Antichrist in Translation: UNDER THE SKIN, HABIT

Showing off scars, from top: Under the Skin, Habit

Under the Skin (2014), the new slick dark green opus from Brian Birth Glazer, is a film that links up panic attacks before and after itself (as seen by you, the viewer) and signals the future of cinema horror or science fiction as less about acting and thrills and more about the brain dissolving itself in a pool of black oil in the middle of a dark forlorn forest wondering as it fades how it hears the rain and sizzle without ears. It's 2014's first official transhumanist off-world chance to begin again --the Blade Runner for the 22nd century -- at that stage of post-modern social decay where the screen is as permeable as a jet black oil-filled swimming pool surface and anyone can dive in, not just a Cocteau Orphee, not just Shauna Macdonald in The Descent (the last UK horror film this good). Just don't expect to climb out in the same skin you wore when you dove or were sucked in.

I know how it is, bro. I began the weekend with a terrible panic attack as my whole world crashed down around me in hailstorms of at-work red tape hot potatoes, allergies, depression, anxiety. When my girl wanted to go out to the movies, my blood ran cold and I shook like the gallows pole was sliding up til she tossed a half-Xanax on the floor and like a good dog I went scrambling and so we caught the late show of Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin down at the BAM and wandering back from it around midnight, through half-deserted and strangely-lit Good Friday-empty Brooklyn streets in a haze of alienated liquid light reflection, stale popcorn nausea and post-half Xanax glow wobbliness, we knew something weird had happened, to us, to film, to Brooklyn. I admit it I couldn't quite get past the feeling Glazer's film was more of a video art installation swerving towards an And then the Darkness detour than an actual movie. Instead of a flow there is, buried in mossy 'membrances of Basil Twist-y underwater shirt twirlings, the sense of drowning in place -- the darkness of the theater swallowing me up - even as we floated back home up Flatbush back to the smoky din, the paranoid terror red hot potato Poe-level paranoia waiting, unabashed, I felt half-digested.

Then, I realized where my paranoid terror was coming from. It was related to rewatching all six seasons of Mad Men in prep for the new and final season and realizing I'd mixed up Don Draper's forced hiatus from Sterling Cooper with my own work woes. I can't tell where the TV ends and my life begins anymore. I'm realizing I'm already half-sunk into the black oil image. When things get too intense at home, by which I mean onscreen, I move to the kitchen to fix a drink or go to the bathroom and repeat to myself, "it's only a movie, it's only a movie - I'm 'here.'" To our pets we at home must look often like statues, frozen in seated positions on the couch, before the glowing square, awaiting our orders....

But away from the safety zone, the world is cold, dark, harsh: Glazer lures us into a dark and alien theater on the power of Birth and the sexual allure of Scarlett Johansson. Set mostly in and around the dark shroud of Glasgow, Skin is rich with bleakly beautiful panoramas of bowling alleys, cobblestone streets with sad pubs, panic attack strobe dance clubs, drenching rain over misty mountain moors and lashing surf rolling and crashing down in fast accelerations on a family at play (at first), sucking them all into their presumed deaths in a chain of failed rescues, sans suspenseful music or any indication they've drowned, leaving only a screaming infant behind, a sequence so harrowingly existential Herzog-level dark that it kind of crawled inside my stomach like a nightmare I had as a child and suddenly all the layers of assurance and support that nothing bad can happen to an infant onscreen is swept up and away with nary a sympathetic string to let us know that the filmmakers too are horrified rather than mountain-level indifferent. We're not given any indication anyone cares, and it's chilling. And there's also working class yobbos, slang as indecipherable as an alien tongue setting up a class divide against Scarlett's posh Londoner accent and damn I get back to that infant. How do you get back to a film's familiar 'Mars needs Men'-style plot (the rural UK-set Devil Girl From Mars coming instantly to mind) after seeing that poor bereft toddler screaming, abandoned in the primordial surf as the sun sets down around him like an evil shroud? This poor kid's screams hang like a torture-tricked sucker punch cheap shot over the remainder of the film --until the sheer weirdness of the deformed boy pick-up throws us for yet another mickey. Whole reels of what the fuck seem to have been edited out, though based on our familiarity with films like La Femme Nikita and The Man Who Fell to Earth we can deduce those missing pieces, but why should we have to if it's only so Scarlett can suddenly turn compassionate Ann Bancroft at the Lynchian epidermal symbolism carnivale? I'm not an animal! See me! Feel me! Touch me! I'm dreaming. Take the shot, Miss Moneypenny, Glasgow is for drunks and junkie loo divers but too dangerous even for a black oil seductresses. Run, (into) forest! Not that one!

That's the problem with this film though I respect others who love it - lord knows I would have followed alien Scarlett J. anywhere, even over to the commercial multiplex wherein she's seducing Captain America and kicking ass instead of playing Venus Flytrap to some juicy soccer hooligans. It's strange and scary but she seems to have very little real power and decays in ways that make us hope Lars Von Trier is waiting in the wings to snatch her from the Kubrick coldness and douse her in the Charlotte Gainsbourg womb of old testament Griffith mortality instead of the unsettling idea that human males might be collectively more terrifying than any carnivorous alien sexually hypnotic prowler. Still, I saw some things I don't usually get to see at the movies - things so weird they're like the dark rural cousin to Matthew Barney's Cremaster. But I guess I'm on the fence (after one viewing) as to whether this is a real movie, a work of staggering foresight and genius that will one day be regarded as the 2001 of our era, or just a long experimental hot mess. Then again, I've seen 2001 and thought it was just a long experimental hot mess before. It took awhile.

The string of previews BAM showed before the film included something for Locke, which is set entirely inside Tom Hardy's car in real time as he talks on the Bluetooth. A whole hour and a half no doubt of artsy glistening street lamp reflections on rainy dark streets looking like luminous watercolors dripped on a black canvas whilst techno throbs hypnotically and family members and work acquaintances shout their panicked exposition at him via Siri's surreptitious digital strands and signals and strings. Is this preview meant to prepare us for the endless driving shots and slow loop to nowhere repetitions of Under the Skin? It seemed an ill omen. I felt the whole of Under the Skin was trying to escape that Locke, the idea that if you want a real movie that does real things you need to stay home - movies are now about big screen compositions set within cars and the minds of predators --they don't expand your horizons but shrink them until they grab you by the neck like a dominatrix dog collar and pull til you're purple. The next stage will be where you spend your ten dollars just to sit in your car and think about what the movie you paid to see might look and sound like if it was ever made, while you drive around. Dig, the movie is you, mate! Ten dollars!

Locke 

Another problem: what's with the mean male handler (Jeremy McWilliams) with the motorcycle humpsuit? There's a kind of icky chauvinist undercurrent--like male filmmakers aren't comfortable with castrating Venusians unless there's a man in charge (see my sizzling expose of cinema's pimps both before and behind the lens) and with Scarlett's voluptuous body stripped to black bra and skintight black jeans she becomes the whole show, just her and the black box rooms with the wet floors --so we really don't give a shit about this handler with his smug countenance. Ain't right. The first film of this ilk that transcends the pimp factor head on and smashes it -- Daughters of Darkness -- the most recent -- Neil  Jordan's Byzantium!

All that aside, Under the Skin tries hard to puncture some hidden and vital vein in our culture, the way any sense of a dislocated universal all-seeing perception dissolves in the dead of night in the middle of nowhere; Scarlett drives slowly trying to lure into her SUV figures of hunched over men, pummeling their way on foot through the darkness, shopping or working long after normal people go to sleep, for good reason, and Scotland especially seems as abandoned as some lifeless corner of the galaxy. From the darkness of an experimental intro that's just drones and a pinpoint of light, onwards to the rainy woodsy finish, it's hard to get a straight bead on anything. We're used to that pinpoint of light becoming a tunnel, but it's not going to be so easy. Aside from 'in Scotland' we never know where we are, except that we're treading the line between modernist ambiguity and hedging indecisiveness. In Glazer's debut, the Kubrickian Birth, we had a real soul in Nicole Kidman, beautiful with her Rosemary buzz cut and Anne Heche a brassy Lady Macbeth that colored the painting of our fear. It was more Kubrick than Eyes Wide Shut on some level, but still it lacked the feeling of planetary orbit of The Shining and 2001 -- films where you can actually feel the world turning below the feet of the Steadicam operator, and your own seat, the orbit of the Earth spinning around the sun and the longer orbit of the sun around the lip of it's galaxy as the universe expands outwards, and how one orbit --the film--and the other--your head-- meet and eclipse each other until both disappear, the sense that any kind of stasis or stillness is an illusion. Under the Skin has only one decaying orbit, and lots of flashy editing tracks and scars are displayed out from under its sleeve, including an extended melange of overlapping images through which Johansson's strange and lovely face gradually appears, but when the charm's unwound there's nowhere to go but towards the macroscope finality ala the end of Easy Rider. It's the kind of film that depends on Wikipedia and summations of the original source novel for sense. My GF read them to me afterwards but I was sick off too much stale popcorn, and was coming down off a doggie Xanax, and the terrors of bureaucratic power finally besting me am der werkhaus. My weekend was ruined! At any rate, I appreciate the hypertextual angle - a film that needs a drive or walk to and from itself, and also the internet to explain the source novel demands to be judged accordingly, thereto...

Before that, there was Larry Fessenden's low budget Habit (Netflixed after admiring his You're Next) in post-Blank Generation style and Liquid Sky content, Fessenden wears all the hats and stars, as Sam, a bartender and witty drunk from the era of the 90s;  I drank the same way, at the same time, in his same neighborhood - (he bartends at the Hat, the great Mexican restaurant in the LES with the with the super strong margaritas --they'd give them to you in plastic cups for take-out!!!) I think I've even used his great line about committing suicide on the installment plan before. And with his wild hair and missing front teeth Fessenden is a great shaggy antihero, one of those where intellect and the ability to succinctly share one's inner feelings is not the mark of a square nor missing teeth the mark of a working class yobbo. He must have been really drinking cuz he's amazing. And there's some really great drinking scenes, where concerns about his girlfriend Anna (Meredith Snaider) and her habit of sucking his blood during sex come out organic and low key as any normal conversation, neither forcedly so or otherwise and she doesn't need a pimp to wave his wand and 'allow' her to feast.

Fessenden also has a great gift for framing within the tight confines of small realistically dilapidated apartments -- the Halloween party early on is a masterpiece of tight economical framing - we've been to that same party before and the low key conversational tone is also a marvel; sounding like an early Jack Nicholson but not trying to, and believably trying to navigate his way through a rapidly downward spiraling series of options! The hand job in Battery Park with Anna was one of the hotter sex scenes I've witnessed in some time, too, for being so sudden, realistic, intense, out of left field, punk rock, real - exciting --it left me bleeding psychic energy from out my limp imprisoned genital matrix in a way I've not been bled since Lydia Lunch in Kern's Submit to Me Now!

All that said, there's still the issue of the horror, the weakest element of this otherwise strong and moving film. The vamp fangs are clearly the two dollar plastic variety and while that could have worked --like if he was too drunk to tell if she's just joking or really trying to bite him -- plastic or real - etc., they play it straight and by then the film's run on kind of long, there's still no denying this is a significant and impressive low budget work; if the climax is a let-down it's only because the rest of it is so much better than it has any right to be.

The main issue with both these femme fatales of course is the weird dichotomies - Scarlett rocks the posh accent but dresses like a waterfront Lars Von Trier prostitute, and why is her spaceship an SUV? And as vamp Anna, Meredith Snaider is too short to be scary; I would have liked to see her taller, or more mature, played by a real gravitas-bearing actress who somehow seemed separate from the murky twentysomething slacker low-key characters in the film, none of whom seem to emerge from the murk to become any archetypal vampire types (the one kid tries to be a Van Helsing rescuer of sorts but it never pans out though he does get in a great stream-of-babblelogue about the real vampire being all around us in the choking overreach of society and popular culture). So in the end it's not as effective as a vampire or horror film but does work as an authentically booze-engulfed LES twentysomething denizen depiction, wherein the sense of world-weary isolation, the cultural vampire metaphor, works.

The reverse is perhaps true for Under the Skin, which has a few striking visuals involving black goo (are the aliens merely tar babies drawn from this murk, as in they're all one giant amoeba that occasionally splits off and dons a pelt like a wolf in sheep clothing?) and in one climactic shot we're able to realize the way even the most horrifying sight can blend in perfectly with twisting sunless old growth forest. Critics have noted the way Earth becomes so easily alien and terrifying through Scarlett's eyes, and how inherently alien she looks to begin with, and the weird similarities between these alien seduction / immersions and the reality of reported alien abductions, and the similarity between these aliens and the weird eye thing in Liquid Sky. While I get all that I'm still not convinced. Were my expectations too high? I wasn't high at all... just poisoned by panic... was that it?

Days later I'm still thinking about it, and the film did help strangeify that long walk uphill from BAM to our Park Slope digs on a late night Good Friday, half the locals seemingly gone upstate to visit relatives for Easter, leaving the neighborhood feeling very abandoned and surreal like an alien world. I guess, that's the best movies can do if they want to be both artsy and get us to not wait for video. To get us to trek out there into the dark foreboding night and pay over ten bucks to spend a couple hours parked next to strangers, our purse and coat pockets easily accessible to bed bugs and junkie fingers, the film has to seamlessly link up to all those things, to forge a doorway between our lives, where we are inside our own skins and their outer furs, wherein our seeing the film, and the film itself, become merged. If a film can't make the walk home resonate through a different pair of eyes than the ones we came in with, then why did we ever leave the safety of our homes to begin with? Wherein films of the past, like Habit, can link up to our memories of the 90s rather than our dreadful 20's tomorrows, and trekking to the neighborhood video store in the wearying sunshine of a Sunday used to help create some kind of anticipatory context, some ceremony, even for old favorites, all that is forgotten in favor of Netflix, the delivery system that sluggens down to a slowmo swim the last vestiges of our impetus to move through the tar pit black quicksand stasis of reality in pursuit of an escape. One day maybe soon we won't even need our own memories, our own darkness, a seat, speakers, ears, or the screens in our retinae. We'll be the viewer and the viewed in one looping orbital motion -the entirety of our senses transferred onto a stack of DVDs on a dusty shelf, and hopefully none of them, not ever, will be Transcendence. 

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Choose Death: Revisiting TWILIGHT's Junky Delirium.

"Young girl with fire / something said she understood /
I wanted to fly / she made me feel like I could...." 

- Neil Diamond  ("Shilo" - song about his childhood anima playmate)

"but we can fly... with these!" -  John Lennon 

(showing heroin pills [?] to Yoko  - John and Yoko: A Love Story TVM- 1985)

"You're like my own private brand of heroin"
--Edward Cullen (to Bella)

"When you're on junk you don't drink" - W.S. Burroughs (Junky)

"I never drink... wine." - Dracula

"My name is Bela Lugosi... I've been a morphine addict for twenty years."

-- (Martin Landau) - Ed Wood

Bella, flanked by cumbersome breathers

Vampirism is every girl's dream if she be faire and smart enough to see when a hottie in the mirror looketh back and to know, if she's ever to bid surcease time's incessant pawing, it's now or never. Small price, killing off your inner Snow White soul via a lugubrious huntsman, to keep that hottie smiling back. And if there's no such thing as vampirism or eternal youth, well, some drugs come close. Slowing things down, killing the appetite and sleep cycle, drugs, love, and vampirism replace glazed-eyed homogenous breather-eater lockstep with an unending thirst.

For the first four films of the Twilight saga, Bella wisely wants to get undead while she's still got that pale flawless skin (her mothers' already shows the results of age and prolonged sun). And that is just one reason why I believe the series so subversive. Bella chooses death. She subverts the fairy tale maturity myth, jamming a crowbar into the wheel of time, making the saga a kind of alcoholic-addict fantasia wherein the enchanted bower is returned to out of clear conscience. She's hip to the banality of 'the right choice.' You can argue she merely chooses Edward (Robert Pattinson) and death goes with the deal. You can argue he's a pretty creepy specimen (old enough to be her great-great grandfather, stalking her and watching her sleep all night after climbing in the window) but he's not a real person. He's a daemon lover / arrested animus projection! The Twilight saga doesn't reflect the move from bleak Cinderella attic to magic pumpkin coach to married princess -- which would mirror a girl's transition from child to adulthood-- but the reverse. Bella moves from sunny Florida girl to the eternally cloudy Forks like its some castle tower prison. In that sense the series is more a Greek tragedy, wherein unresolved past issues come burbling up to drag our heroine back down into the mucky-muck. But there's also a conscious decision on her part, the Campbell mantra of "when falling, dive." She's a Snow White who makes the conscious decision to go back to sleep because she can't be bothered with an awake Prince Charming with all the cumbersome breathing, snoring, bathroom issues, and boring functions one must endure with such a dubious prize.

And the idea that Edward has nothing else in his life to do other than stalk her is creepy sure, but also relevant to the daemonic animus, being the half of us in shadow while our daily waking egoic consciousness goes about its day, the one who literally has no life without us, and is most active while we're asleep (and vice versa). There is no sun or blue sky for the animus. It can only run loose when our conscious is asleep (or, if we're artists and writers, performers or mystics or schizophrenics, truly awake). Edward's daemon lover archetype ancestry stretches back to grim roots, down deep to Eros and Psyche and up through the Romantic poetry of Keats and Shelley, the daemon undead druggy lovers of Coleridge, Poe and La Fanu finally up to the Anne Rice 90s before climbing up to the ultimate teenage Gothic flowering, Edward.

I recently re-watched the entire series as it was all playing on one cable channel or other last month, and after the entirety of around 12 hours of film it definitely holds up, especially if you really like dark purples, which I do. And lastly, it's great because, for me at least, it's guilt-free, there's no objectification of the females, rather we have a rare example of the 'female gaze' and the sole sex appeal comes from the boys, which does nothing for me turn-on wise, hence no guilt. Rather it compels me to realize that maybe my vague discomfort is how most women go through their movie watching life, enduring vast stretches of their boyfriend's chosen strippers and bloody gunfights. In Twilight: New Moon Bella goes to the local cinema with her mortal, age-appropriate friend Jessica (Anna Kendrick) and coming out laments how crappy the film was, mainly as there's "No hot guys kissing anybody." Imagine, a film daring to lament such a shallow thing. Then I remember Dracula again, Bela Lugosi commenting on the film's appeal to women:

 "It is women who bear the race in bloody agony. Suffering is a kind of horror. Blood is a kind of horror. Women are born with horror in their very bloodstream... It is women who love horror. Gloat over it. Feed on it..." 

And also, in a way, it is the woman in me, my own dream lover anima, my ego's dark unconscious shadow, who loves Bella as a projector screen for herself, as it allows her in turn to look out through my eyes and then through Bella's eyes, for each anima and animus has their own inner daemons to work through, and so it goes, in fractals either direction. My anima rewards me with dreams of paradise (which for some reason is a cavernous sub basement under my suburban childhood/teenager neighbor's house hot springs with concrete floors and strange books on benches and vague memories of having a fling with the mother, who is not the same mother who actually lived there. Her husband's always away, and if I can find my way down there, she meets me if so inclined. I've never gotten even to first with her (it's not that kind of dream) but I wake up thrilled, longing to recapture my memories of this hidden underground sanctuary. It looks like a cross between some secret room in a Vincent Price movie, the basement lair of Hammer's THE REPTILE, and Carfax Abbey's ruined Gothic basement and Bellevue's old hydrotherapy room.

And maybe I am prejudiced; Dracula is my favorite horror character. Bela Lugosi is my favorite horror actor, and next to William S. Burroughs, also my favorite junky. And even Bella's name conjures him, so it's sad that so many critics I normally respect tow the party line with the Twilight series, never seeing past the 'teen phenomenon' hooplah. Meanwhile these critics respect, some even revere, the more boy-friendly Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings/Hobbit, and Star Wars sagas, which have twenty films between them (so far) and about that same number of  lines spoken by women. Unless they're princesses to be admired from afar, to be kissed before they turn out to be your own sister, and so forth, women seem to be unwelcome in these franchises, yet these films get way more respect in general critical consensus. I can only guess Twilight's detractors are nerds who've never done drugs, or had more than one girl or boy interested in them at the same time.

If you're like me, with a loud, bothersome anima who withholds great sentence structure and inspiration from your writing on a whim, then you know she loves movies that feature crazy women she can project onto; and so you know she will reward thee with vast acres of flowing prose when she gets to lock onto an Angelina Jolie in Girl Interrupted or a Natalie Portman in Black Swan, or a Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, or even Anthony Perkins in Psycho. (Right at the moment I wrote his name, Bogie says "You're a good man, sister" behind me - synchronicitous!)  Twilight's rife with such crazy feminine. My anima loves that it is not life-affirming but a solid romantic mood poem-- tortured as Edward Burne-Jones trying to score laudanum at the strip mall-- and an exoneration of the death wish underwriting everything from self-cutting and anorexia to just partying like there's no tomorrow or even just sleeping late and missing school, going from rainy day Gloomy Sunday blues to hooking up with a pallid junky and getting involved in 'the life,' understanding what that means, fully cognizant of all that will be lost, yet nonetheless daring to answer 'not to be' when Hamlet asks his mortal question.

Only rubes would think such a choice false next to the demands of the 'paternal' life-choosing next-stage animus, i.e. the result when woman's daemonic lover turns to inner critic and lecturer, who endorses sanctified institutions without question, trusting doctors, school principals, fathers, husbands, and politicians over her own better judgment. This new animus argues over SUV parking spots at the kids' soccer practice, feels the need to remodel the kitchen, honor PTA appointments, hire babysitters, monitor their children's friend choices, and even approves her own gradual arrival at an assisted living domicile. We can see women dominated by this stage of the animus in the Tea Party -- Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, and Ann Coulter -- they let their animus possess them at the expense of their own gender's liberty. It's only near the final 'second childishness' stage of Shakespeare's seven ages the "mere oblivion,"  sans taste, sans eyes, that the younger daemon lover animus returns, to shepherd these 'healthy' choice-making woman into the void. This is even pictured in New Moon, wherein Bella dreams of being all super old and Edward as young as ever, waiting patiently all this time for her to be done with the 'living' he so wishes for her. 

To understand the beauty of Bella's rejection of this fate takes perhaps the mindset of the addict, the sort of girl who stays upstairs reading fantasy novels when the sun's out or the one who's depressed and in misery (and in school) until a hot older drug dealer sweeps her off her feet. Some girls just can't wait for the gradual fade-to-black. Some girls are too enamored of the daemon lover to let him go for the duration of her adult life on the vague promise he'll be back at the end. Sure the choice to stick with him is not healthy but who cares? The women who choose to keep their daemon as their animus are our romantic heroines in the truest sense -- for don't forget that forsaking the daemon may allow her to exit the fantasy and enter the social order (to upgrade animus projections to, say, her shrink), but who needs another normal well-adjusted girl? Not the readers and seers and livers-in of fantasy. 

"Many myths and fairy tales tell of a prince, who has been turned into an animal or a monster by sorcery, being saved by a woman. This is a symbolic representation of the development of the animus toward consciousness. Often the heroine may ask no questions of her mysterious lover, or she is only allowed to meet him in darkness..." - Marie-Louise von Franz

Consider Bella and Edward's break-up early on in New Moon: his 'heroic' attempt to rescue her from himself, to usher her from the faerie bower and into the next stage of her development: the camera wobbles when it shows Bella, we feel her knees getting weak and the stars going around, the drop of anguish cutting through her voice, but the camera is straight and calm cutting over to him, accenting his total emotional coldness. She staggers off, disoriented, winds up sleeping in the forest, a kind of refusal to go back to normal. Rather than following his advice she courts death actively, all but daring him not to come to her rescue.

 Reality is seldom operating anywhere close to a teenager's inner state. Myths are truer in that sense; they are not at all sentimental, for as Jung notes: "Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality" (ala John Ford); they are terrifying because they unveil that which was hidden for a reason. They are beguiling, addictive; once the light is shown over that shadowed corner of the psyche, the grateful prisoner chained in that corner rewards you with hordes of little treasures its stolen from you on the sly ever since you repressed him into that dark corner (usually around your first day of school): bottles of endorphins and dopas and artistic inspiration its fermenting for just such an illumination. Gradually he gives out less and less for more and more liberty to run rampant in your psyche. There's a thin line between being rewarded with one's own treasures and being held hostage in the zone between a daemonic dream lover's ardent wooing and drug addiction, and crossing that line has its own delirious Stockholm syndrome high if you know how to treat the agonies and despair of withdrawal as just another kind of masochistic kick, the muscle ache and burning skin just love 'not given lightly' by your inner whiplash girl child in the dark.

"The pain was my only evidence he was real." - Bella 

Enlightenment doesn't occur from sitting around visualizing images of light, but from integrating the darker aspects of the self into the conscious personality. -- Jung

Blood, the life, love: over the course of five films Bella never has a single real hobby other than desire for Edward, anything else engaged in just a distraction; bringing junked motorcycles onto the reservation for Jake (the werewolf) to fix isn't because she likes him romantically but because the image of Edward shows up whenever she does 'something stupid' - i.e. crashing into a tree. Her various suicide attempts conjure the spirit of Edward saying "Bella, don't" - trying to wrap her in his overprotective shroud, playing the latter stage animus in place of the dream lover (as above, the promise to return at her death bed). But Bella's misery wobble framing steadies around Jake and Stewart shows she's a far better actress than given credit for, as she modulates brilliantly from pale, shocked jiltee, to anguished grieving misery, to playful and sharp-witted, as often happens when one can see and tell the person they're hanging with is in love with them, a captive audience. Bella's using him, really, as exploitative in her way as the first poison-brained white trader to swap furs and bear skins for two-cent trinkets. And using someone to get over someone else is not cool, yet how else are you going to do it?

And that's why Bella is so great both as a character and as Stewart's performance: she is not just one person, she has many facets and not all of them are admirable but Stewart plays the less admirable as if they were admirable --she doesn't know the difference but we do. When geeky mouth breathing classmate Mike (Michael Welch) finds out she's been dumped, he awkwardly asks her to the movies and she snaps, "How about 'Face Punch' have you seen that?" I love that line! The kind of thing that one would say in a cafeteria as a reworking of "how about I punch you in your stupid face?" That Face Punch turns out to be a real movie hardly matters to the brilliance of the line--its refreshing savagery. It probably wasn't even a real movie before she mentioned it. She creates the future before her like a reverse wake, like a zipper uniting the conscious and unconscious halves of psychic jacket, Edward and Jacob zipped together into androgyne Bela.

I can really only think of one or two heroines in film who measure up to that level of realistic fuckerwithery: Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind and Cathy in Wuthering Heights. Out of touch critics in the house can't rear back like startled horses over those ladies' behaviors as they do with Bella's, because they're old established classics, written by, not surprisingly, female authors. Each has a character smart enough to act like she doesn't know it, who slouches and mopes and takes advantage of seeming obtainable but is really quite grandiose and fierce, who plays coy and clueless about how much various boys are crazy over her, a total of traits that, in the rom-com world, would be the purview of bitchy villains, not protagonists. Each has two boys mad for her -- one wild and one anemic -- the twist in Twilight is that the wan, pale anemic one is the true love choice -- the vibrant anima mundi-reflection of the Jake / Rhett / Heathcliff is relegated to the lesser mortal bin; Edward's name even sounds like Edgar, who marries Cathy and becomes as subjected to her as Jake is at the mercy of Bella in Twilight. 

It's this reversal I most resonate with, because Bella is more than just one of a series of female-penned ball-busting manipulating wantons daring to reappropriate the gaze, she is also one of the 'hurrah for the next who dies'-style lost generation, the modernist woman 'who chooses death,' realizing in it an honest choice truer than the one of life and health and mortality because among other things it's a choice that gives her a chance to stare down her fears, to embrace the demon and daemon, to ride over the cliff and into legend. Such women include Evelyn Venable in Death Takes a Holiday, Kate Winslet in Titanic, Assumpta Serna in Matador, both chicks in Thelma and Louise, Ava Gardner in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, Dietrich in Morocco and Dishonored, Sherri Moon Zombie in The Devil's Rejects.  Only by deliberately choosing to act against their own 'best' interests--with gaggles of men and authority figures trying to talk them out of--can these romantic feminine characters be free. Whether that freedom lasts another week or a few hours is irrelevant, except the sooner death comes the sweeter the terrifying narcotic immediacy of the remaining life. (see: Twilight's Cinematic Ancestors). The movie ends either way, why not go out before the credits so you can at least pretend the movie never ends?

As relevant as Twilight's reversal-of-logical-maturation metaphor to death or addiction is the solitary life--spent largely with the unconscious, getting to know, as it were, one's second self through allowing it free reign at the typewriter. All good free-flowing inspired poetic 'flights of fancy' come from the writer's daemonic, the animus or anima. this end my favorite of the five Twilight films has been New Moon, mainly because the brilliant intertextual use of Bella's birthday to invoke a range of age-related fears and longings (including the dream where she's super old, perhaps the most honest and strangely honest metaphysical rendering of birthdays since 2001), and a high school English class assignment, Romeo and Juliet, which contextualizes both Bella's various adrenalin-rush seeking self-destructive behavior (she becomes, as her human friend says, disapprovingly, an adrenalin junky) as well as the more obvious (and fascinating) 'rescue' of said animus, preventing it from dissolving and reforming as the next phase of adult maturity takes over and the buzzkill 'always right' tea party drip, the safety-first counselor moves in: "Bela, stop."

Addicts surely relate, but even more cogently than Romeo and Juliet, Twilight's arc of Bella's pitiless insistence on becoming a vampire reminds me of Antigone, wherein she chooses to disobey the law to not bury her brother, knowing full well it ensures her death. This loyalty to the dead to the point of a conscious, clear-eyed choice results in a prime illustration of the way feminine contrary fearlessness conquers even fate and you get to tell all the smarmy idiots who 'just want what's best for you' to fuck off:

"I shall lie down
With him in death, and I shall be as dear
To him as he to me.
It is the dead
Not the living, who make the longest demands:
We die for ever… "  -- Antigone 

For Romeo there's more grief at work fueled by brashness, rather than Antigone's (or Bella's) cool detached insistence on being 'changed.' Consider Romeo's speech:

"... I still will stay with thee,
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again. Here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber maids. Oh, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last.
Arms, take your last embrace. And, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death."

He's seeing death as a negative; he's waaay off. He's a hothead. World-weary flesh? He ain't never been anywhere. His act is one of youthful grandstanding, a poseur rather than Antigone's or Bella's cold, logical insistence, their refusal to judge death as negative. Sure she's annoyingly obsessive, sure she needs a hobby other than pining or mourning, but neither heroine (nor the ones in Wuthering Heights and Gone with the Wind) are in a 'reality' - they are in a story, a myth. That's the fundamental mistake of so many movies: they must somehow reflect 'reality' and set a 'good example.' Just look at the roster of Oscar nominations and you see it -- the moralizing, the historical heft, the inspiration. Who needs it? Shakespeare and the Greeks never cared for reality or setting good examples, rather they cared for myth, which is a deeper truth of the psyche, by which I mean the sum total of the unconscious and waking selves, the dream of night and the reality of day merged in the titular time, through symbol and archetypes and and performance, the only language the unconscious understands. Twilight cares only for sleep, for chasing the phantom shadows of the romantic animus and kicking the rescuing woodsmen to the curb, even diving after your merman to drown in the briny thrashing deep. Bella fixes herself to Thanatos like a lamprey, she stays true to her animus' original projection. And Stephanie Meyer's series is a success because there's no truth left in waking reality anyway ("Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens" - Jung), recognizing in their airbrushed pale-skinned phantom Edward the same thing that once hypnotized legions of Garbo lovers in the death dream silent theater of the 20s. They called them "Garbo widows."

 

... the animus is also sometimes represented as a demon of death. A gypsy tale, for example, tells of a woman living alone who takes in an unknown handsome wanderer and lives with him in spite of the fact that a fearful dream has warned her that he is the king of the dead. Again and again she presses him to say who he is. At first he refuses to tell her, because he knows that she will then die, but she persists in her demand. Then suddenly he tells her he is death. The young woman is so frightened that she dies. Looked at from the point of view of mythology, the unknown wanderer here is clearly a pagan father and god figure, who manifests as the leader of the dead (like Hades, who carried off Persephone). He embodies a form of the animus that lures a woman away from all human relationships and especially holds her back from love with a real man. A dreamy web of thoughts, remote from life..." - Marie-Louise von Franz

The mistake most Hollywood films make is to misinterpret Franz's "dreamy web of thoughts" as a condemnation, and to make sure their films have no such mistakes on the part of their heroines. But kids need to see their dark daemon webs onscreen --they don't need to see their lives, they see enough of them already, too much even. They don't need the visibly uncomfortable gym teacher creeping even into their most private reveries to caution them about protection. The unconscious is aggressively contemptuous of goodness and safety. The more one tries to eliminate all danger from their lives the farther away death becomes in their field of vision and the staler and duller real life becomes.

And so it is that Twilight draws hostility from critics who perhaps lack enough self awareness to realize their vision has grown dull and stale, too blind to their own opposite-gendered unconscious archetypes to question their initial hostility. I admit I'm prejudiced. When I first starting drinking, for example, I was progressively warned never to drink alone, or to drink in the morning, lest I become alcoholic. But I couldn't just find people to hang with at any hour of the day, and drinking in the morning was a miraculous way to alleviate hangovers and make the whole day rosy. Of course they were right and I almost killed myself a dozen times over and had to stop drinking altogether after a paltry 14 year-run. But I regret nothing! And if heroin had been offered to me, or speed, I probably would have gone for that, too. Now it's cigarettes. Everytime I see some woman on TV with no fingers or throat or hair croaking her warnings about smoking through her tubes I just mute the sound like I'm sure Poe's Prospero wishes he could have done that striking clock chime at his Masque of the Red Death. But these are the choices we make. And if more people made conscious choices to destroy themselves in these slow brilliant ways maybe our world wouldn't be so gruesomely overpopulated, or our country wouldn't be going bankrupt from too many old people still alive and draining Social Security, Medicare, and union pensions for all future generations, as doctors spend our children's future to keep these viejos alive for one more grueling month. It's only when we're no longer afraid of death that we can truly be free, and take our crowbar out of the spokes of the circle of life. In this sense, Twilight is like a lone dark spot in the unending light, or a light in the darkness - what's the difference.

We see a bit of western civilization's knee-jerk pro-life need for consideration in New Moon, wherein Edward dumps Bella, and flees with family in tow but she can get him to appear by risking her safety foolishly, forcing him to move from  demon lover to paternal but neglectful lecturer, telling her to turn around and so forth. It's great because we hate Edward for causing her so much pain, we relish with her the chance to bother him through such disregard for personal safety, forcing him to reveal a stern buzzkill authoritarianism that is utterly without effect or genuine authority.

It's so bitterly fitting as a counter to that that even after director of the first film Catherine Hardwicke scored big, she's replaced by a guy, Chris Weitz, for subsequent films, the guy borrowing a lot of her aesthetic sense but quietly draining it of at least half Hardwicke's fairy tale Jungian archetypal contexts, animal and color symbolism (not for nothing Edward is first met sitting next to a stuffed white owl, wings outstretched and claws preparing to clutch its unwary prey, in science class) but the first thing a film company does when they see a woman has made a hit film is to take over the sequel and kick her to the curb so she doesn't queer up this hit 'they've' lucked onto, so here I'll just quote a woman, from one of the few mainstream sites worth a damn, The Guardian:

"Twilight the film has been a massive success, but its audience is dismissed as fangirls, groupies, teenyboppers, airheads. It is sneered at by the same critics who misogynistically savaged Sex and the City and Mamma Mia, two other films made for women, with such blatant transparency. Strange that the belittling should be so vociferous; we women are the biggest group in the world, yet our viewpoint is ridiculed and denied, our testimony ignored. But that's the way it goes. The studios will use Twilight's profits to fund more films in which there are no decent roles for women, no women in major positions behind the scenes, no women directors. That's happened with Twilight's sequel: Hardwicke has been sacked and replaced by the guy who made The Golden Compass. The female gaze has been blinded yet again." -Bidisha, Guardian 2009."

I wouldn't go that far, Chris Weitz does an amazing job of preserving the female gaze -- he must be in tight with his anima - but there's also a sense of really picking up on what made the book and first film work - whereas to me the weakest of the series is Eclipse, which is directed by a different dude - this one made 30 Days of Night - which makes sense as Eclipse is almost a sequel (I even lumped them together before I knew they had the same director in a post on the Nordic Circle rom-hor genre).  It's fine but I find Eclipse to be rather washed out color-wise, and focusing too much on action and flashbacks as opposed to grand archetypal coming-of-age myth junky metaphor soap subversion and brilliant purple and mist scenery. I should point out too that The Golden Compass has a young capable girl in the lead, boys to the side, wicked stepmother and a Catholic stand-in bad guy contingent similar to the Volturi in New Moon. Bad box office killed the chance for sequels, alas, and the Christians backlashed both for the anti-religion angle and, no doubt, the capable girl with powers angle. A case again perhaps of deep-seated castration anxiety undercutting a lot of parents and unconscious male's good sense, or maybe enhancing it. But since when have fairy tales and myths had anything to do with good sense? If they did, Red Riding Hood wouldn't even talk to the wolf in the first place, and all kids would be bored sick, and then probably have to go talk to wolves for real and get eaten and it would be your fault!

There was a time when women screenwriters ruled in Hollywood, before the code came into effect, and talking to wolves was all the rage. But with the arrival of the code in 1934 came the feeling that, like now, telling women's stories is too important to be left to women. So stories of grandiose emotion and feeling were replaced by smug sermonizing where childish women are brought to heel, weened of their immature desire to be independent by endured humiliations at the hands of twits. Twilight dares to undo all of that, to go back farther than even the pre-code box office tallies can reach, down into the murky recesses of the Brothers Grimm and pre-Inquisition alchemical magick, straight like a hot shot into the archetypal vein, the pulsing warm narcotic rush of the eternal feminine distilled and uncut, so primal it invokes knee-jerk revulsion from most men, a revulsion so deep they don't even recognize it.

If, as Bidisha says above, the profits will be used to fund more male-centric films, well, we can only hope more films about women ruling the dark abysses of true myth will succeed at the box office. Snow White and the Huntsman and Black Swan did well by their women, even if directed by men, and even Disney has dared, for the first time ever, perhaps, to make an evil queen the star of a film, Maleficent (a very interesting name, as her own 'male-efficient' animus is already running the show). Starring Angelina Jolie with Art Deco cheekbones, it could be a bust of CGI 3-D boondoggle like that James Franco Oz, or it could rock. One can only hope it doesn't end with her falling in love with some doe-eyed dork prince and abandoning her witchy black magick ways so she can dote on him hand and foot, as is done, say, in post-code films like I Married a Witch and Bell, Book, and Candle.

I still remember when Jolie sparked bonfires with her Gia-Foxfire-Girl Interrupted power. We'll have to see if there's any of that blood left in her, or if her legions of biological and adopted kids have drained her dry. I'm happy she saved the world and all, but some of just want to watch that world burn.

What's tragic isn't that we want it to watch the world burn, but that we have to clarify the 'watch' aspect to placate nervous censors, the NSA, common 'decency', Batman, and so forth. When we let life-affirming paternalistic morals even in our dreams our dark shadow hearts may have no choice to but to act out into the real, or worse, retreat --until all that's left are church socials, Lassie, freckled children, chaperones, white picket fences, and enough treacly strings to drive even a good girl straight to the devil. Isn't that why he set it up? Why he put the morals in and took himself out? The devil can't corrupt your soul when he's busy on the screen. His biggest triumph is convincing us not to put him there, not to project him out at all, just let him smolder unseen in his buried celluloid coffin like a sulky genie, until even the tiniest spark blows the whole thing off. 

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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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