Die for the Birdy! STAGEFRIGHT: AQUARIUS!

For the Hugo Stiglitz Italian Horror Blogathon 

If STAGEFRIGHT wasn't also a 1950 Hitchcock film, a 2013 Minnie Driver horror musical, a 1980 film AKA NIGHTMARES, I believe STAGEFRIGHT AKA STAGEFRIGHT: AQUARIUS (1987) would be a renowned horror classic, instead of a just a secret juicy bit of self-reflexivity (ala EYES OF LAURA MARS) now OOP. it was originally called DELIRIA but that's a girl's name. Call it OWL WITH A CHAINSAW and the above image might be as iconic as it deserves. That would dampen its uncanniness, though. And for an Italian horror enthusiast like myself (and so many worthy others), finding a gem like this hiding in plain sight is positively ripping!

Directed by Michel Soavi (the Argento mentee behind the ingenious DELLAMORE DELLAMORTE AKA CEMETERY MAN), with post-production foley and lip sync recording good as to be invisible, this HALLOWEEN meets 42ND STREET 80s slasher film is riveting, scary, funny, catty, and post-modern without being tedious or sadistic. See it alone in the dead of night, with headphones blocking all outside noise, and all the lights off, tune body and soul to the "tick-tock momentum" (as discussed in PHANTASM, HOUSE OF THE DEVIL) and thrill to one of the best initial WTF moments of metatextuality since the first Jet fell out of rank in a sudden graceful ballet move. His name? Action.

So it's a dark and rainy night. An old rehearsal space way outside of the city is preparing a sleazy pre-Giuliani Times Square-style dancetacular: a fire in a trash can blazes center stage for crazy flickering shadows; graffiti adorns the fake alleyway walls, second floor windows hold agape witnesses; a subway-skirted Marilyn blasts a saxophone on the balcony; a crazy killer in an owl head comes diving out in a swirl of modern jazz. The director, Peter (David Brandon), gets angry because star Alicia (Barbara Cupisti) doesn't quite get it either, but he thinks the public will swill it up. The suit-wearing producer civilian worries they'll get closed down by the cops (Italy has a long history of 'regional' censorship). Then in a classic move right out of pre-code Warner Brothers, Alicia sprains her ankle - how cliche, notes Peter. And so it is also the deliberately artificial performances of some of the actors that works to heighten their stock theatrical 'types': lecher producer, bitchy but nurturing gay dancer (Giovanni Lombardo Radice), catty slut-and-comer (Mary Sellers), and a black cat (Lucifer) crossing the superstitious wardrobe mistress's path. Turns out Peter was right not wanting to let her leave, as the hospital she goes to turns out to be a mental institution, and a notorious axe murderer has just been admitted, tied to a stretcher... and he doesn't intend to stay long. He and Alicia share one of those uncanny 'see you soon, Clarice' glances as they pass each other in the hallway, like they get a weird glimmer of their own killer-final girl pair bonding to come.

This all may smack of ROTM slasher antics, but as soon as the killer first appears in the giant owl's head, walks nervously on stage and actually strangles and stabs his designated first victim, while Peter yells encouragement, any planned pause for a bathroom trip and drink refill is forgotten. It's got a blood-chilling sense of the meta-macabre; I can imagine seeing this in a theater at night in Times Square and being afraid to turn around in my seat. When what's on stage is so close to what's going on around your seat that you that you can't tell if you're acting like a spectator in a theater about to get strangled from behind or just actually one then you know it's going to be a bumpy ride, and there's no seat belt left to fasten. it's been sliced off by the grindhouse slasher!

And I know the feeling: years ago I was studying to be a drug and alcohol counselor and was interning at Bellevue when one evening I dislocated my kneecap playing a Jim Morrison-esque drunk rock star in an extended improv on the crumbling Bellevue theater stage. None of the fellow actors--all residents-- thought I was really hurt, spooking the pigeons in the rafters as I screamed and heard it as from a distance. They feigned calling an ambulance and feigned concern until finally I got them to stop feigning and follow my pointing finger down to where my knee cap was knocked to the side; the pain was so bad I had to laugh at how inauthentic my screams sounded to me, like John Barrymore cackling at the irony that he couldn't act 'real' pain when it struck him. It took them ten minutes to finally realize I was hurt and not just a great actor.

Even in improv, there should always be a safe word.

Soavi uses every opportunity to fuck with the fourth wall, to collapse the safe word boundary in ways not seen since the musical numbers of Busby Berkeley spilled off the stage and into the dilated pupil of a twirling dancing girl-cello. The only key out of the NITE OWL rehearsal building begins to loom overhead like a giant mirage; running killer POVs follow electrical cord paths as if on wings of a dream; weird mannequins gawk idly and you don't put it past Soavi to substitute real actresses in mannequin poses in some shots and not even call attention to it; a reel-to-reel tape of the Bernard Herrmann-ish musical score that the killer blasts at inopportune times makes Peter's determined vengeance seem like a Warner Brothers cartoon turned opera; a broken bottle of stage blood that looks exactly like the fake-ish 'real' blood, they run together.

There is no safe word.

The initial effect of all this is giddy confusion, with actors and set and costume designers scurrying all over the place and the genres and layers of textuality muddled but that is just what made SCREAM scary, because horror movie trivia and overlapping confusion was such an integral part of our shared film heritage that we felt vulnerable watching, out of our safe zone of set responses. Where did the VCR playing HALLOWEEN in SCREAM's climactic party end and ours playing SCREAM begin? HALLOWEEN's THE THING, and FORBIDDEN PLANET (see my analysis here) are on as well, each relatively comfortable and unscary, both 'comfort films' for me and I'm sure Carpenter as well. That kind of intertextual realism is still underused in horror cinema, as if its so obvious it slips their minds. Soavi doesn't name check, he's way too subtle for that, so subtle I'm not even sure some of the brilliance I glean in his films is intentional, and that only adds to the luster.

The only way it could be better is if it ended at dawn (it makes films like THE WARRIORS, OVER THE EDGE and SCREAM so awesome), but other than that there's little fault to find, especially not in the amazing performance of Barbara Cupisti. We can read her thoughts as they flicker across her face as easily as if it they're in an old lady font, yet she's never overacting. She's a frickin' genius.

Just when you think it can't get any weirder or cooler, the killer, thinking everyone is dead, takes the stage. Man, oh man. I like that he treats Lucifer nicely, and the cat rewards him by... well I wouldn't spoil the tale but anyone who likes their post-modernism rich in bright reds, purples and dark grays, and doesn't mind their soul becoming temporarily stained and bent out of shape like the first time they saw DEEP RED, then Soavi's StageFright (the title's actual spelling) is the girl for you. There's even a great little wink trick ending that's just enough weird to blow your mind figuratively, diegetically, and metatextually, leaving you with shaky hands eager to applaud... even though you're all alone and it's three AM and you don't want to arouse the attention of whatever's flapping outside your chamber door... maybe it'll just go away... but you know how we night owls love a small audience.

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Remembering Lou Reed + A Spotify Mix, GET CRAZY, and Links

Lou died today. He was 71, the same age my dad would be (had he not died two years ago this very week). Hearing about my dad's death made feel a crack in my heart for the first time ever, a thunderous splintering snap. I still haven't recovered. I then lost my dog Inga a few months ago, that brought some tears, but losing Lou isn't a cry-worthy thing. But it is like losing the smooth relaxed but dangerous bass line that's been underwriting my soul since I first heard it as a teenager. Lou's deadpan serpentine bass vibration held me suspended above the dismal American abyss for so long I forgot I was still being lifted by it; now that it's gone, the silence is deafening, and it's a long way to fall.

When I first started hunting down his canon in local used punk rock record shops as a snotty 17 year-old I didn't even know we had the same birthday (March 2nd), we both wear glasses and we both majored in English Lit at Syracuse University. He supposedly stayed in my same dorm (Flint Hall), and like him I moved off campus soon after and formed a band. It was before the internet, or any bio on him, so one couldn't just know all these things. All I knew is, I had been adrift in a myopic solipsistic teenage alienation for years, and Lou came along and said, "hey kid, don't settle for walking." He didn't lead me out of the abyss, but he helped me contextualize the pain into a grand artistic persona, a blue mask to reflect the glare of a hostile world back into its own eyes. He wasn't singing about love me do / you know I love you, he was singing about the agonizing pain of coming home from a dark and dirty fun party and instantly feeling paralyzingly lonely.


I saw him play, twice, at the Ritz, in '85, at the start of, and end of, his tour supporting Mistrial. Disappointing, since Robert Quine wasn't there, but Fernando Saunders was on fretless bass and I knew then I had to become a bassist. I finally joined a band sophomore year, when I was already on my way to becoming an acid rock hippie freak, but I still sang "Sweet Jane" and "I'm Waiting for My Man" and sometimes "Heroin" during the third set, and I was already making token struggles against my burgeoning alcoholism, again not knowing Lou was a drunk, too, and wrote "The Power of Positive Drinking," the sweetest justification for not getting sober when you know you need to, and then "Underneath the Bottle" an album or so later when he realized hey, sooner or later you're going to have terrible DTs, so don't settle for walking, slowing your pace. Embrace the shakes.

In my late 20s living in a midtown loft with my lead guitarist, I would spent hours and hours hyperventilating over the toilet from 2-6 AM, nonstop, trying to keep down enough vodka to stop dry heaving. I was so sick from alcohol poisoning I couldn't hold down the liquor I needed to not suffer the horrors of alcoholic convulsions. I was caught in a vicious circle. My only company was Lou Reed in everything and Nic Cage in LEAVING LAS VEGAS. Sometimes I had a stolen-from-my-girlfriend Librium to help me come down but more often than not I'd drop it and be crawling around for hours in panicked desperation. Lou had a song for that too: "Waves of fear, squat on the floor looking for some pill, the liquor is gone... " My decision to be so open about all my drug and alcohol use, to be blunt about my divorce, band difficulties, emotional rises and falls, losses and regrets, and ambivalence, the courage to let it all hang the stuff most people hide come out in the open, crafting art (or art criticism) from the medium of my own guts, it all comes from him.

None of that means I knew him personally, but I felt like I did. A lot of us did, it was a personal thing. We didn't even mind he could be a total shit some of the time, to his fans, to his world. He never tried to hide his venom, if he had he wouldn't have been him anymore. "Give me an issue, I'll give you a tissue," Lou snarls on Take No Prisoners. "And you can wipe my ass with it."

Sometimes, like after I read one of his unauthorized bios, I began to hate him, but I always came back, because he never sold out or got repetitive. Suddenly after a slump or two there was New York, a new classic, and one of my favorites, the Warhol eulogy record with John Cale Songs for Drella -so perfect and simple with Lou's guitar and Cale's viola never sounding clearer or better together, as if Warhol's spirit buried the hatchet and brought out a playful reverence that they never seemed to share before even on the first album.

But he could be a shit. Maybe it was because he let us all feel like we knew him, and that level of broad openness in one's art is always going to have drawbacks, like finding out the most fun and awesome guy you ever dated is a thief and junkie, and so what, are you going to walk out on him? Lou never stole from us, and he gave so so much of himself that a lot of us freaks, who have never felt this way about any other artist before or since, could forgive his insecure lash-outs at others. He was the cool older brother who brought us to all the dangerous places most young suburban kids never see. He didn't leave us at home with mom, afraid we'd cramp his style. He didn't abandon us.

So I'm not going to cry this time. I'm just going to make a Spotify mix and take a look back at the 30 odd years I've been a Lou Reed disciple, and realize if I'm anything, or anyone, or have any sense of belonging to the gritty New York streets I haunted for the past 20 years (before moving to goddamned Brooklyn) it's because of Lou.

My piece for McSweeny's on "Venus in Furs"

"When Lou sang of the “whiplash girl-child in the dark” who said things like “taste the whip, / now bleed for me,” suddenly I could take the violent reproach of my aching hormones and twist it like a sword until I disemboweled the old me. The result was like dropping nitroglycerin on an oil fire, an alchemical reaction that set me free. I knew that I was, at heart, a sadomasochist."

See Lou in the 1983 classic, Get Crazy.

"Death has brought you close to art as we know it today," says Lou in GET CRAZY, to Max Wolf, ailing manager of the film's equivalent of Bill Graham's Fillmore East. The film starts rough but develops a sweaty-palmed rock intensity that might recall the best rock movies and rock shows and flashbacks of any drug-fueled moments of transcendental pagan abandon, the wild fury of the mosh pit, and onwards.

King Blues sings "Mannish Boy!" Malcolm McDowell plays a T. Rex / Mick Jagger hybrid. There's a great Iggy Pop-ish animal man; a scabby punk rock poetess ala Patti Smith; a flooded bathroom with a shark swimming around it; a giant hypo; Daniel Stern pausing to inhale some smoke from a $1 hookah hit-sellin' Rastafarian in one of the stalls; Iggy prompting people to jump off the balcony, including Paul Bartel; a Satanic pimp alien coke dealer; magical LSD in the water cooler; a crowd-surfing refrigerator; acid rock hippy freaks; a twitchy fire inspector, and that's just the tip of Malcolm's talking penis. It's the beginning / of a new age.

Here's my Lou Reed Spotify Mix, adjusted to reflect a tribute / eulogy / farewell / ode I think Lou would like. He loved assembling new CDs from his old catalog, and he has a flock of cool Spotify mixes himself, that he made, of other musicians he liked. My Lou Mix has no "Sweet Jane" or "Walk on the Wild Side." Too easy. This is the stuff I loved at the time, me alone, in my room, with headphones, blotting out the parents and the world outside the New York Streets. This is the weird stuff no one else would know, lada lie... RIP Lou Reed. xo




And lastly, his Warhol "Screen Test." Goodnight, ladies

POSTSCRIPT: Please also read my piece on Slant, The Lou Reed Discobiography.

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The Satanic Blondes of '66: INCUBUS, EYE OF THE DEVIL

Ah 1966, what an excellent year for human sacrifice. Still two years off from ROSEMARY'S BABY and the sudden hipster clout it engendered, '66's INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL are twin heralds to Polanski's masterpiece: one co-stars Polanski's wife and mirrors Rosemary's feeling of being shut out of some grand conspiracy; the other is like her crazy Esperanto dream. I can only imagine how much better each would be had they been made in 1969 instead, when the fangs were properly installed in the balls of horror cinema. Of course by then the ingenue of EYE couldn't have been in it, and she's the only thing worth watching for. There are those who say it was Roman's getting wife Sharon Tate the EYE role that caused the devil to stir from his liquid slumber and languorously stretch through time to snatch her at the prime two-souls-in-one moment via Manson. But they're crazy, right?

There's a rumor that the many weird rumors of strange accidents and Satanic coincidences during ROSEMARY's production originate in ballyhoo maestro William Castle's imagination. Some say he took his gimmickry to a whole new level, way way past chair buzzers and skeletons on strings, too far, perhaps, because when the subject is Satan, our mostly Christian nation's water cooler gossip heats to boiling. As John Ford or Sutter Kane would say, when everyone believes the legend, the truth warps to accommodate it.

That's where it gets super tricky. These pagan devil cultures offer a much more fatalistic world view than the sacrifice-free Christianity. With Satan there's a gruesome payoff where the subject learns he's "always been the caretaker," and so forth. Ask not whom is sacrificed on the ancient altar. It's always you, doing both the killing and the being killed.

Is there free will in a Satanic model of reality? Maybe the one who has 'always been the caretaker' can play Christian the way a closeted gay guy can play straight i.e. stunting his own potential and becoming far less than he was meant to be and then lashing out at those who dare let their freak flag fly... or he can let go of the handrails and let Satan's magnet pull him towards the full realization of his unholy destiny.  If we apply that logic to the actual making of these films, Tate is doomed the moment husband Polanski helps her get the part in EYE, just the way Rosemary is doomed when Roman (!) Castavet helps Rosemary's husband get his part. And Polanski is doomed the moment he shoots a scene wherein a woman is drugged and date raped by Satan. And we're doomed to have the resurgence of the Salem mindset, ala The 'Satanic panic' of the early 80s.

Even if for the moment we believe all this 'nonsense.' That's fuzzy logic, what Stephen Colbert would call "truthiness" but anyone who denies it completely, is 100% sure it's not true, is just asking for trouble. Satan never singles out the open-minded for his mischief. It's always the sure and pious ones who draw him, their unsullied souls like a flag to a bull.

I mention all this because without Sharon Tate EYE OF THE DEVIL is a grand bore. It draws you in tight like that beetle tied to a string in the middle of a Summers Isle school desk, but then lets you go home restless and unsatisfied. Set mostly at an un-devilish vineyard in the south of France, for most of the movie we're stuck with Deborah Kerr's nosey parker chasing after her pale husband, played like a half-asleep nonentity by David Niven, whose being prepared for some diabolical festival. Following him like a stalker mom worried he's skateboarding without a helmet, she's a real buzzkill. He says please, babe, stop crowding me! Tate and David Hemming's as a pair of magical blonde twins have mere supporting role, and though Niven's angry flogging of an all-dressed-in-black Tate makes the poster, it's just another joyless punitive measure. The film would rather focus in on Kerr begng outraged over David Hemmings shooting down a white dove with his little bow and arrow. When she spies on him and his equally strange blonde sister, Odille (Sharon Tate) as they bring said dove on a pillow into a weird looking Satanic ceremony, Kerr orders them off the property, like she's Dustin Hoffman in STRAW DOGS or Jessica Biel in the 2003 remake of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (see my op here), going into weird backwaters uninvited to harass the locals, a mutton-headed missionary enforcing a hypocritically "Christian" concept of law and order without really examining the extent in which her colonialist animus-dominated sense of superiority clouds her awareness. As a kind of unwittingly dosed Mary Poppins in THE INNOCENTS, Kerr was amazing. She carried that horror film on her shoulders; DEVIL might be the film if those two weird kids grew up to be blonde Satanists, stalking the ample grounds like Warhol superstars. But Kerr doesn't carry EYE, she spills it on the floor and starts lecturing anyone who tries to clean it up. The animus-incubus-like Peter Quint was the corrupting voluptuary shadow to Kerr's 'proud, white, upstanding Buddha' in THE INNOCENTS, driving her like a hearse into the heart of their young charge's budding darkness. In EYE there can be no psychosexual kinks because all she wants to do is rescue her husband and bring him back to her tedious harp performances. We have no choice but to wish we could ditch her and ride with the Rochesters, but our director follows her everywhere, visiting Niven as he lurches around like a post-bones-tossed Queequeg, wicked blondes Sharon Tate and Hemmings loiter in black turtlenecks, turning toads into doves, and Flora Robson chokes back tears because oh not, it's all happening again, and we in the audience are forced to spend the bulk of the film with the boring mom as she runs about doing all in her power to stop the one interesting thing that might happen in this nowhere town.And she's like my mom forcing me to hide all my insidious soul-killing vices from her over the holidays, because she doesn't understand why anyone would do anything bad for their health. Or why I need to just sleep the day away. And stay up all night....

Luckily that old devil stretching through into the future via this movie's cold womb foreshadows future classics. The music played during the 13 Days Festival sounds eerily similar to Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" and after that just imagine the film as a vision of what ROSEMARY'S BABY might be like if Rosemary started the film far too old to be the parent of her two shockingly young children --only one of whom seems possessed by a Damien Thorn. If not for Tate's real life fate-and-sorrow drenched story lending EYE the same eerie black magic ballyhoo synchronicity of ROSEMARY and THE EXORCIST it would be worthless. But it's like her version of James Dean's Highway Safety promo film. She is the Virgin Mary that would beget Rosemary Woodhouse and Regan MacNeil, as they in turn would beget a period of widespread Ouija abuse. And that black outfit with the hypnotic pendant or whatever is damn sexy especially with her bright blonde hair as contrast.

If this were somehow true then the devil is alive and well in any representation of his evil influence, a kind of inter-active Tarot deck, wherein having the cards read is what kills you. Believing precedes seeing; the moment your focus settles on a shadow, that shadow begins to spring to life, the way William Castle's rumor mill ballyhoo about mysterious accidents on set could be said to have indirectly led to the Mansons.

Even with all that, is there any more boring sacrificial murder weapon than a bow and arrow? Do British schoolchildren stay up at night listening to tales of the haunted archery teacher? Nein! It's too cold and impersonal, it lacks the fears we harbor for the knife.
And we come to hate Kerr for dragging us away from the action, like IMITATION OF LIFE's Annie Johnson trying to grab her Sarah Jane from trying to pass for white in death's cold marble nightclub. Everyone else wants whatever is going to happen to happen, including us. We didn't start watching a movie called EYE OF THE DEVIL so we could see Deborah Kerr swamp the fire. We're going to root for Sharon Tate, no matter what. And it doesn't take long before we're fully invested in whatever evil is going on, hoping the devil gets the job done before Kerr comes barging in like mom tromping down to the basement to complain about the noise you kids are making and what's that smell? Smoke? Let me see your eyes!

Mom, go back to bed!

If the devil's eye offends thee, Kerr, pluck it from its hottie roost!

It's hard to believe that this weird little Satan's Little Helper edition of BONJOUR TRISTESSE came out two years before the relatively old school DEVIL RIDE'S OUT (AKA BRIDE OF THE DEVIL), a rousing, full-blooded Hammer film that seems decades younger in spirit if not in form than the new wave-y EYE. There's no occult real life ballyhoo associated with RIDES, and it doesn't needy any, because it has at least one person who's got a dashing air of wit and sparkle: Christopher Lee as the Van Helsing / Quatermass / Sherlock Holmes- type Devil hunter (Dennis Wheatley's original novel was set in the South of France, too, I think). It understands, the way few devil movies do, that the trick to defeating pure evil is not to confront it with pure good, but with balance, and a sense of humor to help your roll with the absurdity of it all, but not to the point you kill the atmosphere.

Onwards then to the other Satanic offering of 1966 -- INCUBUS.

INCUBUS.... the only film ever shot in Esperanto.... the language of the Satanic mass! Invented by the UN coven to bedevil the globe!

Wondrously pretentious, like a beatnik open mike jazz dance performance if it was shot by Dennis Hopper as an ONIBABA-style timeless psychosexual folk tale for Roger Corman over a single weekend out at Big Sur, INCBUS would make a good double bill with NIGHT TIDE. The Esperanto angle adds just the right dash of weirdness to the story of a succubus hanging around a healing spring, driving infirm men to their deaths for big daddy Satan. She longs to corrupt a good pure soul instead of just offing the perverse and corrupted, but her older sister advises against it. She's right. But they have a back-up plan when things go south: unleash the Incubus on the good soul's equally good (i.e. virginal) sister!

This would actually make a netter double bill with the 1961 Liz-and-Dick semi-camp classic, THE SANDPIPER. Both concern a mythic 'impossible love' story between a paragon of virtue and a slutty mankiller lolling in the Big Sur surf and spouting beatnik profundities. One is a studio-backed Vincente Minnelli opus, the other a low budget concoction from the "Ed Wood on a dime bag of Ingmar Bergman" Leslie Stevens. But INCUBUS has everything: blondes in black turtlenecks under peasant girl smocks; William Shatner as a variation of Jack Nicholson's Napoleonic solider sick of war and wandering the Big Sur coast in THE TERROR, refracted through the love of Richard Burton's priest in SANDPIPER if he was played by Eva Marie Saint. Sure it sounds overbaked... but a succubus feeling sexually violated because Kirk brought her to church while she was asleep? Senpreza!

In the end, INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL have a lot in common, fault-wise: EYE is way too dry; INCUBUS way too singleminded and didactic, but they share a strength, too: a unique ambiguity about which 'side' they're on. There's an association of good with boring and safe in both. In ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE EXORCIST the heroines--Chris (Ellen Burstyn) and Rosemary (Mia Farrow) are hip enough, and the evil men--Pazuzu, Guy--vile enough that we're rooting for the right team. But we're rooting for Tate and Hemmings in EYE, as their plan seems in jeopardy because of Kerr's imperialist meddling, and why else would we be watching if not to see Tate do evil stuff? And thanks to Kerr's tired grandstanding, Tate has barely any time to really radiate. And ditto INCUBUS: do we really need to see some old church / patriarchy win out for 665th time against the feminine darkness? No one goes to a devil movie to root for the very thing they went to the movies to escape from, mom! Jesu, set my people iri....

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Your Clowns Bid You Goodbye: THIS IS THE END, IT'S A DISASTER

A cohesive, 'tight' film, funny even into the maw of Hell, THIS IS THE END (2013) comes long after 12/21/12, late to the apocalypse party, which is of course in character considering the cast of stoner royalty --James Franco and Seth Rogen, still soaring on PINEAPPLE EXPRESS fumes, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Jay Baruchel, Emma Watson, Channing Tatum, and so on--all playing themselves. Unlike 95% of its ilk, END skips the zombies and instead goes full literal-biblical, mixing heavenly ascension, childhood buddy friendships stressed by fame and distance, growth and kindness as essential to survival, an actual bible, LA vs. NYC rivalry, raping demons, ethical dilemmas, and lots of weed. The genius touch is to have them all play themselves (only more so) and they bring a lot of brutal self honesty: Jonah Hill acts like Oscar's A-list sycophant, bandying the word "tight" around and treating resentful New Yorker Jay Baruchel like a special needs child. Jay instead blames his own paralyzing social shyness on LA; Michael Cera snorts coke and bullies groupies in fits of drunken Reptillian overlordsmanship; Daniel McBride ramps up his dirtbag townie craziness; James Franco is a vain but guarded host with a weird bi-curious vibe; Rhianna, Aziz Anzari, and countless others disappear down a giant blast furnace hole in the ground. Being a star guarantees nothing as the flame pit widens and the stars are revealed to be tough and resourceful only via movie magic. While the demons howl outside and devour those unlucky stragglers, these dudes duct tape the cracks in the concrete of Franco's party fortress, pool their booze, and wait for the cable to come back on.

When I was counting days inside the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, I used to like to imagine Armageddon as a great excuse to relapse on whiskey, and hoped one day I would get the chance, for whiskey is so so good. But if an alcoholic vows to drink again only when hell froze over, sooner or later he'd drive down into the flames on a stolen Zamboni. That's in the bible... if you know which bible I mean. Still, for some of us, the apocalypse is our last chance to reunite with our deranged lover, whiskey...

In other words, I would be the first to volunteer to leave the compound and forage, because maybe somewhere in the hellish mist of the Hollywood Hills, there might be unbroken bottles of bourbon. That's the comfort for an alcoholic in the apocalypse. No demon can compare with that one, no scare or threat can stay the thirsty drunk. Without that carrot lure I can't see ever stirring from my bunker. But I am alcoholic. I am the thing in the black crib with the upside cross baby mobile in ROSEMARY'S BABY. I am the third heat, the eternal thirst carved large as Asmodeus' initials into the EQUINOX oak tree soul. I guess we all have our reasons for wanting this damned parade to finally end, in a blaze of glory. That's one of mine.

But these guys--Seth Rogen, Franco, Danny McBride, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, all playing themselves-- are more grounded than I am... which is odd, considering they don't seem to have girlfriends and the first thing they wish for (outside of weed) is a Back Street Boys reunion. Perhaps that's the secret to success; girls always Yoko up a band sooner or one of you goes to college, or leaves it. I can only imagine what would happen if I never moved to NJ or my buddy's parents didn't get divorced and turn him militant, or if I never became a hippy punk rock boozer. All these things killed our comic book making, super 8mm filming, dungeon and dragons module creating, and selling, and marketing company. Girls were but the coup de grace. 

If I had known nerds would conquer the world, that the "Comic Con" would one day be a prestigious event, I might have never have choked down that first pilfered warm beer at my punker friend's graduation party. I'm funny, too, man. Can't you tell? Why did I give it all up for a life of hipness, boozy abandon, and relationship-attempting? None of the dudes who wind up at Franco's seem to have any long term relationships, or kids, to worry about, and it's damned refreshing. At no point does any character say, "I can't leave without my children!" or "If Kathy's back there, I'm going to get her!" These guys don't give a shit!

The main star of THIS IS THE END though is the raw kinetic energy and flow of weird ideas that doesn't stop, just snakes forward from LAX to chillin' with buds to a party at James Franco's house all the way to....  The big budget CGI in the film isn't used for guns and nonsense. There's only one gun in the whole damned movie. Instead there's great towering demons to rival The Night on Bald Mountain sequence in FANTASIA, and Jonah Hell spewing green bile like a portly Linda Blair, but no monster is quite as scary as Emma Watson with an axe. Or more balls-out-gonzo than McBride gone cannibal - role of the year in the movie of the year.  Like many Piscean artists and writers I've always admired--from a distance--the McBride type. I never invite them to parties but they always show up, draining your bar but bringing you awful weird new drugs like angel dust, Jimson weed, and crank and introducing you to carnivorous whores. You can't get rid of them, so you may as well enjoy their ferocity. When the world ends and the savage reign, we could use a man like Frank Booth again.

I don't want to spoil what may be my favorite movie so far this year, but if you haven't seen it yet, you can still take a page from its bible and start to be nicer to people; even if there is no one true God it couldn't hurt your chances for ascension. I've written extensively on my arcane beliefs regarding soul density, in that the more self-centered and hateful you are, the more dense your soul gets, allowing demons to capture it when you try to ascend; it follows then that the more positive and selfless you are, the lighter and more expanded your soul gets, so demons can't capture it anymore than one can catch smoke in a butterfly net. Just a theory, based on a mix of Thaddeus Golas, Egyptian mythology, and David Icke.

So, yeah, bro, if only life were just buds and booze how simple and joyous but instead how complicated and downer-ish it is to watch dudes from your crew marry and--unless you join their creepy 'we have kids' cult--never be seen again. Maybe that's the real fantasy, that the world will end before maturity's inevitable bro-pocalypse wipes out your network and leaves you alone or a parent. I hear it's just like falling asleep.

And that brings me to the stifled world of the couple's brunch where, if they had girlfriends with bourgeois hipster tastes, the dudes in END would be going on Sunday afternoon instead of to Franco's on Saturday night (or if I was there and it was the 90s, both). I'm of course referring to the 2012 disaster comedy currently streaming on a Netflix near you, IT'S A DISASTER (2012).

David Cross is the stranger being vetted by his internet-met steady Julia Stiles' posse. He moseys around the nice house, drinks some Scotch with the boys, hears how they got problems of their own, blah blah. Suddenly, a neighbor comes in decked out in a hazmat suit. A dirty bomb has gone off downtown, poison gasses everywhere. Commence duct taping! And then the couple who are always super late try to come in, coughing and hacking and begging to be let it in. But the duct tape is on. What do you do?

Damn right.

That kind of satiric moral querying is welcome, and the swinger couple (Rachel Boston and Kevin Brennan) slipping a subtle menage a trois come-on to Cross are hilarious; America Ferrara mixing all the drugs in the house together to create some homemade ecstasy, determined to get super high to face the end, is my hero. While her beau seems to think ranting about conspiracies will turn the deadly real situation abstract enough to deal with, i.e. what you can deconstruct can't kill you, she's doing the right thing, the thing the old black jazz pianist on the cruise ship or Woody Harrelson does in the movie 2012. Overall it's some good ensemble work, giving off the impression these people all know each other and respect one another's comedic rhythms, and if it all seems over before there's any special effects fire and brimstone, well, it makes up with in the kind of inner-hell only the relationship-encumbered truly know.

So what in the end is the right scenario for you? A lot of us were hoping the world would end last December 21st, so we could skip that much-needed root canal, or get out from under our credit card debt. Now here it is a year later and we know we're saddled with seemingly immortal life. So pick your poison and live to die another day: going out with the bros is of course the more fun option than meeting the new girl's posse at a petit-bourgeois couples brunch, because the deeper you look the more you see how hard it is to grow when you can just blame your significant other for holding you back.

Unfortunately real personal growth only seems to come with pain, fear, and trauma. With the boys up in the Hills of THIS IS THE END, though, there's no one else to blame, and so, convexly, no escape from the awfulness of one's own true self.

Oh how time flies / with crystal clear eyes

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Make up Your Mind Control: 33.3 Ways to Read EYES WIDE SHUT

 

"In regards to the title of this film, Eyes Wide Shut is said to be a code phrase used by members of high society that translates roughly into --- you have not seen any of my misdeeds, because your eyes are wide shut. This allows such people to run amok above and beyond all laws, and without the threat of ever being caught. We see this happen time and time again in our lives, where if one of us broke the law, we would be dealt with in a prompt manner. However, we see on the news and read in the newspapers and news magazines, where globalist figures are constantly walking away from serious crimes without so much as a slap on the wrist. - The Kentroversy Papers 

"At the opening party at Victor Ziegler’s house, Alice Harford meets up with and dances with a Hungarian man. The name of this character is Sandor Szavost. This character shares his name with the creator of the Church of Satan, Anton Sandor LaVey. This would be an accurate analogy, as members of the global elite are all dedicated to either Lucifer or Satan. Their religion has them believe that both Lucifer and Satan are good, and the God of the Christians has forsaken these so-called fallen angels, and is therefore, an enemy God. This type of thinking is extremely twisted, and represents what some have called a Satanic Reversal --- evil is good, lies are truth, death is life, and darkness is light." --The Kentroversy Papers

"It may also be significant that the film's director Stanley Kubrick died suddenly. Mozart, a mason, died soon after revealing masonic mysteries in his opera, The Magic Flute. Author Stephen Knight, whose book,Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1975) revealed Victorian London's Whitechapel Murders as the work of ritual masonic killers, also died mysteriously. And William Morgan, author of Freemasonry Exposed(1836) was kidnapped and allegedly murdered by masons. -- Uri Dowbenko (Steamshovel Press) 

"During his dark night of the soul, Dr. Bill travels through the seamy underworld of his disturbed psyche, searching for sexual release, haunted by some insatiable hunger driving him toward unknown ends, along the way encountering a woman he hardly knows, who swears she's madly in love with him. Add to this collection an HIV positive prostitute, as well as the daughter of the aforementioned costume shop owner--who's apparently being pimped out by papa--and what we have is a trinity of lost souls, caught up in the grinding wheels of a powerful machine that eats people up, then spits them out in tiny, fragmented pieces. All of these woman could easily be Monarch victims, and even if they aren't, each is a prisoner of a system of control prevalent in our society; a system which exists on many levels, and in all strata of society, both seen and unseen."--The Konformist

"According to "Treee," a young Las Vegas woman who claims to have contacts inside the secretive club [The Bohemian Grove], a ritual sacrifice of Mary Magdalene takes place Tuesday July 21; and the ritual sacrifice of Jesus Christ takes place Wednesday, July 22. A human body or effigy is burned in front of an large owl symbolizing Moloch, the pagan Canaanite God...

If having our world leaders belong to a satanic cult weren't bad enough, the Las Vegas woman says the Illuminati are actually an alien reptilian species that occupies human bodies and feeds off our energy....

She says: This reptilian species is called "Sangerians;" they are a "fourth dimension race" and make up 3% of the world's population. She claims to have met "more than one, more than once." They have three-hearts, shift shapes, are cold blooded, but are developing human feelings from devouring human flesh and blood. -- Henry Makow

"The reptilian-illuminati hybrids are obsessed with sexual aggression and domination, which is evidenced by their sex magic rituals. Humans are routinely taken and programmed to serve them as familiars and sex slaves; more evidence of their desire to control and "own" others. 

Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut is probably an accurate representation of what takes place in one of these rituals. He was certainly involved with some of their circles and must have been exposed to things like this on more than a few occasions.

As a side note, he was apparently killed because he refused to cut a scene which contained subliminal triggers that were intended to break the mind-control programs of the people in the audience. Following his death, the scene was cut and never made it to the final film." ( -Carleee (Prison Planet Forum)

And so it goes, ever deeper and more perverse... I was going to just keep quoting for this whole post, let the paranoia mine its own irony, but the sinking feeling in my poor stomach was too much. Because, you see, I am easily traumatized, and this shit gets disturbing... Trauma-based conditioning? Torturing children to create multiple personalities?

I believe the above craziness is true without necessarily being real. Keeping my sanity and peace of mind requires me to dismiss most of it as collective subconscious complexes--automatically generated recovered memories of sleep paralysis-- but the way my lower chakras spin like frightened tops when reading it means there's more going on than just schizophrenic hallucinating.

So how can it be one and not the other, you ask, real but not true, or was it vice versa? Pay attention to my ambiguous wording. There will be a quiz. In fact this is it:

HYPOTHESIS: You drop a jam jar on the linoleum floor of your kitchen. It breaks. Jam flies all over the floor. You sweep up the glass, scrub the floor but the jam is still there; you wind up cleaning the whole house, scrubbing top to bottom, and still see the jam, though hazy now is still there -  floating like a ghost imprint over the sparkling floor.

QUESTION: Is the jam 'really' there? (show your work)

The ghost jam is a dried Macbeth-bedamned spot etching its Rorschach butterfly way across the linoleum lining of your subconscious' ceiling. The ceiling of the subconscious (the basement) is the same as the conscious (kitchen) floor, therefore the jam never left. It was spilled on the floor but also in the mind that saw the spill. As there is no true accident, the jam was spilled on the subconscious ceiling first. The conscious floor spill is only a reflection. Is the tell-tale heart really still beating just because Poe's narrator hears it? It is his own heart reflecting a guilty conscience, but isn't his heart also his victim's? We are all connected, therefore the only sane answer is.

ANSWER: The only jam that 'is' is the jam seen, 'there' in the 'real' of the kitchen is an illusion. The truth is the spill. It has always been the spill.
 ----
We can apply this same answer to our tendency to believe in Satanic conspiracies. The 'recovered memories', are like the ghost jam, or the tell-tale heart. They point to a zone that horror authors have been parking in for centuries, but which Freud and Jung never compared enough notes to find on the map --the collective subconscious. Freud had his personal subconscious (the repository of forbidden libidinal desires and traumatic memories) and Jung had his collective unconscious (ruled by its own ego of opposite gender to our consciousness, the anima/animus) but Freud didn't buy the collective much, and Jung didn't go in for the sordid limits of the subconscious. Neither thought there could be a collective subconscious. Why would there be? How could there be a mass repository for all the dark repressed Oedipal fantasies of the individual, all coalesced into a collective real place - where one might see people they know - dressed in robes and doing very dirty things? And then those same people would remember them on the street the next day, or pretend not to, because to admit you were there breaks the code.

I believe all paranormal recollections under hypnosis tend to be true but not real at least not in the limited way we currently define reality. I believe in a collective subconscious, which is located in the fourth hypothetical dimension referred to in the quote above.

I am learning how to be a good adept in navigating this fourth dimension, or does that just mean I sleep a lot? To me it's like the collective multiverse is a phone book of infinite thickness and our world at this moment in time is one chapter, but sometimes other worlds find their way in, laying atop or below us like layers of a Photoshop file. Most of the time it's all pretty copacetic -- the personal subconscious is a vile basement of repressed and banned emotions and thoughts, but it's your own basement, no one else sees it. The collective is more about symbols, sages, shadows and initiations, the shared myths and codes, rather than a private basement it's a shared tunnel network, and the entirety of the ocean and the sky, connected. Compared to it we're just a fleeting cloud or mild earthquake tremor.

BUT the collective subconscious is completely different, as you might imagine - a consensual basement - meaning ogres from other people's repressed personal dark desires can tunnel into yours and come lumbering up the stairs to abduct you. The recovered memories of Satanic rituals in hypnotized children or victims of ritual abuse are 'seen' through the third eye, the same eye we dream with, but the mind cannot distinguish between the real and the vividly imagined. Maybe we don't remember our dreams for the same reason we repress painful memories, and we need to externalize this mechanism, hence the idea of pervasive CIA mind control experiments being responsible for our amnesia. It's not that I don't believe such experiments happened, it's just that I believe they were like a lot of things in the 60s, i.e. the results were too uneven to count as a success so they gave it up in the 80s - I could be wrong, but what's the point of being right? I can't do anything about it. And it makes my skin crawl. In fact it makes me so upset I have to question its validity just to not succumb to heartbreak and panic attack.

The conspiracy theory of MK Ultra-Illuminati started long before Kubrick, the CIA, the Masons, or the Annunaki. And it reached a 20th century full flower in the Satanic panic of the early 1980s, where, like we did back in Salem, we ignored lack of physical evidence and let a bunch of disoriented children accuse their parents, nannies, teachers, daycare workers, and neighbors of witchy ritual. Until it became obvious that there was no logical way some of this stuff could have actually happened, the fear and mob mentality and (my guess) deep-seated sexual repression all cauldroned up to activate the collective subconscious. After all, these kids (in both Salem and the 80's) had no visible marks or scars and according to their hypnotic regression testimony they'd had limbs removed, given birth to tiny winged serpents, and spent a longer time in the coven then they'd been alive, and so forth:

Recovered memories of early sexual trauma, satanic ritual reconstructions, and the development of multiple personalities satisfy the wish of both patient and therapist to understand a bewildering array of symptoms that plead cautious study. Until the 1970s, multiple personalities were considered extremely rare. Although almost entirely absent from the European and Japanese literature, more cases of multiple personality have been described in the past five years than collectively in the past hundreds of years. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has not found one single case of satanic cult ritual burial remains, although tens of thousands of individuals every year are purported to have been victims. - JAMA (1995 abstract, Making Monsters: False Memory, Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria)

The hypnotists were getting at a truth, so were the Salem judges maybe, but it was a truth unrelated to any physical reality. It was a truth related to the subconscious of a developing child's mind, where everything dirty and only half-understood from adult coded conversations and stray X-rated imagery is translated into ornate fantasies of dominance and subjugation built up larger and more terrifyingly bizarre with every session. Some of the less grisly of these reports of abuses resembled my own prepubescent fantasies involving girls from my class in elementary school and some of the cast of CHARLIE'S ANGELS, but scrambled, like all America's most twisted suppressed dark desires from childhood were still floating around in the ether, ready to be received like radio stations direct through the unconscious mouth into the headline-grabbing hypnotist's tape recorder.

I didn't really understand it until I read Patrick Harpur's Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld which points out the science vs. religion vs. occult arguments are all failing to encompass the way our perceptions change the perceived:

As with all anomalous entities, the very act of observing the particles disturbs them. Observer and observed, subject and object, cannot finally be distinguished. Particles whose existence is predicted obligingly turn up. If we didn't know better, we might almost say that they had been imagined into existence. The so-called New Physicists smelled a rat long ago. They began to compare the whole enterprise to oriental religion or to suspect that its reality is primarily metaphorical, not literal and factual. This is not to say that daimons cannot manifest concretely, as we have seen. In fact, the smaller they are, the more powerful they can be, viz. the atom bomb. (more)

Harpur also points out the similarity of Satanic child abduction to the indigenous tribal initiation practices through the centuries, practices we would consider barbaric and illegal today. But these ancient tribes understood the importance of trauma in enabling the symbolic death of the child and his rebirth as an adult. Note the astonishing similarities that in the tribal ceremonies Harpur describes below with the recovered memories of children that led to the Satanic panic (as well as the Salem trials):

 They are snatched from the safety of their homes in the dead of night by tall entities with extraordinary faces --slit mouths and noses, large eyes, for example -- and carried off to a dark place, sometimes narrow and subterranean like a grave, where they are left for days at a time. Deprived of food, exhausted, they are periodically visited by the entities, who torture them, slashing their penises and scarring their faces. At the same time they are given amazing knowledge --secrets they must not reveal -- before being returned to their villages in a blaze of lights where their families no longer recognize them. (231)

Harpur writes that the children kind of know what's going on -- that this is all an initiation -- but are still terrified beyond all measure, not only of death but of the now confirmed suspicion that their parents and relatives have been transformed into demons:  "The children themselves are painted to look like ghosts... for their former childish selves have to die through the initiation before they can be reborn into new adult selves." (231)

It would explain a lot if we took this into account alongside the sole non-PG remnant of the tribal initiation rite in our modern age--the losing of one's virginity -- to explain the sordid sexual nature of the Satanic panic and mind control sex slave EYES WIDE SHUT mythos.

It might seem like I'm saying this stuff doesn't exist.  The tribal initiation, the paranoid schizophrenic fantasy, the Salem Sabbath, and the the Illuminati mind control conspiracy are of course all part of the same phenomena --the collective subconscious --but I don't think it's 'bunk' or 'made up' entirely. There is a vast wilderness beyond what our ego allows as 'reality' (a term the ego doesn't even like to examine, as like HAL 9000, it refuses to see itself as it truly is --a fantasy).

Seeing ROOM 237 last week (review here) is what set me off on this tangent. If you see that film you naturally have to see THE SHINING right afterwards, and then keep going, applying the paranoid deconstructions from 237 to his other films. But I warn you, keep out of EYES WIDE SHUT with your ray of paranoid layer uncovering! Just stay out! A few luridly detailed mind control theories and recovered memories in and you might be wishing you could put the genie back into the bottle.

I don't know why I was so shocked by all that SRA (Satanic Ritual Abduction) business. Reproduction is a nasty brutish business, even without the Illuminati stealing all the hot women, and the idea that mind control frequencies in TV broadcasts turn girls super slutty if you give the right code word ("Tiffany's! Cartier!"). Such stuff I'm sure has happened here or there and it might be a comfort to the broke, lazy slob in his easy chair seething with resentment that his wife isn't Victoria's Secret level hot to know some day he'll be rich enough to buy a hot hypnotized girl's programmed love. Me, I poison myself with straight white male liberal hatred against my darker sexual self until I feel literally sick because no matter how cleanly feminist I think I am, there's another layer of self-awareness  under that wherein I realize it's all an act, dating back to my virgin middle school days, wherein I deludedly believed my sensitive new age guy routine would enable me to get girls into bed rather than just as friends.

If the sensitive shoulder to cry on gambit ever worked it didn't work long, and my soul began to itch for freedom to let Mr. Hyde free. By the time I unearth that layer and lay foundation for a deeper level of sensitive self awareness and wise up to my six foot deep playa tricks ("the best agent is the one who doesn't even know he's an agent," said Bill's insectoid typewriter), the girl I'm trying to win or impress is off having children with a stable husband. Naturally I think she did all that just to spite me. And that kind of solipsistic paranoia seems to me at the heart of some of this Satanic recall. Just read a ton of stuff on the Monarch MK-Ultra conspiracies out there and then watch TV, any TV show or movie, and you can feel the truth of it.

For example, as I'm writing this, CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG is on TCM, with an automaton girl standing before a series of mirrors (which I've learned they use in mind programming), singing that she's under a spell--an almost exact description of sexually subjugating mind control techniques (including occurring before an assembled audience of mysterious attendees, which mirrors our standard dreams of being exposed naked in a class we forgot to study for, etc.). In reproducing the iconography of normal subconscious dreaming, the programmers tap into the control state, programming their automaton women, the "standard pleasure model" ala BLADE RUNNER, DR. GOLDFOOT, etc. (see CinemArchetype #16 - the Automaton) to fall in love with whatever billionaire diplomat is breezing through town for a weekend. I don't believe this was what CHITTY was trying to achieve (then again, Walt Disney was a 33-degree Mason) but it shows you that once you let this paranoid stuff into your mind, it mutates and transforms even dull children's movies into rabbit holes of horrifyingly vast circumference.

Staged (with audience) Programming (note raised hands), from top: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, 
Clockwork Orange, Manchurian Candidate

And it's a rabbit hole we're hardwired as children to be attracted to... scared to go in, yet unable to look away. Part of this is our secret masochistic projection, Freud's "a child is being beaten" rubric or modern thriller cinema's obsession with abducted children-- the proxy agony of the hypothetical abductee, the way Cruise's cocky doctor uses the image of the wife being ravished by the naval officer--an image to something which she admits up front is only a fantasy--as a tool for paroxysms of masochistic acting out that would make even Josef Von Sternberg go "whoa, bro."

The naval officer theme is no accident, appearing as it does in the dream 'cover memory' in ROSEMARY'S BABY and equating the ocean with the military industrial complex - the dream captain, the "master" of the ocean surface as the subconscious to the unconscious' deep waters. Cruise's doctor might explore the feminine depth, but always with a glum matron present, always with sterile gloves. The navy man goes in deep because he is master of the ocean! He needs no matron present (except naked, in the shadows, chanting)

Row Row Row! (from top: Eyes Wide Shut, Rosemary's Baby - dream sequences)

In the end, if for no other reason, imagining all the hotties in the world are mind controlled sex zombies for the rich and powerful is an ingeniously masochistic tool to explain why you can't have one. And for that and other reasons it makes no difference if it is real or just the subject's subconscious id's favorite childhood bondage scenario remembered as real through hypnosis. In other words, even if true it is still a paranoid fantasy!

As per Lacan (as analyzed by Zizek):

"Even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological. Along the same lines, one could say that, even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls), their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological - because it represses the true reason the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. So, in the case of anti-Semitism, knowledge about what the Jews "really are" is a fake, irrelevant, while the only knowledge at the place of truth is the knowledge about why a Nazi needs a figure of the Jew to sustain his ideological edifice." (Looking Awry, p. 71)

Translated to the Illuminati codexing of EYES WIDE SHUT, the only truth is that we need to project our latent masochistic perversity onto hypothetical figures who freely practice what we won't even allow ourselves to fantasize about. If these projections are real it is only because these dark fantasies, which we are not even conscious of, structure the fantasmatic dimension of our social order.

If we could prove these evil secret networks did exist, with names named and figures arrested and tortured confession, it would merely be a hum-drum scandal once the public interest moved on, and the worlds of paranoid schizophrenia, narcissism, etc. would be without their dark support structures. If you know any people with these conditions, maybe you have heard them talk about ex-boyfriends breaking into their apartments while they're at work, moving objects around, planting microphones in their teeth, sending strange numeric codes at the bottom of seemingly random SPAM emails. They can sound very very sane and convincing, and you may even believe them when they're in your room having coffee, but as soon as they leave, you snap out of their spell and roll your eyes. As per the above Zizek quote, even if these things are really happening, that eye roll has just kept you from being dragged down into their pathology. The idea is to not believe it but at the same time to not deny its possible truth, for the more we try to scoff at or downgrade these experiences the more we drift into the role of witch hunting moral crusaders, in other words -the more we believe it the more true it becomes, the more our reality needs it to be true to flourish.

Missing the Orgy

Part of the paranoia of all this which I really resonate with is the feeling of being left out of something. Somewhere, somehow I'm missing the orgy. I remember circa 1989 up in Syracuse, being super sick with a fever and trying to sleep in my girlfriend's apartment while she was painting in the other room (she had no roommates). As I lay there in my deliria I became sure that she was cheating on me and in fact had another man over at the exact moment I was in her bed, and that she was cheating on me with him; I could hear them laughing. I would stagger into the other room to confront her, but she'd be alone, not even on the phone, not even the stereo on. Then I would go back to bed and begin to 'know' deep in my gut that the guy was hiding under the bed. I checked and the closet was empty so I became sure he was in the closet. I checked. I checked under the bed again. It didn't matter I found no man (the apartment was very small and easily searched) because I knew he was there. I was ready to start a massive fight over it because I was sure he, or they, were hiding, mocking me, from every shadow. The moment I closed the door I heard my girlfriend begin to laugh quietly and him whispering. I whipped open the door, nothing. Even knowing I was just having feverish delusions didn't help.

At any rate, it proved a valuable experience for me in later life. When I later saw RAGING BULL I knew why he was so psychotically jealous of his wife: head trauma.

We can see the end result of this delusional fantasy in the case of Richard McCaslin, Who "planned a heavily armed assault on the exclusive (and alleged site of sadistic Illuminati-reptilian Satanic abuses and human sacrifices) Bohemian Grove men's club for more than a year," believing "it would take something dramatic" to draw attention to human sacrifices he feared were being held there":

"In a jailhouse interview Monday night, the well-spoken, lucid and clean-shaven man said he "wanted to make a point" and was prepared to kill people at the Monte Rio resort if necessary. 

McCaslin said he thinks he is sane. 

"They might beg to differ," he said with a laugh, pointing his thumb behind him into the mental health ward." --- The Press Democrat (1-22-02)

Was Kubrick the filmmaker version of McCaslin, confused by the mix of suppressed subconscious fantasizing, exclusion anxiety, and "somewhere a child is being sacrificed" or "Somewhere my love lies sleeping (with a male chorus)" neurosis?

OR was he initiated into the weird world of mind control and sex ritual due to his being hired to fake the moon landings? Did this dark secret prove such a burden to him, not being able to tell anyone, that he finally snapped and told his wife, who was pretty freaked out, mirroring Bill's late inning confession to Alice? And that's why they killed him? Is everything in EYES WIDE aspects of Kubrick's attempts to come to terms with realizing his own wife was also a victim of mind control?

OR did Kubrick just read a lot about it in those 'recalled repressed childhood Satanic abuse trauma' and MK-ULTRA books and eventually it warped his mind?

OR is this all just an isolated neurotic's stilted conception of how rich oversexed people behave at parties?

The case of McCaslin and my own fever jealousy should illustrate by now that there is no real difference, the answer to all these questions is yes.

Part 33.3: Antahkarana Kadabra!

The weird irrational behavior of the two models in the opening party, for example, along with everything else that goes on, can be explained through the maze of the mind control theory, as they want to take him "over the rainbow," presumably a well-known code for the world that is shown to subjects of the practice, leaving them a way to explain all the bizarre things that seem to happening to them, THE WIZARD OF OZ being one of the source texts for this kind of conditioning:

"The Rainbow--with its seven colors has long had an occult significance of being a great spiritual hypnotic device. Constance Cumbey, in her book The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow, which exposes the New Age Occult Movement, correctly writes, "The Rainbow (also called the Antahkarana [left] or Rainbow Bridge) (...) is used as a hypnotic device (p.261). 

"The Supreme Council of the 33rd" of Freemasonry has used the rainbow on the cover of their magazine. In a book teaching Druidism (as in Illuminati Druidism), The 21 Lessons of Meryln, the Rainbow is described as "A true sign of Magic...it exists in both worlds at once!" Elvira Gulch is a woman who owns 1/2 of the county where Dorothy lives in Kansas. She is shown later in the Land of Oz transformed as a witch.

Many of the Illuminati elite are rich and lead double lives. People who meet them at a ritual will see the dark side of these rich people. At the rituals, people are tranced from drugs, chanting, and mind control; they are "over the rainbow." - Fort Refuge

On the other hand, the two girls may be there to just set up the future problem between Bill and Alice, whose mutual attractiveness has surely caught them the attention of interested parties before, but like the single night of misadventure that opens A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, their marriage seems to begin at this party. (No one from Alex's violent misdeeds prior to the home invasion night gets revenge, for example.)

The figure who separates Bill and Alice originally, Nick Nightingale, has a name that symbolizes sleep (we always fall asleep alone no matter who is in our bed), and immediately after Bill is called away, Alice is hit on by her animus-representation, the Anton La Vey, and soon thereafter Bill gets drawn into a menage a trois any man would melt in his bones for. Now, in my book any good looking young couple is going to want to mingle and flirt and bask in the adoration of others at a party, and then they go home together and no harm done. What, are they supposed to just canoodle all night? Why even go to the party if not to strut? So why are they so cowed and confused by this attention they're receiving? Why does Alice seem to change into a different person, very coy, tranced out, and strange, the minute Anton approaches? Why are these girls so bizarre? Is that illuminated star by the door some psychic trigger to release their inhibitions, or is this just what really really good expensive champagne does?

In the end there's a weird symbiosis between the masked orgy Bill crashes and Alice's dream and the idea that Alice is actually the girl who dies (or 'has her brains fucked out' to use Sidney Pollack's vile terminology), begging the question: what is worse, a sex-saturated dream where you lose control and are violated every which way but which you are enjoying (she's the center of attention -- she 'belongs' there) or a sexual reality in which you are out of your depth?

As someone whose had a panic attack after being hit on by two spooky models at a 2006 Halloween party, I no longer envy and hate Dr. Bill the way I did when I first saw the film in 1999. I hadn't read Lacan then, and couldn't stand the fact that Bill's uncertain fog lets these two hotties slip away, and all the subsequent ones he loses, or even got them in the first place, or was so easily picked up the West Village streetwalker. I mean this isn't Atlantic City! But now I'm beaten down, broken on the wheel of time, like a scarecrow. If I had another encounter with those two spooky models I would still run away but wouldn't hate myself so much later. Why? Because now I've read up on EYES WIDE conspiracy mind control theorems.

Here's a detail I remember about those two girls who tried to pick me up but gave me a whopping panic attack instead (and this after I 'tested' my psychic powers by requesting in my deep meditation to pick up not one but two girls for a menage a trois that night)-- one was dressed as a dominatrix, the other wore a black bikini, had a perfect body, AND REPTILE EYES, though they were presumably contacts for her 'costume.' OR we were meant to assume so, just as we are meant to assume that all of the masks at the orgy in EYES hide human faces. Are reptile contact lenses on Halloween the perfect cover, allowing reptilian-human hybrids to show their real selves?

Now that we're talking about it, I'm remembering a run in or two with another pair of spooky girls, hippie chicks (and one guy) up in Syracuse in 1987. They were gorgeous and way too sexually open for my prudish tastes, to the point I found myself backing up away from them and was not sure why, as I was hardly a virgin, or sober. I can barely remember what any of these two sets of girls looks like now, except that they were very sexy, and seemed possessed with eerie calm. If I did hook up with either set, would I even be alive today? And are all my subsequent peccadilloes just my long night of the soul trying to get revenge on womankind for making me feel all itchy and strange for my chickening out of these encounters? Were these girls even human? Was their whole mission just to seduce men and steal their DNA, and/or leave us with a lifetime of sexual anxiety that they could siphon off with their orgone harvesting matrixes?

My roommate Eric did sleep with one of those hippie chicks and was super weirded out afterwards. He told me that something about her vagina didn't look right, though he couldn't explain exactly what was so wrong about it....then again he's not a writer. One of them came onto me at an outdoor concert while I was tweaking out on way too much LSD and my dog acted all afraid of her and her beauty carved into me like talons; I could feel the emanating waves of open sexuality calling to me but I could see my mortal death as well. I heard myself muttering an incoherent apology and felt my legs carrying me away even as a part of me tried to take up her offer.

Plus, Bill getting called away before he can go 'over the rainbow' to deal with the OD seems to be implying those two girls meant shooting him up as well as whatever sexual stuff... and he may have wound up as comatose as she is. Even metaphorically it means he is spared the problems that plague a man beset upon by two hot women, a kind of all-encompassing panic-inducing mix of dread and desire that confound his ability to walk or think clearly (the awkward nervous banalities of their conversation reflects this kind of flushed disorientation). It is like a drug in and of itself, draining normal humdrum reality, the way, for example the music dies down and changes and the rest of the world becomes a blur when Maria and Tony's first spot one another in WEST SIDE STORY.

What's in that champagne?

Hey, so naturally fitting in with my life experience I read EYES as a metaphor for addiction and recovery. The name Dr. Bill is even a hybrid of Dr. Bob and Bill Wilson, the founders of AA. And that 'program' as they call it can get very cult-like, despite the founders' best attempts. The drug downstairs at the party is champagne but they all act like they're on heavy duty opiates, or maybe expensive champagne is just so expensively good it acts as a moral inhibition quasher.

Even so, I've never seen anyone act as bizarrely as they do at that EYES opening party, except at gatherings of sexy friends where everyone was drunk and super high on ecstasy and/or roofies. Did someone tell Kubrick that people at parties talk super close (because of loud music) and act weird on ecstasy, so this is what he was going for? Maybe he should have actually gone to a few parties. That's the problem with all these cultish mind control readings: maybe they're true but their behavior is also very close to the ideas of what a person who has already missed all the orgies would imagine orgies are like, someone like a doctor, who always has to keep his mind relatively clear in case there's an emergency call.

To get back to Lacan, there doesn't even need to be an orgy going on to feel you're missing the orgy. But miss it too much and you might come crashing in armed to the teeth like our poor friend McCaslin, shocked to fine an empty grove instead of the full-swing Sodom that was causing you so much unbearable Freudian anxiety!

Awake, sleeper, from the dream of Cruiselessness

But if that's what he desires to depict then Kubrick messes up again, because upstairs the comatose hooker Mandy looks nowhere near pale or blue enough to be believably OD-ed. Her skin glows. Bill does a good job of 'reaching' her through her head in a way that might mirror deprogramming, though: "Mandy, Mandy, are you in there. Can you hear me? Move your head if you can hear me..." shining a light in her eye, you can feel almost what it's like to be lying down hearing him far above you as you die, and maybe that is a parallel with Scientology's work with addicts, but when he says, "you can't keep doing this... you're gonna need some rehab" it's a joke. How does he know? She could easily be just dozing off from too much of that roofie champagne. Probably she won't need rehab for the very reason that her tolerance is way way down otherwise she wouldn't have passed out so early in the evening. Maybe she got the good stuff at this party and it's usually cut with B-12 so she overdid it and passed out for a hot second. She should just tone it down and keep her tolerance way low by under rather than overdosing. And she needs to stay the hell away from Ziegler and has super-potent supply. He's like that producer whose underage girlfriends keep OD-ing in BOOGIE NIGHTS. Ding!

The next scene, their post-party clinch to "Baby did a bad bad thing" by Chris Isaak, seems a little shady, too.. The joint rolling is cool but then Alice goes back to talking in that close druggy whisper and you're like damn girl, you ever talk normal, like a normal person? Did Stanley make you take roofies all during the shoot? Was Rohypnol your cough drop? Did he stress you guys out so much that roofies were your only escapes? I've done my share of Rohypnol and let me tell you, on the right dose you don't pass out (if only you take a half like you're supposed to), rather you float around on winged angel Roombas and talk real close to people, in a whirl of abandonment and inhibition-free jouissance.

But to take the paranoid conspiracy theories quoted at the top to their inevitable conclusion, all sexual openness and ecstasy is a product of hypnotic mind control, or Rohypnol-spiked champagne. And that's sad. I believe there is mind control behind desire, but it's not Satanists or the CIA or the Illuminati at work. Power is enough of an aphrodesiac, they don't need to get all drastic to have chicks swoon for them, No, the culprit behind all this is far more evil than any inner circle of hooded power brokers, and more serpentine and twisted than any 4th dimensional reptoid.

Of course I'm referring to DNA.

Call it alien programming, if you like.... why not? Our DNA after all wouldn't have survived this long had it not liked to inspire us to throw condoms to the wind. The genes that survive through millennia are ruthless in their goals. They can make you think not using condoms just this once is going to make it sexier, and keeping the baby is nobler, and that your lover is "the one" you should raise a family with forever, and ever, and ever. But that's before you climax and plant the seed. Once you've dropped off the goods, that drive now tells you to split. Hahaha that voice wants you to be a tomcat whore when ten minutes ago it was preaching at you like the mufhuggin' Bishop of Canterbury. Sucker! The genetic con job is the oldest trick in the book. We're like the tip of the iceberg thinking it's moving of its own free will when all the while the bulk of it is below the surface being drawn hither and yon on murky currents. Thinking you can really ever know how deep below the waves you go is, in the end, the very definition, in the end, of "fucking" madness...

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