazy people who go off the rails and commit horrendous, senseless crimes. Sometimes our need to make it sensible leads us to believe strange things, to make us wonder why a crazy person would do crazy things. We assume people are like most of us, who do things for a reason, try to escape punishment for our misdeeds, attempt to have some kind of consistency in our lives. When we see someone acting otherwise, it's hard to process, we are, perhaps, bewildered and alarmed for our own security. Or perhaps, for our own sanity. Could that, we ask, be me or my children in the theater, either victim or perpetrator? And it's in this state that we are susceptible to believing in conspiracies, especially a theory suggesting that an innocent person has been highjacked by mind control or a doppelganger.
If the world's a stage, and we are but actors, it's no wonder we're often curious to know who the director is. Of course it helps that in this case, it all took place in a theater showing a film in a franchise which has already given us a dose of real-life death. Even before the release of the last installment, Heath Ledger, Joker actor, was dead in an apparently accidentally overdoese of legal medications.
P.S.
I wanted to work the following image in somehow, but I'm not quite sure how it works in. One "right-wing" theory is that this is a staged event by the cryptocracy to further a gun control agenda. What if it were in fact a right-wing conspiracy to make it look like a gun-grabbing conspiracy? Wouldn't it be nifty to suggest this was a staged event, then point out that it isn't working and then link the shooter as Joker to the gun-grabber in Chief? I don't advocate this at all, but after I thought of the image below it crossed my mind that this was a pro-gun conspiracy disguised as a blatant anti-gun conspiracy.... This is how crazy this kind of stuff will start making you. Oddly enough, for some that's proof enough of a successful....conspiracy.
Obama is evoked, perhaps in a long and roundabout way, but so is Romney. The villain of this latest Batman film: Bane. What company, often seen as villainous, did Romney once lead? Bain & Co....
The first theme is that of the body double, known in the trade as a political decoy; that is to say the alleged perp paraded before us on TV is not the real thing.
The second theme is the idea that the killer is a product of mind control.
These two themes are often brought together, as I've seen in the Aurora case, to construct the figure of the mind-controlled patsy.
The idea of the political decoy doesn't originate with the Kennedy assassination, but I think that as the über-myth of 20th century conspiracy literature, the assassination of JFK has become the source for the idea's subsequent application to various mass murders and killings. In what I've read about Aurora so far, an explicit connection is made to the JFK assassination--the body double is a typical tactic of a nebulous cryptocracy orchestrating events in order to further their own agenda. In this case the timing coincides with an important UN vote on an arms control resolution. Drudge actually plays into this; for several days running his page had links to articles about how in the wake of this tragedy, gun sales are actually increasing, contrary to the expectations of....(insert bugbear here). Conservative friends on Facebook have posted about how if everyone in the theater had been armed, the death toll would have been lower, also explicitly alluding to the UN vote. The conservative press, typified by the Examiner article linked to above, has been making the link unuambiguously.
The Gid, my fellow writer on this blog, provided his own take on this topic:
....it strikes me that neither Obama nor Romney nor any other big political figure in the US seems to making a gun control issue of the event (unless I've missed something). In that light, it's almost a bizzare twist on twilight language--it's totally in your face that politicians ought to be all over this in terms of gun control, but they aren't, as if it has noting to do with the topic ... The politicians have evoked The Law of Silence on the topic. It is, however, totally possible that I'm wrong since I haven't paid a lot of attention to the news over the last couple of weeks.
I first heard about the "second Oswald" in Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger in relation to countercultural mystery man Kerry Thornley. Thornley knew Oswald and had written about him before the assassination. Because of this he actually testified before the Warren commission. The first book on the topic was by one Richard Popkins appropriately titled The Second Oswald (1964) (review). There is also an alleged memo from Hoover stating "there is a possibility that an imposter is using Oswald's birth certificate."
In 2004, conspiracy theorist John Armstrong published a book entitled Harvey and Lee, which claimed to have identified a Lee Harvey Oswald double who had impersonated Oswald as part of an intelligence operation. Armstrong bases his claims on photographs which appear to show discrepancies in Oswald's physique and facial features. Armstrong cites contradictory eyewitness testimony from the Warren Report, placing Oswald in two different locations at the same time. (Wikipedia: Political Decoy)
Which is exactly how I first heard of the James Holmes patsy theory--a photo comparison. The only inexplicable difference I can make out in this photo is the shape of the nose, which is much more flared in the first picture. This could in fact be due to the angle of the head and the lighting. The general contours of the face, the eyebrows, the ears, the slope of the shoulders....all look pretty much to same to me. The mouth and eyes can be explained by the different expression. I concur though that the overall impression is that we are looking at photos of two different men, albeit very similar in appearance. I'm not going pass judgement, but the idea is out there whether I pass judgement or not!
My co-blogger, the Gid, looking at the same photos, was more judgemental:
I have to say that they look like different people to me. I find myself trying to convince myself that, yeah, sure those might be the same eyes, laughing then afraid, even though they look so different; that might be the same mouth, the same beard pattern, the same cheekbones, etc. Quite frankly, it's a lot easier for me to see these as two different people than as the same person.
On LoS, the political decoy has come up in the context of the death of Saddam Hussein and the death of Bin Laden. In the latter case, the internet was awash with forgeries rather quickly; total confusion and further conspiracy theories were spun off of the evidently faked photos of the dead Bin Laden.
While not exactly the same thing as a body double, the idea that Oswald acted alone is doubted by even the most non-conspiratorial of people. Likewise, some doubt has been cast on Holmes' lone-nut profile. According to one witness, some minutes before the shooting, a guy got a phone call inside the theater and went to the emergency exit, propping it open. A few minutes later, Holmes burst in and opened fire. This would suggest a partner. The name Holmes is evocative in this regard, for where Holmes goes, his partner Watson goes. Kind of like Batman and Robin.
(That said, the Police narrative is that the person who propped the door open was Holmes, who'd entered legally after buying a ticket. One would imagine this was so he could prop open the door, retrieve his weapons and return to carry out the attacks. The police believe he acted alone. The cell phone story could easily have been a ruse used by Holmes--an excuse to get up and go to the door. I think this is very plausible.)
John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy kind of bookend the period of major sixties' assassinations; both were noticably similar in appearance, both excited wild optimism. In and of itself, the brothers reinforce the theme of the double. Bobby was like a reincarnation of his older brother....and met the same grisly fate. This leads us to the second theme: mind control. It's with RFK that I recall first hearing mind-control allegations against an assassin. Sirhan Sirhan, his own name a double, is often seen as a kind of "Manchurian Candidate" a term taken from a 1959 novel by Richard Condon of the same name. In his novel (first adapted to film in 1962), a man is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist plot. Conspiracy theorists have had a field day with the "coincidence" that a book about a brainwashed assassin would appear in print a year before a real assassination so rife with suspicious inconsistencies that even the least paranoid among us smell something rotten in the official story.
In Holmes' case, people cite three things to build their case for mind control. The first is that Holmes acted inconsistenly. Why go on a murderous rampage and then meekly surrender to the police? Why rig one's house with explosives then warn the police that they are there? I've read it suggested that this indicates a kind of mental struggle in Holmes' mind, that his programmed mind was in conflict with the part of him that knew his actions to be wrong. I'm no mental health expert, but let's use the razor here. A man walks into a cinema and kills 12, injures dozens more, dressed like a character in the film about to play. I think it's fair to say the man is mentally unbalanced. So do we really need to ask why he was acting inconsistently to our rational minds? I mean, really? A crazy man acting odd? You don't say!
Other "evidence" is that Holmes was a student of neuroscience and that Aurora is home to a large military community. Although these are tantalizing facts, their presence in the story is indicative of nothing unless some concrete info can be found which makes it relevant. I've heard that suicide is quite high among psychologists; this doesn't mean they've been mind-controlled. To me it indicates that troubled people might actually want to go about investigating the way the mind works. Could this also be true for neuroscience? Was Holmes pushed in that direction by inner doubts about his own mental health? Who knows at this point.
As long as we're hound-dogging untenable theories, let's pause to make some connections between the movie and real (or least our conspiratorially-imagined versionion of real) life. The second of these three Batman flicks included the bad guy Two Face. Half his face was normal; the other was twisted and evil. He flipped a coin to decide who would live and who would die. Note, too, the "Sons of Batman", vigilante killers in Miller's Dark Knight Returns comic--surely nightmarish dopplegangers.
Two Face also appears in the Dark Knight Returns storyline, his face repaired and to all outward appearances, normal; he does remain Two Face in his head though, and he continues to terrorize Gotham City in disguise.
But that's not all! Consider, too, that Batman was a doppleganger of Bruce Wayne, created by death, the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents, who were murdered returning home from a movie, a Zorro film. Zorro is, of course, a doppelganger of Don Diego de la Vega. Bob Kane has described how Batman was influenced by Zorro in both look and mission.
As a last note along these lines connecting the films/stories with these conspiratorial musings, The Gid mentioned to me that he's always wondered if Bruce Wayne didn't kill his own parents. He seems to think that the whole mythology works much better that way. Of all the superhero franchises out there, Batman writers question the sanity of the hero the most. In the second installment of the Nolan trilogy, Batman comes across as crazy as the Joker, something alluded to in other stories as well I think. Batman is a man obsessed, leading a double life, one identity slipping into another. What is Two Face but a more grotesque version of the Batman? The Joker doesn't seem to have this inner dichotomy, however, being simply bat shit crazy.
Let's go back to the Manchurian Candidate and consider the question of why conspirators would go around announcing their intentions. In the synchromystic strain of conspiracy theory, the cyptocracy uses cues (called twilight language) to activate certain ideas and feeling to create a sense of recognition; they're fucking with us, basically, in order to heighten the fear and increase a sense of powerlessness before them. Another example cited is the Dark Knight Returns, a graphic novel which greatly influenced film director Nolan's vision of Batman in The Dark Knight Rises. In the comic, a red-haired guy goes into a theater and starts shooting people up, killing three. Of course, reason would suggest that Holmes was life imitating art. For others, the book was a blueprint, a kind of forewarning of what "they" had planned.
Aurora would actually be a good choice for "them" to execute their plan if this were (is) true. Aurora is the Goddess of Dawn. I, like many other Americans who were obliged to read it as kids, will no doubt think of Aurora in the Odyssey (recalling Odyssey Dawn, the name of the US operation in Libya), the rosy-fingered one who appears at transitional moments in the epic; symbolizing our hero's ongoing transformation. What better way to evoke a sense of awe than to subliminally trigger thoughts of a story where human strength is often crushed under the weight of divine intervention? In God(s) We Trust. And just as the gods control peole in the Greek epics, so do people mind-control people in the conspriatorial-epics of today. Aurora is also the name of dozens of municipalities across the US and the anglophone world; what better way to bring a distant event a little closer to home?
The title of the film is evocative in a similar sense to the name of the town, evoking the transition between night and day. The Dark Knight Rises could be read as a pun....dark night rises. Yet it's day which usually rises, with Aurora Night usually falls. These metaphors stem from what appears to the be the literal rise and fall of the sun each morning and evening--which coincide with humans rising and falling from sleep and from beds. Of course this inversion within the title of the film could mean just about whatever someone wanted it to mean....the world tuned upside down, for example. My co-blogger, The Gid, suggests that the title of the film is also meant to evoke the title of Miller's 4th book, The Dark Night Falls.
Dawn is of course a symbol we've looked at many times: the rising sun is a new day, a new world order, Luciferian illumination. Another god LoS has examined is Janus, in a post we called Blood and Fire. Janus was a two-faced god, a god of doubles. Like Lincoln's double visage in our last post, like the double-headed eagle we keep running across linked to black-ops by private mercenaries, it's an obssession of ours. As we said in the last post, the body-double idea evokes Janus, who in addition to his doppelgänger role, also served as the god of gateways; what is dawn but a kind of gateway?
Indeed. Aurora is called "The Gateway City". The interview with the guy claiming to have seen someone prop open the door was interviewed at Gateway High. Not so far from Columbine, as initial reports reminded us. And Columbine is the mistress of Harlequin....a kind of clown. And Harley Quinn, in some versions of the Batman story, is the female sweetheart of....the Joker. This female villain incidentally, was once Harleen Quinzel, Arkham Asylum psychiatrist....
Michael Hoffman, whose essay with James Shelby Downard entitled King Kill 33, is a classic of the twilight language texts, proposes that the JFK assassination was part of an elaborate Masonic Killing of the King ritual which culminated in the moon shot a few years later,. He's now written an article on the Aurora shooting entitled Predictive programming and ritual stagecraft: Batman movie shooting synchronicity. (The comments are intriguing as well).
In this essay he asks: Where's Watson?
Where indeed? At least, the conspiratorial rumblings suggest that Holmes did not act alone. The use of mind control and political decoys is a more fantastic proposition, the kind of stuff that in times past was grist for the fringe elements of the frings. But with the internet, the fringe has lept into the center. More correctly speaking, there is no more center, it's all fringe, arranged like knots in a vast net which is cast wide and harvests every detail, no matter how trivial, and hauls it into the boat. Looking at the squirming mass before us, it doesn't make "sense" in the traditonal way; merely appearing together is a kind of proof of something. History and journalism, the documented and demonstrable, are no longer part of the process. We simply throw around ideas, half-elaborated "facts" and hearsay, then run with it. There are so many narrative threads we can pull out of the tangle of facts, whatever suits our fancy.
The idea of twilight language is convenient because if nothing concrete ever comes of it, the ideas are still planted, the lack of follow-up is part of the process. As the theory goes, the plotters show us just enough to remind us they are there, but not enough to do anything about it. There will always be reasonable doubt. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, just as sometimes there are crazy people who go off the rails and commit horrendous, senseless crimes. Sometimes our need to make it sensible leads us to believe strange things, to make us wonder why a crazy person would do crazy things. We assume people are like most of us, who do things for a reason, try to escape punishment for our misdeeds, attempt to have some kind of consistency in our lives. When we see someone acting otherwise, it's hard to process, we are, perhaps, bewildered and alarmed for our own security. Or perhaps, for our own sanity. Could that, we ask, be me or my children in the theater, either victim or perpetrator? And it's in this state that we are susceptible to believing in conspiracies, especially a theory suggesting that an innocent person has been highjacked by mind control or a doppelganger.
If the world's a stage, and we are but actors, it's no wonder we're often curious to know who the director is. Of course it helps that in this case, it all took place in a theater showing a film in a franchise which has already given us a dose of real-life death. Even before the release of the last installment, Heath Ledger, Joker actor, was dead in an apparently accidentally overdoese of legal medications.
P.S.
I wanted to work the following image in somehow, but I'm not quite sure how it works in. One "right-wing" theory is that this is a staged event by the cryptocracy to further a gun control agenda. What if it were in fact a right-wing conspiracy to make it look like a gun-grabbing conspiracy? Wouldn't it be nifty to suggest this was a staged event, then point out that it isn't working and then link the shooter as Joker to the gun-grabber in Chief? I don't advocate this at all, but after I thought of the image below it crossed my mind that this was a pro-gun conspiracy disguised as a blatant anti-gun conspiracy.... This is how crazy this kind of stuff will start making you. Oddly enough, for some that's proof enough of a successful....conspiracy.
Obama is evoked, perhaps in a long and roundabout way, but so is Romney. The villain of this latest Batman film: Bane. What company, often seen as villainous, did Romney once lead? Bain & Co....
Thanks to The Gid for his suggestions and additions, as well as copy editing. Some very great observations and clarifications are integrated into the text. Also some rearrangement of ideas. He had a lot to add about the Batman comics I'd forgotten. Some of his ideas are introduced with phrases such as "The Gid suggests..." written by the man himself. Hmmm. Writing about yourself in the third person? Talk about your double-mind....
Sorry Gid, that I nixed your PPS about Snoop Dogg. That's gonna be a post of its own....
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Lines in the sand: Crusaders, swarthy hordes and the Alamo
My inspiration for this post was a comment made by LoS comrade .sWineDriveR. in response to our post about the massacre in Oslo earlier this year ("Their ashes were then ground up and dumped into the Seine, so as to leave no relics behind.")
In that post I mentioned the movie Ironclad because of the coincidences: Templar protagonist; bloody tag-line (Bllood. Will. Run.); it was released within days of the attacks. sWD noted:
I want to say this company lives in the "sword and sorcery" neighborhood -- but it's more like a romanticization of European Heroic Mythology as exemplified in the last few years with:
[sWD here lists some recent films]
A fairly mixed lot, but confined to a fairly tight thematic subset. I'm probably falling feint with synchronicities, but I do think it's a significant development. After all, only ten years ago we were inundated with techno-dystopias. A kind of soul searching with blood and unwashed peasant titties?
In his list of films I imagine a subset of the subset I'd like to explore here, in chronological order. Not an exhaustive survey by any means; I'm not even sure it is useful. Forewarned is forearmed.
A little history
It was in Norman Davies' massive and excellent Europe: A History (recommended to me by sWineDriveR., incidentally), that I first read the idea that it was the rise of Islam that first gave rise to the notion of Europe.
Davies:
Islam, in fact, provided the solid, external shield within which Christendom could consolidate and be defined. In this sense, it provided the single greatest stimulus to what was eventually called 'Europe'.
I think this idea is debatable, of course, and I state it not as a fact but as an idea which has a long history.
Less debatable is that the history of "the West" and Islam has been one of recurrent conflict, from the early Middle Ages until the present time.
Consider that the Muslim calendar takes as its starting point the Hegira, or "flight of Muhammad." This was when Muhammad left Mecca for Medina in order to escape an assassination plot. This is dated 622 AD/CE by the Western calendar. Islam wasn't even a religion at this point. Yet by 718, Muslim armies had conquered the Iberian Peninsula, most of the Pyrenées and parts of southern France. The northward advancement of Muslim armies wasn't checked until a decisive Frankish victory over the invading armies in 732 at the Battle of Tours.
Although modern historians disagree over the significance of this battle, it was (and still is) a widely held belief that the battle "saved" Christianity and Europe from Islam. Most scholars, including Davies, accept that the victory made it possible for the Carolingians to dominate Europe for the next hundred years or so. As Davies puts it:
[The] establishment of Frankish power in western Europe shaped that continent's destiny and the Battle of Tours confirmed that power.
We have already seen how the Visigoth Pelagius had won a victory over the Moors ten years earlier at Covadonga, Asturias, later imagined by Christians to have been the start of the Reconquista, the effort to win Iberia back from the Muslim control. This process wasn't complete until 1491, the year before Columbus "discovered" America. An 800-year struggle!
The history of the Middle Ages is pretty much inseparable in the popular imagination from the Crusades, a series of mostly disastrous military campaigns to take the Holy Land from Muslim hands. The principal crusades took place between 1095 and 1291 and gave rise to the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights, all of whom will figure into our later discussions as heroes of our cinematic genre. The Crusades and Reconquista are pretty much part of the same global struggle defining the Middle Ages.
Contemporary context
When I think of my own childhood, my memories are peppered with incidents involving violent struggle with Muslims and Arabs. I recall the Iranian hostage crisis, a humiliating ordeal for the U.S., fraught with anxiety. I remember toilet paper with a picture of Khomeini and the slogan "In the bowl-a with the Ayatollah!" Then there were a series of aerial skirmishes with Libyan jets and the "mad Arab" Gaddafi. Beirut and the Hezbollah gave us hundreds of dead Marines. The Gulf War and the mad Arab Saddam Hussein, the World Trade Center Bombing, the USS Cole....a continuous barrage of conflict with Arab countries and terrorists. All this culminating (so far) in the spectacular trauma of September 11th. The hunt for the mad Arab bin-Laden and his al-Qaeda henchmen, the attempt to eliminate the Taliban, our current folly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Drones in untrustworthy "ally" Pakistan, suspected in all sorts of dirty anti-American deeds. And 30 years later, one of the hostage-takers in the Iran crisis is now the country's saber-rattling President. It goes on and on.
The events of the Arab Spring, while promising, have given some in the West cause for concern. Democracy in the Arab world is a noble goal....but what if the turmoil leads to the seizure of power by Islamic fundamentalists? In this, Islam itself is seen as the enemy.
The films I am going to look at have all been produced against this historical and contemporary backdrop.
While the "noble Moor" character crops up from time to time--see Costner's Robin Hood (1991) or Banderas in The 13th Warrior (1999), I would argue that the fact they are solitary figures alone in the West allow them to be friendly and noble. They are not a threat because they are not numerous. On the contrary, the films I will look at offer up a kind of "Alamo" scenario: A noble group of European types face incredible odds against a mostly mindless mass of foreign invaders. Not all of these invaders are Arabs, some are merely foreign, some aren't even human. But I would argue the dynamic is the same.
There are also two other films from this roughly decade-long slew of medieval epics which deserve mention. Kingdom of Heaven (2005) is set in 1184. The Swedish production of Arn - The Knight Templar (2007), treats more or less the same time frame. Both feature positive portrayals of Saladin, a nemesis of the Crusaders. In Arn, (the only film I mention in this post that I have not seen), the hero saves Saladin's life and the two become friends. In Kingdom, Saladin is portrayed in one scene returning a cross which has been knocked over to an upright position. Reviewers from the right were scandalized that the crusaders were portrayed so negatively. Robert Fisk has this to say:
Yet it is ironic that this movie elicited so much cynical comment in the West. Here is a tale that - unlike any other recent film - has captured the admiration of Muslims. Yet we denigrated it. Because Orlando Bloom turns so improbably from blacksmith to crusader to hydraulic engineer? Or because we felt uncomfortable at the way the film portrayed "us", the crusaders?
This post is not a "wake up call" nor a call to arms against Islam. This is not one of those "Islam is our greatest enemy" essays. Nor is it an accusation of racism against the films I will present. I am merely observing a set of shared elements within our current historical context.
The Films
The first of these films is actually a trilogy: The Lord of the Rings. The films were released between 2001 and 2003. Tolkien has long been accused of racism in the original books. The evilest of creatures, usually non-human, are invariably described as "swarthy" or "slant-eyed". But Tolkien was, by all accounts, actually quite liberal on issues of race and ethnicity for his time--yet he was still a product of his time. When I saw the last film, however, there was one scene which gave me pause. The whole trilogy is full of "Alamo moments", wherein a small group of heroic Western types takes on a massive horde of mindless Asiatic/Arab types. In the final battle, the enemy comes lumbering in on Elephants, in Turbans, with junk-like boats, etc. Their get-up, depending on the group, is clearly inspired by Arab, African or Asian models. Our heroes, on the contrary, though fantastic, are clearly inspired by European models.
The battle commences with a rousing speech by Aragon which ends like this:
Hold your ground, hold your ground! Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of woes and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!
I specifically remember "Men of the West" is emphasized, yelled really, at greater volume than the rest. I remember noting that is would certainly be interpreted as a racist commentary the moment I saw it. Whatever intention Tolkien or Jackson had aside, one cannot fail to see the implications of the speech in our day. Personally, I see it as entirely normal that a culture celebrates its virtues in the face of an "other". LOTR is arguably the most influential work of fantasy, ever (aside from the Bible). This aspect seems to have made its way into several films: a noble band fights a de-humanized horde and wins against incredible odds. In an earlier battle, Gimli and Legolas are competing for kills. As Legolas cuts Orcs down as easily as leaves of grass, he gleefully shouts out the number: "21!....(hack)....22!" No compunction, no guilt or uneasiness. His is unbridled joy.
2003. In 300, which .sWineDriveR. suggests is the first in this line (one of them, I'd agree) we have a film which is basically plotless and takes this unbridled killing as its central focus. It's basically pornography in this sense, anything other than violence is merely a pretext, a setup for the "sex scene". But 300 is also one long Alamo moment: The Spartans, 300 of them, are the only thing that stands between Greece (the West) and the Persians (the East). The Spartans are herein noble, brave, highly-skilled, heroic; the Persians are mindless, some of them not human, who, like the Orcs, keep coming and coming, struck down as fast as they come, neither brave nor fearful, merely full of blood-lust and fanaticism. They come on elephants, their leader an androgynous monster.
The film has also been accused of being fascist, racist, nationalist, etc., which is a debate I'll leave to others. Thematically, however it fits right in with the previously described scenes from LOTR and is nearly impossible (for me anyway) too see in any other way except against the backdrop of Western/Arab conflict.
Next film in the list is Black Death (2010). England. The year is 1348. A motley band of highly-skilled warriors, led by a disillusioned Hospitaller, along with a pious monk, make their way to a village led by a witch. There is no Alamo theme exactly, but the men are highly outnumbered. I saw this film almost at the same time as the much-derided Season of the Witch (2011). This latter takes place in 1344. A Teutonic Knight, a disillusioned crusader, leads motley band of kick-ass yet slightly unsavory characters, including a monk, into what is essentially a showdown against superior force. Their mission is to bring a witch to be judged.
I would argue that the disillusioned soldier returning from battle in the Middle East is in a sense a reflection of the current reality that hundreds of young men and women are in fact returning from combat in the Middle East, many of them much more cynical than when they left. Yet for all that, in these films, the characters retain a certain nobility of purpose, and integrity. And of course, they remain pretty much the one-man army of super-human skill which is a staple of American pop culture, from Rambo to Batman.
Ironclad (2011). England in 1215. King Henry is forced by the feudal nobility to sign the Magna Carta, but Henry's not to happy about it. The plot basically revolves around a bloody siege. Again, a motley band, not quite savory but ultimately brave and above all, highly-skilled, hold off a vastly superior force, in this case foreign mercenaries Western values are extolled..."liberty" is thrown about every once and a while. There something of Braveheart (1995), which is set at the end of the 13th century. Like 300 it is one long Alamo scenario.
Another example isn't a film, but a series: Game of Thrones (2011). The hero is played by the lead actor in Black Death and is much the same: a man willing to die for principle, forged by war, well-meaning but cynical. What GoT shares with our LOTR meme is that the danger lurking in the background is two-fold. One is a zombie-like menace from the North, at this point in the series not so developed. A lot of the action takes place in the Westerlands, as various interests scheme for the throne. But in the east live a people known as the Dothraki, clearly based on the Mongols. They are vaguely Asiatic, copper-skinned, nomadic, somehow more wild than the clearly European Starks, Lannisters, what have you. Like LOTR and 300, the Dothraki have been accused of being a racist stereotype.
Just now, running a check on something, I came across this:
Maybe all of this is in the book and the producers are just staying faithful to the source material, but that doesn't change the fact that this is an unfortunate trope that crops up all too frequently in popular sci-fi and fantasy. Think of the turban-wearing, generically evil Men of the South in The Lord of the Rings, or the also turban-wearing, dark skinned Calormenes who help literally end the world in The Chronicles of Narnia, or the menacing Persian army (which is historically real but never had a leader who dressed like an S&M queen) in the movie version of 300.
Obviously, I'm not the only one who sees a connection here.
I have spoken about "Alamo moments". The story of the Alamo is that in 1836, during the Texas Revolution, a group of 189 Revolutionaries held off an assault on the Alamo mission by thousands of Mexican troops. Instead of surrendering, they decided to resist. A famous anecdote has it that Colonel William Travis drew a line in the sand and said, "Those who are with me, join me on this side of the line. Those who aren't are free to go." This line in the sand was evoked by George Bush against Iraq, not just in the sense of joining him, but as in defining a line against aggression from the mad Arab Saddam Hussein. Looking for the origin of Bush's metaphor, I found out about the Alamo. But the quote has an earlier use; history tells us it was first used by the Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae, the very battle depicted in 300!
I would also point out that Martel's aforementioned victory at the Battle of Tours served and still serves as a "line in the sand" moment. Although, estimates vary, Martel and the Franks were outnumbered by their Moorish foes, and the casualties were one-sided. 1100 Frank to 12,000 Moors, a ratio of more than 10 to one.
Final thoughts
While the "noble Moor" character crops up from time to time--see Costner's Robin Hood (1991) or Banderas in The 13th Warrior (1999), I would argue that the fact they are solitary figures alone in the West allow them to be friendly and noble. They are not a threat because they are not numerous. On the contrary, the films I will look at offer up a kind of "Alamo" scenario: A noble group of European types face incredible odds against a mostly mindless mass of foreign invaders. Not all of these invaders are Arabs, some are merely foreign, some aren't even human. But I would argue the dynamic is the same.
There are also two other films from this roughly decade-long slew of medieval epics which deserve mention. Kingdom of Heaven (2005) is set in 1184. The Swedish production of Arn - The Knight Templar (2007), treats more or less the same time frame. Both feature positive portrayals of Saladin, a nemesis of the Crusaders. In Arn, (the only film I mention in this post that I have not seen), the hero saves Saladin's life and the two become friends. In Kingdom, Saladin is portrayed in one scene returning a cross which has been knocked over to an upright position. Reviewers from the right were scandalized that the crusaders were portrayed so negatively. Robert Fisk has this to say:
Yet it is ironic that this movie elicited so much cynical comment in the West. Here is a tale that - unlike any other recent film - has captured the admiration of Muslims. Yet we denigrated it. Because Orlando Bloom turns so improbably from blacksmith to crusader to hydraulic engineer? Or because we felt uncomfortable at the way the film portrayed "us", the crusaders?
This post is not a "wake up call" nor a call to arms against Islam. This is not one of those "Islam is our greatest enemy" essays. Nor is it an accusation of racism against the films I will present. I am merely observing a set of shared elements within our current historical context.
The Films
The first of these films is actually a trilogy: The Lord of the Rings. The films were released between 2001 and 2003. Tolkien has long been accused of racism in the original books. The evilest of creatures, usually non-human, are invariably described as "swarthy" or "slant-eyed". But Tolkien was, by all accounts, actually quite liberal on issues of race and ethnicity for his time--yet he was still a product of his time. When I saw the last film, however, there was one scene which gave me pause. The whole trilogy is full of "Alamo moments", wherein a small group of heroic Western types takes on a massive horde of mindless Asiatic/Arab types. In the final battle, the enemy comes lumbering in on Elephants, in Turbans, with junk-like boats, etc. Their get-up, depending on the group, is clearly inspired by Arab, African or Asian models. Our heroes, on the contrary, though fantastic, are clearly inspired by European models.
The battle commences with a rousing speech by Aragon which ends like this:
Hold your ground, hold your ground! Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of woes and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!
I specifically remember "Men of the West" is emphasized, yelled really, at greater volume than the rest. I remember noting that is would certainly be interpreted as a racist commentary the moment I saw it. Whatever intention Tolkien or Jackson had aside, one cannot fail to see the implications of the speech in our day. Personally, I see it as entirely normal that a culture celebrates its virtues in the face of an "other". LOTR is arguably the most influential work of fantasy, ever (aside from the Bible). This aspect seems to have made its way into several films: a noble band fights a de-humanized horde and wins against incredible odds. In an earlier battle, Gimli and Legolas are competing for kills. As Legolas cuts Orcs down as easily as leaves of grass, he gleefully shouts out the number: "21!....(hack)....22!" No compunction, no guilt or uneasiness. His is unbridled joy.
2003. In 300, which .sWineDriveR. suggests is the first in this line (one of them, I'd agree) we have a film which is basically plotless and takes this unbridled killing as its central focus. It's basically pornography in this sense, anything other than violence is merely a pretext, a setup for the "sex scene". But 300 is also one long Alamo moment: The Spartans, 300 of them, are the only thing that stands between Greece (the West) and the Persians (the East). The Spartans are herein noble, brave, highly-skilled, heroic; the Persians are mindless, some of them not human, who, like the Orcs, keep coming and coming, struck down as fast as they come, neither brave nor fearful, merely full of blood-lust and fanaticism. They come on elephants, their leader an androgynous monster.
The film has also been accused of being fascist, racist, nationalist, etc., which is a debate I'll leave to others. Thematically, however it fits right in with the previously described scenes from LOTR and is nearly impossible (for me anyway) too see in any other way except against the backdrop of Western/Arab conflict.
Next film in the list is Black Death (2010). England. The year is 1348. A motley band of highly-skilled warriors, led by a disillusioned Hospitaller, along with a pious monk, make their way to a village led by a witch. There is no Alamo theme exactly, but the men are highly outnumbered. I saw this film almost at the same time as the much-derided Season of the Witch (2011). This latter takes place in 1344. A Teutonic Knight, a disillusioned crusader, leads motley band of kick-ass yet slightly unsavory characters, including a monk, into what is essentially a showdown against superior force. Their mission is to bring a witch to be judged.
I would argue that the disillusioned soldier returning from battle in the Middle East is in a sense a reflection of the current reality that hundreds of young men and women are in fact returning from combat in the Middle East, many of them much more cynical than when they left. Yet for all that, in these films, the characters retain a certain nobility of purpose, and integrity. And of course, they remain pretty much the one-man army of super-human skill which is a staple of American pop culture, from Rambo to Batman.
Ironclad (2011). England in 1215. King Henry is forced by the feudal nobility to sign the Magna Carta, but Henry's not to happy about it. The plot basically revolves around a bloody siege. Again, a motley band, not quite savory but ultimately brave and above all, highly-skilled, hold off a vastly superior force, in this case foreign mercenaries Western values are extolled..."liberty" is thrown about every once and a while. There something of Braveheart (1995), which is set at the end of the 13th century. Like 300 it is one long Alamo scenario.
Another example isn't a film, but a series: Game of Thrones (2011). The hero is played by the lead actor in Black Death and is much the same: a man willing to die for principle, forged by war, well-meaning but cynical. What GoT shares with our LOTR meme is that the danger lurking in the background is two-fold. One is a zombie-like menace from the North, at this point in the series not so developed. A lot of the action takes place in the Westerlands, as various interests scheme for the throne. But in the east live a people known as the Dothraki, clearly based on the Mongols. They are vaguely Asiatic, copper-skinned, nomadic, somehow more wild than the clearly European Starks, Lannisters, what have you. Like LOTR and 300, the Dothraki have been accused of being a racist stereotype.
Just now, running a check on something, I came across this:
Maybe all of this is in the book and the producers are just staying faithful to the source material, but that doesn't change the fact that this is an unfortunate trope that crops up all too frequently in popular sci-fi and fantasy. Think of the turban-wearing, generically evil Men of the South in The Lord of the Rings, or the also turban-wearing, dark skinned Calormenes who help literally end the world in The Chronicles of Narnia, or the menacing Persian army (which is historically real but never had a leader who dressed like an S&M queen) in the movie version of 300.
Obviously, I'm not the only one who sees a connection here.
I have spoken about "Alamo moments". The story of the Alamo is that in 1836, during the Texas Revolution, a group of 189 Revolutionaries held off an assault on the Alamo mission by thousands of Mexican troops. Instead of surrendering, they decided to resist. A famous anecdote has it that Colonel William Travis drew a line in the sand and said, "Those who are with me, join me on this side of the line. Those who aren't are free to go." This line in the sand was evoked by George Bush against Iraq, not just in the sense of joining him, but as in defining a line against aggression from the mad Arab Saddam Hussein. Looking for the origin of Bush's metaphor, I found out about the Alamo. But the quote has an earlier use; history tells us it was first used by the Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae, the very battle depicted in 300!
I would also point out that Martel's aforementioned victory at the Battle of Tours served and still serves as a "line in the sand" moment. Although, estimates vary, Martel and the Franks were outnumbered by their Moorish foes, and the casualties were one-sided. 1100 Frank to 12,000 Moors, a ratio of more than 10 to one.
Final thoughts
Looking back over what I've written, I fear this is one of those posts that seemed good in my head, but not so much on paper. The links I see may simply stem from the fact I saw these movies more less at the same time.
The thesis that "Europe" is inconceivable without Islam is provocative; such a seemingly unified and quick-moving foe provided an "other" against which the differences between Christian peoples seemed lessened. "We hang together or we hang separately", to pull a temporal fast one with a Franklin quote. The encounter with Islam certainly had a profound effect on European culture. Arab scholars had preserved a lot of classical learning which found its way back to Europe with returning Crusaders, ultimately contributing in no small way to the Italian Renaissance; these first inklings are generally dated to the end of the 13th century: simultaneous with the end of the major Crusades.
In addition to the preservation and transmission of Classical culture, the Arabs also contributed a great deal to European scientific culture in the fields of optics, mathematics (especially Algebra) and medicine. International trade was given a great boost and it was to protect pilgrims that the Templars invented the credit system which pre-dated modern banking. Not to overstate things; who knows where Europe would have headed if it hadn't thrown so much time and effort into what was ultimately a futile endeavor. Yet it would be foolish to dismiss Arab influence out of hand.
There's certainly a lot more to say on this topic and many more films to be seen. I'm sure there are far more egregious examples of the Alamo theme. In one of Robert Anton Wilson's books he quotes the 1935 film The Crusades. A female lead played by Loretta Young says to Richard the Lion-Heart, "You just gotta save Christianity, Richard, and you gotta!" I laugh at this every time I read it. Simpler times, and like the rest of this post, I'm not quite sure what my point is in quoting it. I certainly feel this post in incomplete, but I also feel that given my uncertainty, there's not much cause to continue.
That said, I think there's a lot to be considered regarding the ongoing identification between elements of the far right and the Crusades. Anders Behring Breivik, the Oslo killer, identified himself as a Templar and believed he was waging "Christian war." His rhetoric is that of the lone figure fighting of an onslaught of immigrants which he feels are, in effect, invaders. His manifesto (PDF link) describes his actions as the continuation of the Crusades, essentially unresolved from the Middle Ages to the present.
As we've already mentioned in another post, Xe (formerly Blackwater) founder Eric Prince has been accused of viewing
....himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe....To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.
Which may or may not be true and in all fairness we should emphasize the "may not" over the "may". If it is true, it's far more sinister and potentially dangerous than a fellow such as Breizik. These people are wealthier and better armed, both with guns and government contracts. Prince would not be alone. Far right Catholics invariably see themselves as upholding the Crusader spirit. The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), to cite one example, publishes a magazine called Crusade which glorifies the exploits of Christian heroes such as our friend Pelagius; the "threat" of Islam is a major preoccupation in their writings. Of course, this is not solely a Catholic viewpoint. Protestants of all stripes share the rhetoric.
I'm not here to say whether or not the TFP is right or wrong, but to propose that it's worth discussing the reality that their ideas exist and to determine to what extent these ideas are held among Westerners and, finally, to what extent they are reflected and/or perpetuated by contemporary Western cinema.
Hopefully some one out there will take up the mantle and charge headlong into it, like some hero from one of the movies herein described. Good luck, pilgrim.
There's certainly a lot more to say on this topic and many more films to be seen. I'm sure there are far more egregious examples of the Alamo theme. In one of Robert Anton Wilson's books he quotes the 1935 film The Crusades. A female lead played by Loretta Young says to Richard the Lion-Heart, "You just gotta save Christianity, Richard, and you gotta!" I laugh at this every time I read it. Simpler times, and like the rest of this post, I'm not quite sure what my point is in quoting it. I certainly feel this post in incomplete, but I also feel that given my uncertainty, there's not much cause to continue.
That said, I think there's a lot to be considered regarding the ongoing identification between elements of the far right and the Crusades. Anders Behring Breivik, the Oslo killer, identified himself as a Templar and believed he was waging "Christian war." His rhetoric is that of the lone figure fighting of an onslaught of immigrants which he feels are, in effect, invaders. His manifesto (PDF link) describes his actions as the continuation of the Crusades, essentially unresolved from the Middle Ages to the present.
As we've already mentioned in another post, Xe (formerly Blackwater) founder Eric Prince has been accused of viewing
....himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe....To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.
Which may or may not be true and in all fairness we should emphasize the "may not" over the "may". If it is true, it's far more sinister and potentially dangerous than a fellow such as Breizik. These people are wealthier and better armed, both with guns and government contracts. Prince would not be alone. Far right Catholics invariably see themselves as upholding the Crusader spirit. The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), to cite one example, publishes a magazine called Crusade which glorifies the exploits of Christian heroes such as our friend Pelagius; the "threat" of Islam is a major preoccupation in their writings. Of course, this is not solely a Catholic viewpoint. Protestants of all stripes share the rhetoric.
I'm not here to say whether or not the TFP is right or wrong, but to propose that it's worth discussing the reality that their ideas exist and to determine to what extent these ideas are held among Westerners and, finally, to what extent they are reflected and/or perpetuated by contemporary Western cinema.
Hopefully some one out there will take up the mantle and charge headlong into it, like some hero from one of the movies herein described. Good luck, pilgrim.
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