I finally get to be a Western Hero, the day before on Clint Eastwood's birthday, no less.

Part Two of this exploration of male-bonding as it relates to Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch, with Phil Snyder, Bill and John Morrison. Part one includes a brief discussion of Bill and John’s father, his brutality and his wound, then of Jason’s father and the family business, and Jason’s inevitable rebellion. In part two, Jason and Phil discuss why “the boys want to be with the boys”—but only so far, how being among men allows our emasculation wounds to show; fear of obligation, performance anxiety, and Phil’s catastrophic family trip. In part three, Bill talks of Robert Bly’s description of mentors, the ritual of the sword, and how Bill never received his father’s blessing. In part four, Phil and Jason discuss the archetypal longing of The Wild Bunch, Sam’s “dog brothers” (James Coburn, L.Q. Jones, Warren Oates, Lee Marvin, et al.), “misfit culture” and how individuals are united in their common refusal to join society; Blue Velvet and Phil’s father’s cronies; men on a mission: the real purpose of bonding being the fusion of wills towards a single intent; the bunch’s integration through death, Angel as the higher conscience of the bunch, the soldier’s code, men out of time. In part five, Jason discusses with Bill and John the slaying of the king, how he disinherited his father’s fortune and rejected the legacy, the blood money of corporate business, and “the bad king.” In part six, Phil and Jason return to The Wild Bunch, speaking of death as destiny, the unconscious nobility of the killer, how the primal urges that make the bunch warriors finally make them heroes, and of the bloody wound that runs through Peckinpah’s films.

Although we impact each other throughout our lives, real, meaningful change very rarely happens (after 20 years of "self-work," I speak from experience, alas!). Most of us die with the same patterns we developed in our first 7 years still firmly in place.

I'd say change never comes about through the willed intervention of another save in a negative fashion, by causing trauma. Of course there are overt ways that people change us - by saving our lives or giving us STD, or whatever; but even then these people are only agents of change who happen to cross our paths and so impact our lives. If it wasn't them, it would have been someone else.

Our idea of having some sort of say about the way our lives unfold is largely illusory. Think of it this way: the Universe is a larger organism that is operating intelligently according to its own "agenda," and we are microbes within that organism and so, inevitably, part of that unfolding agenda. Do we consider the cells in our bodies to have free will? Maybe when they develop cancer! Otherwise we consider them merely a part of the greater working, with no autonomy outside of mutiny, ie, "disease."

What I mean, maybe, is that - accepting that we can't help but influence those we interact with - we should never try to change another person, because to do so would be to impose our belief/value system upon them. We are invariably been driven by our own "patterns". Our motives are never clean.How many of us even know what's best for ourselves? If we did, would we be so tangled up in addiction, frustration, sexual obsession (aka "romantic love"), self-hatred, and all the rest? So then, where on Earth do we get the idea we know what's good for others?

It's a socially endorsed form of egomania, and it's very evident in the APC (alt. perc. comm) in the way people platform with their ideas under the assumption that it's "important" people know about them, when really, they are simply trying to get attention to validate their own beliefs. Myself included with this post!

Versions of Reality

I: Kings of Reality

Everyone has their personal version of reality and everyone believes theirs is not only the best version, but the only one that really counts.

These versions of reality are cobbled together (usually in early adulthood) from what we see, hear, and read. The data gathered does not determine our version of reality, however; rather it’s our still-forming version of reality that dictates which items of data we choose to retain, to patch together our version of reality. The reason is that our version of reality is actually dependent on our physical, emotional, psychological imprinting as infants, and has little or nothing to do with conscious processes.

It never seems to occur to us, for example, that our version of reality is built up from material that comes directly from other people’s versions of reality (the books we read, people we respect, and so forth). Another way of saying this: our idea of objective reality arises from our agreement to agree that, if enough different subjective realities are patched together, this somehow constitutes “objective” reality. But logically, the reverse is the case: the more external points of view our version of reality draws upon, the more subjective it becomes.

We cling to our version of reality as if our life depends upon it. Maybe it does. Yet we know that any version of reality is incomplete, and never can be complete. Our insistence that it is “truth” is like the “suspension of disbelief” we perform while watching a movie—we trick ourselves in order to forget what we know, so that we can believe what we want to believe.

The way we view the world defines who we think we are, our constructed identity. We cannot see ourselves from the outside, except through the eyes of another.

We agree the sky is blue without ever wondering if we are seeing the same color, knowing only that we have agreed to give it the name “blue.” We cannot ever know what color the other is seeing, so it’s irrelevant to us. And yet, we still insist that others agree with us on the blueness of the sky.

We all desperately need others to agree with our version of reality, even while we insist that we are special and unique. Really, we want to uphold a version of reality in which we are King and everyone else will slavishly agree with us: a world of Yes-people. Boring and hellish as this would be, it’s the only version of reality in which we’d have complete control and therefore feel totally safe.

II: Reality as Defense System

We like people who see things the way we do. At the same time, we want the people we already like to see things that way too. We experience disturbance, anxiety, if we encounter people whom we admire who don’t agree with our view of things. Either we have to ignore the dissonance this creates or decide we don’t admire these people after all (or at least, not that particular aspect of them). A third option is to rethink our version of reality. This is the hardest path. Does anyone ever really upturn their version of reality in a way that is meaningful? It is akin to identity-suicide.

Our versions of reality are our defense systems, our armor, against an incomprehensible, and probably hostile, Universe. It began as a necessary survival response to those first childhood experiences, the ones which presented the original threat to our well-being, so shaping the identity-armor that was later fully consolidated as a version of reality.

Parents are the first to override our sense of reality by telling us that monsters do not exist and that our invisible friends are imaginary, that we are not hungry when we say we are, and so forth. Parents use their children as the supreme opportunity to strengthen and fortify their own versions of reality: by “recruiting” others to uphold it. Imposition of beliefs on others is the most effective way to assert and build up our identities. Since it is done to us from day one, we quickly learn to do it ourselves.

As children, we have two choices if we wish to maintain our well-being: either we must create a version of reality opposed to the one being imposed upon us; or, we create one that is compatible with it, in imitation of it. Either way, the result is the same: we have created a version of reality—a structured identity—as a direct reaction to, and against, the versions of reality that oppress and imprint us as infants.

III: : Worldview Warfare (weltanschauungskrieg)

Back to the central question: why do we care what anyone else believes?

We are looking for allies, most of all in our illusions. Complicity in denial. The rejection of conspiracy “theory” (a telling term, since it is often as fact-based as anything in the consensus realm) perhaps stems from our unconscious awareness that we are all conspiring, all of the time, to keep ourselves in the dark about this one, all-consuming fact: that we are the authors of our own beliefs.

“We are greater artists than we know.” Nietzsche.

Friendship is opposition. When worldviews, versions of reality, go to war, the potential for breakthrough is great.

When something or someone confronts our belief systems head-on, and we cannot simply dismiss or ignore it, we either have to let go of those beliefs, or watch them collapse, taking our precious identity-armor with them. A very real kind of death ensues.

Every version of reality is equally essential, equally “real,” to us; yet at the same time, it is equally constricting and oppressive, like heavy armor that protects us from events that have already happened, and that prevents us from being able to move freely through our present environment. All belief that is invested in personally, which includes disbelief, is a form of slavery, because we are obliged to constantly distort our perceptions and actions in order to stay within the comfortable confines of that belief.

What we believe to be real becomes real. We forget that we chose to believe a version of reality because we had to. It was a necessary illusion.

To challenge another’s version of reality should not be done lightly or for the wrong reasons. At the very least, it is extremely bad manners. At worst, it is offensive action.

On the other hand, if we question or deny the assertion of another, we validate it and make it stronger. We confirm that it is sufficiently threatening to our version of reality to need refuting. The moment we do so, we betray our own uncertainty.

Shamans in Denial

How can a creature be both a bat and a bird at the same time? How can something that appears ugly, dirty and threatening actually be something that is delicate, beautiful, and harmless?

The answer may be found in what follows.

As is well known, shamans are also diviners who use a seemingly random arrangement of elements (tea leaves, goat entrails, raw egg in water, etc) to find a hidden narrative that will inform them as to the secret workings of Spirit, the design of power working through everything.

On this week’s “Shooting the Ghost,” I have attempted the same. Selecting fragments from roughly eight hours of conversation between myself, Balloon Man Bill Morrison, Phil Snyder, and Bill’s brother John, more or less at random, I have woven them together into an hour-long podcast. This was done based largely on the quality and “charge” of the clips, and with almost no eye, or ear, to how I might eventually tie them together. It was only once the show was completed, in fact, while listening back to it, that I was able to discern some sort of coherent narrative. It is many layered, so it would not be apparent to most listeners; hence my decision to provide these notes.

Listeners may prefer to discover the hidden narrative for themselves; but if not, here are some clues. Be warned, however: this is a point by point description of the show, and so is rife with “spoilers.”

Firstly: due to the ostensible cause that brought us together, the four players are here unconsciously acting out, embodying, different aspects of Sam Peckinpah’s psyche. Among these aspects are:

addiction;
rage;
hostility;
violence;
sensitivity;
creative expression;
ambition;
paranoia;
victimization of women;
ugliness;
disillusionment (with America);
guilt;
poetry;
the artistry and wisdom of storytelling

The podcast begins with Bill’s description of caring for a neighbor’s rabbits and all the “shit” (literally) he has to deal with to keep their cages clean. One basic function of the shaman is the handling of “unclean” psychic matter and waste. Connection to Nature (the animals) is essential to any shaman’s power. (Rabbits, however, are notoriously timid animals, and suggest powerlessness.)

Next up, Phil tells the story of how his rage manifested a weird bat creature in the basement of his parents’ house (read: ancestral unconscious), which he then killed with a pellet gun, afraid that it might be carrying rabies. Once it was dead, Phil realized it was “actually” a dust-covered baby bird, even though he had been sure it was a bat. He also suspected he had somehow materialized the being through his own anger—a living tulpa or thought form, made up of Phil’s disowned psychic energy.

The key to this story—which is a small mythic blueprint for the show’s theme of “shamans in denial”—is that Phil mistook the creature for a rabies-infected bat, when in fact it was a bird(?). Phil disowns his primal self (rage) and simultaneously projects onto what is delicate and new, something ugly and threatening, thereby turning a baby bird into a diseased bat.

Phil and John then discuss their anger-management problems, with an aside from myself on the subject of tulpas, and a dubious musical interlude.

Bill talks of his admiration for “crazy, ugly people,” with their stories of violence, as being “the stuff heroes are made of.” He talks of his work as a (relatively) honest car salesman, and of a 72-year-old reformed killer and rapist in his neighborhood (Hollywood). He asks the question: “When do we get rehabilitated?” and speaks of the predatory structure of society, as well as his own, more balanced upbringing.

We then move into a brief discussion of Sam Peckinpah, his relationship with his father and his choice to go into theater and television rather than law. Of Sam being a man out of time, struggling unconsciously to reconnect to the ancestors, while consciously making movies to express his alienation and despair. How his movies testify to that inner struggle, and as such are secondary artifacts: the real story is hidden behind the seemingly random elements of his various movies.

I then tell a story of having my guitar stolen on my birthday, of getting it back the following day, turning the situation around so that the thieves became allies. This story relates to a shaman owning his power (self-expression and music) through a mixture of surrender and will, and getting that disowned tulpa energy to work for him (rather than simply killing it!).

Bill and John then share their night-dreams of being successful performers, revealing a desire for power and influence, and how their dreams are possibly compensating for a lack of worldly recognition. This is the very inverse of shamanic use of dreaming, which finds otherworldly power through dreams, and relinquishes all desire for other forms of “success.” (This was also the trap Peckinpah fell into.) Phil describes how, in similar dreams, he is always watching on the sidelines, aware he is supposed to learn something. The same appears true here on this podcast—after his initial story which sets the ball rolling and provides the theme for the show, Phil stays mostly on the sidelines, observing.

There follows a discussion on the macrocosmic narrative, that of America and the realization in the late ‘60s (through movies such as Easy Rider and Wild Bunch and events such as the Manson murders and Altamont) that the American dream was, and always had been, a Lie, being founded on the murder of the Native peoples. The Native American represents the Other, the disowned Shadow of the White Man, his primal side, and also the denied shaman within. To the Whiteman, the Native American is like Phil’s bat-bird: it is perceived as a threat, when actually it is something else entirely.

Bill then gives a short speech on the need for America to be exposed and to confess, “right back to the Indians.” I describe the US Nation as “Dorian Gray,” corrupt beyond all possibility of redemption, Bill speaks of the ugliness of Americans. The bat-bird again, having become what it beheld, America (like Phil) perceives its inner self as ugly and diseased. Bill speaks of his own comfort and complacency, and the pressure that builds within us all, the feeling we could simply explode one day and go on a mad killing spree. The disowned primal speaks. Psychopaths are acting out shamanic urges for transformation, unconsciously.

We then discuss politics as an extension of religion and the modern-day “serfdom” that has surrendered its responsibility to the elite; the Magna Carta and the Masonic sorcerers. The development of comfort and convenience of the modern world, is it detrimental to spiritual growth? Do we have a richer inner life now than 500 years ago?

John and Phil talk of their home entertainment systems, Phil describes his basement theater as both a shrine and a tomb, hinting at a desire to hide away in the unconscious realms, to return to infantilism. John’s cites his three marriages and his HUD apartment, then describes how the homeless (mostly from California) are getting violent in his neighborhood and mugging people who won’t give them money. He mentions how many of them have pit pulls— these “dog brothers” are also distorted shamans, demanding payment. They represent John’s disowned primal—his “tulpas”—and as such, they are a necessary compensation for the denied shadow side of his middle-class white neighborhood: the archetypal “return of the repressed.” John’s increased desire to watch TV and stay off the streets is the “normal” (i.e., non-shamanic) response to this pressure.

We discuss entertainment as being increasingly inadequate as a distraction: as life’s challenges become ever greater, more and more energy is needed for our denial to be effective. As we reach a turning point for the species, recycling ancient myths until all the variations are used up, there arises a need for new myths. But there are no longer any shaman-storytellers to create them.

I then describe myth and reality as being interconnected, the story of Christ, the ultimate shaman, who’s person embodied cosmic forces, and so became a living myth.

We discuss the function of myth, both for survival and for gnosis, the mutation of the species through sharing of knowledge and experience, “around the fire.” John cites early myths of hunting an killing, a la Phil’s story of the bird—a distorted myth-story for this mini-tribe of shamans, caught in varying levels of denial.

After a brief reference to the vitality of mystery, as something to be explored, John points out how Bill’s squeaky chair is causing John’s bird to talk—joking that there is a “relationship” between the two. John’s bird echo’s Phil’s “bat-bird” (representing Phil’s hidden soul nature). It is interfacing with Bill’s un-oiled chair (throne), i.e., Bill’s unconscious power? Is Phil’s inner poetic nature trying to reach out to Bill, and finding only a squeaky chair?

Bill then talks of his alcoholism and addiction to marijuana, as his best means to access “the other world,” thereby fully completing the reflected image of Sam Peckinpah’s fractured psyche: a man who smoke and drank himself to death rather than allow himself to open to the ancestors, and to his own grief and wounding, thereby tapping his hidden shamanic potential.

Are you still with me?

Rediscovering Fire

Is there anything in this world more beautiful than male wisdom in action?

Is there anything rarer?

When was the last time you saw it?

A Gathering of Men.

Ghost of a Life

Balloon Man Bill Morrison’s Perfect World

  “It’s a marvelously gloriously great ghost of a life.” Bill Morrison

 
Somewhere in some recondite and under-explored wavelength of your television transmission (free cable), there’s a show with Promethean potential and diabolic disregard for the rules of entertainment that verges on Nietzschean hubris in aspiring to a new plateau of aesthetics, one that is verily “beyond good and mediocrity.” Is Bill “Balloonman” Morrison good at what he does? Resoundingly, and beyond any question, yes. He is a master at what he does. But what is it that he does? This is a question I would venture that even Mr. Morrison could not, or at least would not, answer (at least not intelligibly).

When Mr. Morrison faces the camera, his eyes do not seek refuge in self-justifying internal reassurance. He is a man beyond shame, and whatever it is he is doing, like Mitchum acting, he makes damn sure never to get caught doing it. Often inspired by his own free-associative virtuosity, but just as often not, he seems to care not a wit either way, and remains unflinching in his incoherence. But Mr. Morrison is also inspiring, most of all in his willingness to play the Ape of Thoth so consummately, and with so little regard for his own apishness. By such brazen nonchalance, Mr. Morrison at times transcends the self-imposed role of monkey and dimly, dimly, begins to resemble a god. A TV god, for sure, the deity of a petty domain, which is free cable after all, and not even a national network; but his confinement to so lowly a circle of US media hell reflects less upon Mr. Morrison’s talents—which appear to be prodigious beyond even his own (or especially his own) capacity to comprehend or fully harness—than it does upon a paltriness intrinsic to the medium itself. Mr. Morrison has opted to remain a very large fish, possibly even a shark, in a tiny pond.

Put bluntly, Mr. Morrison is the David Letterman for a brave new world that will never (we pray) come into being. For in such a world, one that Mr. Morrison’s demented armchair ravings obscurely and extremely indirectly herald—a world perfect in its total embracing of all imperfections—there would be no talk show hosts, no TV dinners, no TV at all, and so no Bill Morrison persona. Life would be far too interesting and bizarre to require such dubious means for killing time.

To be fair to him, Mr. Morrison’s solipsism is at times wearisome, to the viewer as much as it is (evidently) to Mr. Morrison himself. The “show,” if he’ll allow me to refer to it as such, would certainly benefit from a little structure, some kind of framework in which the host’s freewheeling poetry of molecular irrelevance and impotent grandeur would be able to come more fully into its own. Perhaps he should invite guests to inflict with his almost superhuman poise and irrationalism, the occasional straight man for him to loose his tongue upon? In a word, this man’s talents—it may even be a kind of genius, though it’s hard to say for sure—may never come fully to bloom (as both the man and the medium so sorely deserve) until they find the right soil—necessary context—in which to do so.

It’s too bad that Mr. Morrison’s giftedness is inseparable—even maybe contingent on—his obscurity. Neither Letterman nor Leno, nor any self-respecting high priest of the television airwaves, is ever going to have Mr. Morrison on their show. For obvious reasons. The moment Dave or Jay lets Bill on their show, it will be painfully plain to everyone watching that their ilk have been superseded, by a new and unstoppable mutant strain. Mr. Morrison may never be the talk show host he deserves to be, but if so that’s because, at heart, he is no host but a virus. The moment mainstream TV allowed him through its doors of perception and into the sleeping mind of the masses, it would spell the end of mainstream TV.

Until that time, Bill Morrison will remain perhaps what he most aspires to be: a marvelously, gloriously great ghost of a guy. 

Jason Horsley, 2006.

For anyone wondering about divinevirus.com and where it is, truth is I am behind on server payments and can't be bothered to get the site back up right now - feels like ancient history, and who needs a website these daze anyway?

But here's a direct link to the archives here (older version of the main page but most of the rest of the material hasn't been updated for years anyway)

Interview with Aeolus Kephas

What's It All About?

OK, another God Game (Nobody's Army) is up so it's about time I reintroduced anyone out there to the concepts behind it - what exactly IS this God Game thing anyway?

What follows is the original God Game Treatment. This was back when I intended to make a feature film, with 24 different "subjects" all woven together. That didn't happen, because the project took an unexpected turn (more on which anon), and instead I wound up with 6 separate episodes, featuring 6 of the chosen individuals, each one 24 minutes long (except Nobody's, which is 32 mins). So here's how I initially concieved it.

“God doesn’t play dice with the universe. He just plays hide and seek.” 
—Woody Allen, Husbands and Wives

The God Game is a sui generis work, that is, a genre unto itself. I call it “surrealist documentary,” a documentary on the fantasy we call life. The objective is to assemble a fantasy feature film from documentary footage, to get the actors to write the script, as it were, and then to assemble the plot in the editing room. Of course the themes will take precedence over the narrative, as in any documentary, but the form and flow of the film will be closer in feel to Buñuel than Mike Leigh. Imagine a cross between The Thin Blue Line and The Matrix, a work of cinema verité about the illusory nature of reality.

Twenty-four humans of all ages and backgrounds have been recruited. Each one will be interviewed intensively for a single day, and talk about his or her beliefs, philosophy, life experiences, dreams, goals, and views on society and religion and “the greater picture.” They will undergo imaginative exercises by which they can recreate themselves in specific ways, i.e., as a religious leader, a terrorist, an animal, and so forth. They will have the opportunity to imagine themselves as a different person altogether, living a different life. And they will each contribute to their own personal recreation of the Afterlife, depicting their view of existence beyond the body and the self, and their thoughts on how life looks to them from this new, transpersonal perspective. The film will set out to portray each of these very distinct, charismatic humans as but masks or windows onto the gestalt Human: a single, unified and collective consciousness, of which we all are but fleeting manifestations. The idea of death, then, is used not as a morbid dampener on the life experience but, on the contrary, as what drives us and inspires us to attain ever higher states of consciousness in our brief time as individual beings. It is what finally unites all these separate entities into a single, continuous energy or Life Force. 

To clarify this point: the acceptance of the movie is that in death, the illusion of selfness is shed, along with the body or “skin,” and consciousness “returns” to the primordial, formless energy from which it emerged. Whether this once individual consciousness is then dispersed into the Universe, recycled into a new form, or something else altogether, is entirely up to the individual, and depends on just how far s/he has developed his/her awareness, knowledge, and imagination, while alive. 

The God Game will consider the possibility that in death we are hurled into Eternity and there left to create our own reality. It will posit the notion that, if so, this is also the case in life: that we are each one of us creating our own reality through the acts of perception and interpretation, but that we have gotten lost in details. When death comes to tap us, the curtains close, the angels and demons and unborn and dead souls applaud, and we realize that this world was but a stage, our life but a performance, of such verisimilitude that we were wholly lost therein. At that point the Grand Director says, “OK, lovely, let’s try it one more time,” or, “Perfect! That’s a wrap!” or any number of alternatives we can imagine (including that there is no Director besides ourself). 

The question the film will ask is, If in death we find that our world and reality is but an extension of ourselves, and the creation of our own consciousness, might it not be possible to realize this in life?

The God Game is about perception. It’s about illusion, identity, and the masks we wear to hide from the terrible, wonderful truth of ourselves: that we are the sole creators of our reality. Imagine, then, twenty-four players, twenty-four lives, interwoven into a single Tapestry. Imagine razor-fine editing that will create a musical cadence to the images, until each life/personality merges with the next and all are revealed as sharing a common Identity, an Identity which is accessed by us all through death, but might equally be accessed in life, through sex, madness, or other methods. This Identity is what we have called, in our confusion and our isolation, “God.” It is Who were really are.

The film will be an intricately woven quilt, a magik carpet, a collage or montage of moments, scenes, images, ideas, descriptions, words. The twenty-four players (plus assorted supporting players) will come and go throughout the film. They will not be showcased in separate segments, nor will they be named until the final moments. They will stand out only through their physical attributes and individual characteristics, their charisma, their ability to shine. If there is to be a structure to the film, it will be based not on individual persons but rather on specific themes or subjects. For example, there will be titles throughout, say, “Sex,” in large white letters on black screen, followed by ten or fifteen minutes of images, thoughts, and impressions upon the subject, all woven into one another. Depending on the footage we get, I expect that most spoken word sequences will not continue for longer than 20 or 30 seconds, and some for no more than 2 or 3 seconds. The players’ thoughts will be woven together thus as part of some strange, telepathic template. For example, one player begins a sentence, another continues it, a third finishes it. Or one player begins a story, another takes over telling a different but similar story, and so on, finally back to the first player. This way, various stories are being told simultaneously, and all are connected by the final “realization” shared by all. (For example, a paranormal experience which convinces us that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in our philosophy.)

The film will take the form of a Map of the Hologrammatic Universe, the “Body of God,” and present the argument that Reality is made of Language. Each Player or Soul will be a path or doorway on this Map, a character within the Myth, or Game. The humans and objects and symbols presented within this context will be as it were the thread of pearls by which we navigate the Labyrinth. The interview questions will be designed to help the Player define him or herself in such archetypal, mythical (not quite personal) terms, for example, asking them to imagine themselves as an animal, a color, a body part, a planet, a natural disaster, and so forth, and juxtaposing the various responses. The God Game will proceed like so, as a partially obscure, largely surreal, wholly mysterious and absorbing stream of consciousness movie. Moving from one subject to another, returning to the same faces again and again, we will gradually come to know the players, even as they become more and more mysterious and enigmatic to us. Towards the end of the movie, perhaps in the last third, we will begin to segue into the death sequences. These will be visually distinguishable from the life stuff, either by being in black and white or else via digital effects, to create the sense of being in another world. In this world, the death world, Eternity, all is energy, all is perception. Each monad soul creates its own reality. The only limits are those of the Imagination. Everything is intensified here to a maddening degree. A grain of dust is infinite, a moment lasts forever.  

 To recapitulate, The God Game will consist of the following basic ingredients:

1) Players talking in their home environment, in close-ups, medium shots, long shots, from a varying assortment of angles. This will be intercut with (often using voice over):

2) Players in motion, on the street, their place of work or at play, in the pub, public transport, dancing, and so forth, basically out and about, living their lives. Some of these images will be overlaid with the actors talking; on other occasions, the player will be talking to the camera while in the scene, in the style of certain movies (Alfie, for example).

3) Abstract shots of articles, objects, and things from the player’s home and life environment, shot in extreme close ups so as to be unrecognizable, at least initially. These objects represent extensions of the Player’s personality, the things they cannot take with them. “I surround myself with things that look like me,” as the Michael Gira song goes. As such they will form part of the individual tapestry of each player’s persona/soul/universe.

4) Shots of things, objects, animals, events, relevant to a given monologue. E.g., shot of a bird flying for “I felt as free as a bird.” Beyond such rather obvious inserts (which will be used in the fast, almost subliminal editing style which Oliver Stone employed for Natural Born Killers), there will be more subtle, free-associative images, the meaning of which will be more obscure (e.g., person talking about frustration, shot of a hamster on a wheel or a man trying to get a chair up some stairs; for these shots we will go to stock footage from TV, anything in the public domain) 

5) Digital effects. Impressionistic images and scenes from the Afterlife.

6) Titles. Since The God Game is to be an extremely impressionistic, free-flowing, non-liner, “right-brain” work, in order not to overly confuse or alienate the viewer there will be sporadically placed title cards, white letters on black screen, stating subjects to be covered; we will also be inserting relevant quotes, from the Bible, philosophers, and so forth (rather as in Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog). These may even be read aloud by the players, who will be asked to come up with some of their favorite quotes. This technique will provide relief whenever the viewer is starting to feel swept away in the rising tide of images, ideas, and associations.

7) Graphic images depicting specific symbols, such as the Arcana Mayor from the Tarot, the sephiroth of the Tree of Life (Kabbalah), astrological signs, sacred geometry, chakras, and other occult and/or religious iconography by which we give structure to the formless.

The desired effect of The God Game will be to create a sense of vertigo at the overwhelming nature of the human experience, the myriad, mutating points of view that make up the collective human experience and our multi-faceted, only partially consensus perception of “reality.” This reality, we will show, is by no means as fixed and final as we are inclined (and programmed) to believe. The film will strive to create an affinity between the audience and the Players, since we are all sharing a common experience, that of “the ship-wrecked,” hopelessly (if happily) lost in this sea of free associations. It will illustrate the manner in which each of us assembles and holds fast to his own meanings, her own truths, and that these truths are always relative, never absolute. They are like stepping stones that shift whenever we tread upon them. Finally, it will be seen that the personal search for “identity” is impossible until one accepts that there is no identity outside of this search. The fool rode his ox in search of oxen. The means for seeking and the thing that is sought are one and the same. Who, at last, is seeking this elusive “self”? God hides, and God seeks.

The Quest is all.

Finally, after seven years procrastinating, The God Game series is going to be viewable online. Here's part one of Part One, "The Rebel Within "(with special thanks to an aeolian psychonaut, or two!). Alternatively you can watch all three parts in widescreen here

Fragmented Self

Here's a recent interview I did as part of a Guardian project with the artist Mark Titchner

It covers various subjects, including schizophrenia, the environmental crisis, multiple personality disorder as relating to our moods, the personal self as Frankenstein's monster, Matrix Warrior, Fight Club, the primal self, mythic narratives of moden movies, and other juicy titbits.

JH

Agents of Chaos: Alan Moore's Alchemical Workshop, and an Authentic Miracle of a Movie

Warning: the following review is likely to be somewhat “biased”: When I first read Watchmen in my early twenties, it affected me as deeply as any work of fiction ever had—it changed my life. So my responses to the movie—as described below—are going to be more than a little colored by a highly personal connection to the source material.

Watchmen, the movie, directed by Zack Snyder and adapted by David Hayter and Alex Tze, sticks remarkably close to the source material, the ground-breaking graphic novel written by visionary author Alan Moore (whose name isn’t on the film) and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. Moore is a self-confessed magician and uncontested genius of comic books, and his twelve issue, 300+ page superhero epic is a stupendously ambitious work, not merely one of the great accomplishments of comic book writing, but an outstanding work of fiction in any field. (It made Time magazine’s 100 greatest novels—what more do you need to know?!)

When I first heard about the Watchmen movie, I was skeptical—to put it mildly. In fact, I was indifferent. And when I saw the first stills from the movie, I knew, absolutely knew, it was a bust, that they were turning it into something gaudy and noisy and messy and dumb—what Hollywood does best. Beyond all doubt, “the visionary director of 300”—a mind-numbingly vacuous live-action cartoon cum commercial for Spartan warfare—would debase the material by catering to the lowest sensibilities of the mass audience. 

But within ten minutes or less of the movie, it’s clear that something else is happening. The film, like the graphic novel, starts with the murder of the Comedian. The perfect pre-credit sequence, it sums up the delicate resonance of the story by both keeping to genre conventions (for an opening action set-piece and plot-starting murder) while adding a whole new layer of emotional nuance and poignancy. The Comedian’s weary acceptance of his fate speaks volumes. He has been waiting for this moment, and he’s secretly relieved that it’s finally come. If he puts up a token resistance, it’s only because he doesn’t know how not to. He keeps up his end of the mythic narrative to the bitter end. 

This is followed by the lovely, eerie frozen images of the credits, by which flesh and blood becomes comic book image, or vice versa. The credit sequence is inspired: both delightful—enchanting—and wryly amusing, it lets us know that we are in good hands and can settle back to enjoy the most fully satisfying and morally complex superhero enactment in the history of movies. Watchmen is an authentic miracle of a movie—the best of its kind (the philosophical action fantasy) since The Matrix came out ten years ago. (Plot wise, Watchmen is less ingenious than The Matrix, but morally it’s far more sophisticated.)

What’s really astonishing about this movie is that, in under three hours, it manages to capture not only the spirit of the novel but the full, epic breadth of its storyline. I’ve read the comic book at least a dozen times and yet I couldn’t even say which parts the movie misses out (except for the obvious, the parallel story within a story of “Tales of the Black Freighter”). The odds against a big budget Hollywood adaptation of a fiction masterpiece being almost 100% faithful, and at the same time managing to translate it whole into a new medium, are truly phantasmagorical.

Yet therein may be a problem: Watchmen is so completely true to its source that anyone not already enamored of the comic book may be unable to fully grok it. The storyline is straightforward enough, but the peculiar blend of social realism with the pulp roots of comics, and the idiosyncratic, poetic, magical genius of its creator, make Watchmen utterly unlike any superhero movie, or any movie, we've ever seen before. It’s a freak in the best sense of the word: a creature of unfathomable beauty so unique that some people may mistake it for ugliness. It creates its own aesthetic.

What’s perhaps most unusual about the film is its complete moral ambiguity, the way in which it steps entirely outside of the usual mythic paradigm of good and evil, spins off a parallel reality, and weaves its very own mythic narrative. Just as the graphic novel did within the comics field, Watchmen creates a new paradigm for the superhero movie. It’s a paradigm which I highly doubt other filmmakers will be willing, or able, to match, much less develop. There are no heroes in Watchmen, and no villains either. There are rather extraordinary (and extraordinarily flawed) human beings, struggling to make sense of a world in chaos, wrestling with their own complicity in that chaos. These are easily the richest and most affecting characters to ever grace what is ostensibly a fantasy movie. They are not just functions of the plot, as Neo and Morpheus are functions of the plot. As in all great writing, Watchmen’s story develops out of the characters and not vice versa. And these characters are nothing if not ambiguous.

The most dislikeable of the characters, Ozymandias, is driven by a seemingly pathological, philanthropist desire to save the world, and this he succeeds in doing. But we don’t admire him for it—we can’t admire him, because no end could justify these means. He’s an elitist, driven by intellect and a sense of his innate superiority, but devoid of heart. On the other hand, there is much to admire in the murderous vigilante Rorschach—who is all heart. His code of no compromise, his ruthless implacability, his deranged sense of justice, beneath which is a strange tenderness and a deeply wounded soul. Rorschach simply cares too much not to cause mayhem. Like Travis Bickle, his pain, rage and confusion spills out into the world—and he matches it atrocity for atrocity.

Dr. Manhattan, on the other hand, cares little for humanity’s plight: he’s moved beyond that. Was ever a god this chillingly disconnected, a superhero this utterly disaffected? Yet, as Billy Crudup (the only recognizable face in the movie) plays him, Dr. Manhattan is deeply touching. He’s human despite himself, and in his way he’s as lost a soul as the rest of these characters, because he is so utterly, completely alone. As written by Moore, Dr. Manhattan is the first fully believable depiction of a superhuman being—a god—in movies.

On the face of it, the Comedian is the most sheerly unpleasant of the characters: a rapist and child killer, the puppet of the military industrial complex (in a beautiful twist added by the moviemakers, he’s also JFK’s actual assassin). Yet, loathsome as his actions are, he doesn’t ever become hateful to us. None of the characters are defined—or limited— by their actions; they are far too alive for that. Moore’s genius is that he uses the very limited and limiting genre of the superhero comic as an arena—a sort of child’s playground, but also an alchemical workshop—to work through his philosophical themes and develop flesh and blood characters—like forging gold from lead. With Watchmen, he created a kind of feedback loop that expands the story from genre melodrama, into infinity—the realm of archetypes, of true myth. Paradoxically, by turning superhero archetypes into ordinary, believable human beings, ordinary beings are transformed into something extraordinary, something magical, transcendent. 

Moore creates a world of impossible possibilities, and the movie recreates that world with breathtaking fidelity—the kind of loyalty and integrity that seems unimaginable in Hollywood, but that has somehow come to pass. Admittedly, the film does fail in one crucial area: that of mapping the endless series of synchronicities between images, words, events, that form the texture of the graphic novel, and that in a sense are what it’s really about. More than the story, or even the characters, Watchmen describes the texture and flow of mystery that living in a quantum universe entails, and what’s lacking in the film is the necessary plethora of fine details, of recurring motifs and themes. Besides that smiley face, I didn’t notice any repeating phenomena, and so the scenes aren’t woven together at this subtler, more esoteric level. The result, for those who aren’t familiar with the original story, may seem to be an almost straightforward, though complex, action movie; they may well miss the finer undercurrents moving beneath the gloriously gaudy surface. 

There are other minor flaws: the sex scene to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is something we could certainly have done without; perhaps more seriously, the extreme violence seems out of place here, largely gratuitous—it doesn’t add anything and may even detract from the dreamlike quality of the story (though with the Rorschach scenes a degree of savagery is probably intrinsic to the material). And sometimes what works in the graphic novel can seem mannered and contrived on screen (such as Night Owl’s question, “Whatever happened to the American Dream?”). Moore’s dialogue is often self-consciously clever, loaded, and this works better when we can hear it in our heads and give it our own inflexion. Actors can be all at sea with these multi-layered lines. There are also areas, such as Rorschach’s revealing the abyss of his soul to the liberal-minded psychiatrist, that need more time to be developed, that are rushed and hence diminished, and the film would probably have worked better, been less choppy and more textured, if it had been allowed an additional ten or twenty minutes of screen time.

But despite these flaws, the sheer joy and originality of the source material fills every frame. It animates every performance with an exuberance, audacity, and poetry, that is unique to the genre. I haven’t even begun to analyze the schizophrenic subtext of this film—perhaps another day?—but I can honestly say that, in thirty years of movie-going, I have never been so pleasantly surprised by a movie. Watchmen has every imaginable reason to crash and burn. Yet somehow, against impossible odds, it takes flight.

Footnote: perusing some of the other reactions to this movie, it seems fair to say that it was made expressly for people who have read and loved the graphic novel, and to hell with everyone else. Right there is the real miracle

But - if you haven't read the source material, it may not work for you.

2nd part of an excerpt from The Blood Poets, Chapter 6, "Crime & Censorship."

Let’s open those neural floodgates!
 —Nicki Brand, Videodrome

 Joan Smith writes, in “Speaking Up for Corpses,” “There are men for whom female terror, experienced at a safe distance, carries an erotic charge.” As one of these men myself, I would—for obvious reasons—feel more comfortable amending the above statement, and saying that there are men who are aware of the erotic charge that results from vicariously experiencing (or causing) female terror. And then, there are those men who, through denial, ignorance, fear or saintly purity (this last seems the least likely) are blissfully unaware of this sadistic streak in themselves. Then, among those of us (men) who are aware of this streak, and don’t mind admitting it, there are varying degrees to which we accept it, fight it, strive to understand or overcome it, indulge it or, God forbid, act upon it. Personally, while I’m in my confessional mode, I can say that I have never in my life come that close to striking a woman, much less terrorizing or brutalizing one, and I can honestly add that (be it virtue or sentimentality) I am incapable of killing an insect—one that’s minding its own business at least—without feeling pangs of regret. So—am I a violent person? Am I an evil, sick, depraved, and aberrant man? The moral majority and legions of decency would say, Yes, and resoundingly. But am I to be judged for my thoughts or by my actions? And if judged I am to be—who exactly is to judge me? Who among us is fit to cast the first stone?  

 I have come to accept, over the years, that imagination is not action, and that the rules and laws are different for thought than for deed, and that those who would most quickly judge another (either for his fanstasies or his acts) are generally those most reluctant to judge themselves, or even to look too closely at their own feelings—for fear of what they might find there. The easiest way to deal with the unpleasant truths about our society is to condemn them as “evil.” The easiest way to live with unpleasant truths about oneself is simply to ignore them, to whitewash them over with positive affirmations about decency and goodliness. Both these “methods” are based on cowardice—they depend on avoidance of the issue through self-deception, and in fact, they serve to reinforce the problem. The more “evil” the other guy is, the safer we can feel about our own souls (we’re pure enough to judge other people, obviously); the more decent and wholesome we pretend to be, on the other hand, the more we can puff ourselves up and point our fingers at the corruption around us. Society—decent, god-fearing society, that is—is made up of such fakers: it’s very maintenance depends upon fraudulence and facades. And so there’s nothing more terrifying, more dangerous, more “immoral,” to these pseudo-saints, these self-appointed guardians of the good and the right, than the possibility of evil being something common to us all. The slightest doubt in the immaculacy of their moral front and the whole thing collapses. And so the notions of compassion, of understanding, of tolerance, charity towards “sinners,” and the moral freedom which such charity implies, become unthinkable. And yet these qualities or virtues or concepts are the blood and soul—and the vocation—of every artist worthy of his station. To enhance our awareness as to the nature of life means being human, which is being fallible, which is succumbing to temptation once in a while, which is sin—the whole, murky question of evil. 

 A film that causes us, or at least helps us, to identify with a killer—whether to increase our compassion for evil or merely to diminish our pity for the victims—is not an immoral work, but a deeply moral one. For it forces us to assume responsibility for this evil (instead of simply feeling pity for the victim), which is the first, essential step towards understanding it, and perhaps, in time, correcting it. At the very least, it may force us to question our eagerness to judge and condemn what we cannot understand; and maybe, just maybe, it will cause us to pause in our moral outrage for a moment, and lay down our stones.

*

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion. 
—David Cronenberg, Cronenberg on Cronenberg

 In the above interview from Chris Rodley’s book, Cronenberg continues:

Suppressing everything one might think of as potentially dangerous, explosive or provocative would not prevent a true psychotic from finding something that will trigger his own particular psychosis. For those of us who are normal, and who understand the difference between reality and fantasy, play, illusion—as most children do—there is enough distance and balance. It’s innate. . . . It’s an endless struggle between those who are basically fearful and mistrustful of human nature—and they have ample proof that their version of humanity is right—and those who feel that a truly free society is possible, somewhere. It’s conceivable that in the near future there won’t be anything approaching a free society anywhere. That’s more than possible. Which is why I resist, in any small way I can, any attempts . . . to increase censorship.

 Marx wrote somewhere that the fight against capitalism begins with “the weapons of criticism and the criticism of weapons.” If so, then the triumph of totalitarianism begins with the censorship of crime and the crime of censorship. One wonders about the mass hysteria of the so-called “moral majority” over the “dangers” of violent movies and their effects on children; how they cry out to protect the little ones from “exposure” to such evil, corrupting material, such vile and pernicious images. Where is all this hysteria leading? Is it really motivated by a simple—if misguided—urge to protect the innocent; or is it that old wolf in sheep’s clothing again, crying “wolf,” in order to distract the sheep’s attention from its own lascivious designs? To blame the world’s ills and the corruption of our children on a handful of “nasty” movies seems to me to go beyond mere idiocy, and to approach dangerously close to totalitarian thinking.

 Obviously you can’t stop crime by censorship, all you can do is limit the public’s exposure to it, and by extension, its awareness of it. In which case—seeing as how awareness is the only defense we have against crime, and seeing as how aberrational activity (or “evil”) is notoriously wont to thrive and bloom—like fungus—in the darkness of ignorance and denial, then this “protection” policy is worse than useless—it’s downright deadly. Censorship is crime, then, of the most pernicious and indefensible kind—crime against freedom, against truth, and our right to possess it, no matter how “harmful” it may be (and, as every poet knows, truth that’s worth its “salt” is the most dangerous thing there is).

 It is impossible to protect children from certain cultural artifacts without, on the one hand, restricting and censoring the culture itself, and, on the other hand, restricting the behaviour—the freedom—not only of children but of adults as well. To go to such plainly fascistic extremes on the off-chance that a movie once in a while causes a crime would strike me as criminally insane, if it wasn’t part of an apparently all-too-sanely-motivated “madness” (though nonetheless criminal for that). How is it that these irate and indignant persons can get so worked up about a few bloody videos—or even a few savage crimes—and be apparently indifferent to the war, starvation and encroaching social tyranny which are an instrinsic part of this very order which they are striving to protect? Never mind that their measures look set to make such ideas as free speech and right-of-choice just faded memories of the past; how is it that these spokespeople can pretend to know, beyond any doubt, what no psychologist or social scientist in the field has been able to establish: namely, the exact manner and degree to which violence in the arts encourages, or even causes, real violence? And why is the question never raised as to the possibility of actual violence—as mediated through the news and other documentary programs—also having such effects? Or children’s cartoons; or Budweiser commercials? How come no one suggests banning TV itself, and going straight to the root of the problem?

 The “video nasty” is the bugaboo beloved of the kind of partiarchal, literal-minded petty tyrants that thrive on expressions of moral outrage and the feelings of self-importance which they derive from them. It’s another scapegoat, and the skapegoat is like the patsy—it really doesn’t matter what it is, or does, or says, so long as it is there, available, for the sacrifice. It seems to me that those who “do battle with the devil” are really doing the devil’s work—pouring gasoline on the blaze, as it were. The indignation, the audacity, and the degree of arrogance which this interfering mob displays strikes me as a kind of violence itself, equally as reprehensible and as corrupting as the kind they claim to be opposing, as well as being every bit as “nasty.” In its own way it’s even nastier, because it hides its meanness and small-mindedness behind false smiles and troubled frowns, and words like “decency” and “innocence” and “morality.”  

 When a film like Child’s Play III or Natural Born Killers is somehow found—however tenuously and spuriously—to have some fleeting connection to a real-life crime, the media, like one single rabid beast, pounces upon the chosen scapegoat and proceeds to tear it to shreds, with all the slavering, sadistic relish of Hannibal Lecter. But when a film like The Lion King is established, more or less conclusively, to have incited, or at least inspired, a child to commit suicide, this same beast barely stirs from its slumber. The boy in question (the case is described in Karl French’s Screen Violence) was Imtiaz Ahmed, and wrote in his farewell note: “I am going to die because I want to be a Lion King. Mom and Dad please put The Lion King film in my grave with me.” He was found hanging from a tree near his home in Stoke on Trent, England; the parents honored his last wish. It doesn’t matter whether or not The Lion King really did drive a boy to kill himself (I’m every bit as inclined to doubt this as all the other claims)—the point is that the evidence here was far stronger than the evidence for any video nasty-related crime, but seeing as the proverbial scapegoat was not involved, and it would be pretty hard for the moral majority to get all puffed up and indignant over a Disney film without looking exactly like the facile dunderheads that they are, the mob kept quiet, and waited patiently for the next scapegoat to come along. 

The hysteria over video nasties and movie violence in general is the worst kind of false alarm—it’s not only crying wolf (because when an actual case does come along, who will believe it?), but a deliberate attempt to blind the public to the true dangers facing them, dangers represented not by the forces of anarchy or artistic irresponsibilty, but by the forces of censorship and control. The “mob” wants to rule not only our actions and our decisions, but our thoughts and feelings and our desires also. They want to protect our own children from us, and in turn protect us from ourselves, from our own negligence or faulty judgment or bad taste, or whatever is they consider us guilty of.

 The obvious question here is—who asked them to? The worst kind of tyrant is the tyrant that elects itself to rule. And the majority that declares itself to be moral simply because it is legion, the people’s own consensus of tyranny, amounts to nothing less than the rule of the mob.

Schizo Cover

Just got this cover image from the publishers, for the new book, quite happy with it, mercifully. It's a poignant image from a great schizo movie, and probably Willis' best performance. Something very touching about the image of this great world-saving action hero in such a childlike pose - fully caught up in the schizophrenic journey, way over his head but still standing tall!

Kind of how I've been feeling of late, actually.

The Secret Life of Movies (Schizo Cinema)

Here's an interview I did for the upcoming book.

What prompted you to write The Secret Life of Movies?

I started the book back in 2000, and I wanted to write a follow up to The Blood Poets, which was about savagery and violence in American movies. The reason I wrote about violence was simple: I wanted a thesis that would include all my favorite movies, and I soon realized that the common thread running through them was violence, destruction. As I set about writing the book, I found out a lot about why I liked certain movies, and about the basic appeal of vicariously experiencing, via movies, things we would otherwise be careful to avoid in real life. If you narrowed it down to one thing, it would be “intensity.” Movies provide the kind of intensity which we would only experience in real life if we were in crisis, when such experiences tend to be traumatic; but in movies, as in Greek tragedy, they are potentially cathartic. During the process of writing The Blood Poets, then, I discovered a lot about the movies I liked and why I liked them, and therefore about my own psyche. These were movies I had seen many times, and in the process of writing about them, looking for ways to develop my thesis, it opened up a Pandora’s Box. I found out that, by writing about movies, I was able to go into realms of the psyche and of society that I normally wouldn’t have gone into. This gave me a clue: movies were like windows onto the collective psyche. The things I liked about movies at a conscious level were a lot less revealing than what appealed to me at an unconscious level.

That gave me the idea of the occult text. A lot of movies seem to be about fictional scenarios, but actually they are archetypal. Like myths, they allow us to uncover and map areas of the psyche that are otherwise hidden from us. If we scratch the surface of a sci-fi movie or a horror movie, for example, we find that they are using the same archetypes as ancient myths, and that they serve as a kind of psychological blueprint. But movies are unlike myths, in the sense that they are superficially much more sophisticated, more “realistic.” Even sci-fi or horror movies are more realistic than ancient myths, which often aren’t populated by human beings at all, and which are full of impossible possibilities. Even fantasy movies attempt to be realistic, and when they aren’t they are either considered to be kids’ movies or just bad ones. The realism of popular entertainment means that the mythic function of movies is more hidden, it gets suppressed through the process of conceiving and making the movie, to the point that even the filmmakers usually aren’t aware of it. Mythmakers were generally aware of what they were doing, of giving coded information in the form of a narrative so that the average person could enjoy the story, while “initiates” could read it in a more abstract way, as a mythic blueprint. But movies are different.

Movies are like myths at a different stage in our society, a stage when we are more ego-developed beings, when we have a sense of identity that is more rigid, and so our sense of reality is also more rigid. So we require our myths to be more realistic as well. We have disconnected from our subconscious, basically, and so movies have to be more covert in their mythic unfolding. It was only by analyzing movies for The Blood Poets that I found out about this occult text. It intrigued me, because it was like movies themselves had an unconscious. The filmmakers obviously had an unconscious, but unlike mythmakers they were not working from it—to some extent, perhaps, but not entirely. They might be aware of the subtext or they might not, but even if they were aware of it, there would be a still deeper subtext, and that was where the real juice was. Essentially, I was drawn then to look at movies not only that had hidden texts (all movies do), but that dealt with the unconscious in an overt fashion, and with the conflict between the conscious and unconscious mind of the protagonist. That drew me naturally to the idea of madness, and specifically schizophrenia: the idea that there could be a conflict between one’s perception of self and one’s reality, between what one consciously believed was real and what one unconsciously felt was true. Schizophrenia is to do with a splitting of the self from the environment, so that the self doesn’t feel a part of environment. You could even say that the more the ego develops, the deeper schizophrenia becomes; in which case, those diagnosed as schizophrenics and who experience a loss of identity are in a sense less schizophrenic than the rest of us—because they are more acutely aware of their condition. As I looked into the subject more, or rather as I was writing about it, I realized that this state paralleled the act of watching a movie itself: a disconnection from the reality we are seeing (on the screen), as well as from our immediate environment (the theater or living room). That’s the pleasure of movies – to be emotionally involved in a surrogate reality without having to take part in it. So the pleasure of movies—and the reason violent or tragic movies are often cathartic— relates to the schizophrenic nature of watching movies, the possibility of observing our environment without being a part of it. This is the schizophrenic experience: through the act of watching movies, one ceases to exist as a self. 

Isn’t there a mystic tradition similar to this idea, that of dissociating from objective experience to view one’s life from the outside, i.e., “as a movie”?

That was also what I was looking for, the shamanic dimension of movies, that they shape our perception, which is a shamanic method. And also the parallels between schizophrenia and experiences of other realities. This idea brings it back to myth again, to ancient myths. They all tie in. The violence in a sense related to the symptoms: in Blood Poets, I was analyzing the symptoms and following them to the condition, which led me to a diagnosis, that of schizophrenia, the cut-off of the mind/identity from the physical world, which is schizophrenia in its most basic form. You could say that, having described the symptoms, I wanted to describe the condition itself, and even if possible to find a cure. That became The Secret Life of Movies. It was an attempt to use movies more deliberately, as a way to diagnose a culture. Movies are made by a collective of individuals to meet the demands of a whole population, so what we are seeing is not informed by an individual’s unconscious but by the collective unconscious. Movies are being shaped by collective dreams through the plastic medium of film. They are a shamanic tool that’s being used unconsciously, at least at this time. (There are cases where this tool is being used consciously, films like The Matrix or Fight Club that actually become shamanic experiences because the unconscious and conscious minds of the filmmakers are working together, and so text and subtext are intertwined rather than at odds.) What writing this book entailed, then, was allowing movies their occult function as collective dreams, dreams that, if analyzed, provide information in symbolic form as to the condition of society and of the species. It’s rather like taking a blood sample, a psychic blood sample from the collective unconscious. By looking at movies, we can find out what condition the system, our culture and society, is in. 

So your book presumably draws on the work of Carl Jung?

Not directly no, but it’s certainly informed by it. Jung was a psychologist as a shaman, or vice versa. He entered the field of psychology realizing that it was actually the same field that shamans had worked in for thousands of years. Psychology is a science in that it follows and maps principals, conditions, that to a certain extend are empirical, universal. The shadow, the anima and animus, and suchlike, these are principals that apply to absolutely everyone on the planet, so far as we know at least. So it’s a science, and it can be used like a science; but since it’s the science of the psyche, it’s not a hard science but a soft one. It requires imagination and creativity, both to understand and to apply it. Jung was an alchemist who described his practices in the terms of a budding new science called psychology. 

So although the basic idea of this book can be compared to psychology and dream analysis, that’s really just a way to update it into terms the modern, rational person can understand. A more primitive or “superstitious” mindset could understand this book’s premise more easily, since the “superstitious” mindset is also more open to the realities of the psyche, for example, to the idea that our whole culture could be a sort of collective dream, “the imagination of God,” say, or the perspective of an animistic universe, a living conscious system. These ideas are acceptable to a primitive understanding without resorting to psychological terms. Within that frame of reference, then, what I’m doing predates psychology: it’s a form of scrying, based on the understanding that nothing in nature is random. Whether it’s goat’s entrails, tea leaves floating in a cup, an egg in a glass of water, or whatever, the patterns these things create is a coded language that can be deciphered, according to the present moment, to find out whatever the shaman wants to find out. This is what myths are, except that myths are consciously designed in this way by sorcerers or shamans so that others of their kind will recognize them. Movies are both less and more pure than that. Being shaped by the unconscious makes them more pure, but they are also being shaped by conscious agendas of commerce, propaganda, popular taste, and so forth, agendas which overlay the work, rather like a person who edits their dreams to make them more “wholesome” or entertaining. Movies have been heavily edited and filtered, but the basic components still come from the unconscious , because everything does. So as long as you can sift through the noise and get to the signal, you can still use them to diagnose; and even the noise can be diagnosed, too, because we can see the ways in which we are blocking out our unconscious.

So in writing this book you are acting in the manner of a contemporary shaman?

Well, it’s an armchair shaman, isn’t it, because I’m just watching movies and writing books. So far as I apply what I write to my own life, that would be shamanic.

But presumably one of the functions of the shaman is to steer the community into healthier, more integrated directions?

I don’t know if that’s one of their functions. Shamans tend to live on the outskirts of town and work one-on-one with sick people. I don’t think they tend to go and preach to the community. They might give them guidance if there was a catastrophe or some such, but I think that they are generally marginalized even by the culture that depends on them for healing. I would say that they only have the influence that you are referring to when people are desperate enough to actively seek them out, and the same probably applies to what I’m doing.

So how do you prevent your subjective perception of films from interfering with your objective analysis of the culture?

I don’t. The more wholly subjective you can be, the more objective you are.

That seems counter-intuitive.

It’s counter-rational, perhaps, but not counter-intuitive. But it would be impossible to explain rationally without going into shamanic terms, or at least Jungian psychology, which academics are not generally open to.

But surely filmmakers are?

Some of them perhaps. If you think of a collective unconscious, by definition it is shared, so that means our own unconscious is part of the collective. So anything that communicates from the unconscious, even though in the process of writing a book or making a film it passes through the conscious mind and is shaped by it, it is still sourced in the collective unconscious. This means it has a dimension, an under layer, of universal or so-called “objective” reality. So if we allow ourselves to be fully in our subjective experience, both of reality and of ourselves, then we are not blocking it to the same extent with futile attempts to be “objective.” We are dropping into the unconscious state, and so objectifying the subjective, as it were. By allowing our subjective experience of conscious reality to deepen, we are allowing it to overlap with our unconscious, which is collectively subjective, let’s say, and therefore is “objective.”

Like a herd of cats?

There’s no such thing as a herd of cats.

Exactly.

Yes, well. The idea is to surrender one’s subjective point of view rather than surrendering to it. But to surrender it, you have to surrender to it first of all. But it must be consciously. If it's done unconsciously, it leads to ego inflation. Consciously surrendering to the subjective experience is alchemy, Jung’s individuation, which is recognizing that one’s conscious mind is only a small, superficial aspect of one’s whole psyche. If you consciously surrender to your subjective view of things, it’s like going into dream while awake, like lucid dreaming. In ordinary dreams, you forget you are dreaming and your dream takes over, your whole environment becomes you and you become your environment, there’s no split-off. Again, it’s schizophrenia, loss of self. In lucid dreaming, you enter your environment consciously so you are aware there’s a separation, and yet it’s not like ordinary consensus because you are aware that you are creating your reality. At that point, you can take responsibility for it and start to read the images, the symbols of your dream life, and to use them alchemically, for individuation. If you are unconsciously surrendering, then you don’t have that option.

So what you’ve done is you’ve viewed these films in the manner of lucid dreaming?

Well, the dreams are somebody else’s dreams, so I can’t do that. I view the films as a Jungian analyst would listen to a patient’s dreams. The lucid dreaming element comes in when I am using the information of these collective dreams—the movies— in my own daily life.

So if you continue on this course, ultimately you will arrive at a project that would be more or less incomprehensible to the rational mind?

Like James Joyce? I hope not. (pause) Life as theatre is the end to which we are evolving, at which point we would become playwrights and play actors and directors in our own lives, alchemists. We will become that, we will turn ourselves into fiction. It’s inevitable. We will eventually allow ourselves to realize ourselves as narratives, seeing as that is what we already are, and cease to cling to the illusion of being a leading player in the narrative. It’s a paradox, but by insisting on being the lead player, we become puppets. By allowing ourselves to become the story, we can attain a level of surrender and begin co-authoring our stories. In our present culture, this is a religious or mystical perspective, and hasn’t evolved into one that is scientific or shamanic, and therefore practicable. It can only be talked about under the rather flimsy guise of “faith.” 

We are stories, that’s all we are. Every narrative that we are not surrendered to as a co-creator, that hasn’t been specifically shaped by our perception, or that hasn’t shaped who we are from birth, all of these narratives must be discarded. That means every narrative save our own. Everything that has come from elsewhere, our social, cultural, racial and religious conditioning, is just crust, other people’s imposed narratives. Unless we can turn these other narratives into an element of our own narrative, an integral part of it just as our mother and father are an integral part of it, unless we can live the truth rather than simply pay lip service to it, these external narratives are all equally worthless to us. 

© Michelle Fornasier

Sex, War, and TV Advertising

Part One of an excerpt from The Blood Poets, Chapter 6, "Crime & Censorship," about the Cronenberg film Videodrome. (Just to keep this blog happening, while i organize the next project--watch this space!)

Sex and death have commingled—one inseparable impulse. Risk feeds sensation—sensation makes risk acceptable. We’re headed towards . . . something we’d perhaps do better to avoid.
—Frank Black, in the understatement of the “Millennium”

 In his essay, “Hollywood’s Four Big Lies,”29 Michael Medved cites “Epidemiologist Brando Centerwall of the University of Washington,” and his “exhaustive studies for the American Medical Association,” which assert that “without TV there would be 10,000 fewer murders per year in the U.S., 70,000 fewer rapes and 700,000 fewer assaults.” Medved is an old-style hysteria-monger with little respect for the finer points of debate, but I am personally inclined to accept the implications of these figures (if not the figures themselves, which are obviously impossible to gauge). The basic claim seems perfectly feasible to me, if not actually certain. The statement states, however, “without TV,” and not “without TV violence,” and my inclination—or intuition—is to accept that TV itself, as a psychological tool for social control, has a profound effect upon the individual, and on society at large. It may be, then, that part of this effect includes an augmentation of aggressive behaviour and antisocial activity (in a word, violence). As to whether a “Faces of Death” documentary, an episode of “Millennium,” or a thirty-second commercial for Budweiser is more or less responsible for this “effect,” that is something that is more open to question. My feeling is that TV itself—simply by being switched on (but most especially when the material emitted is by nature numbing, repetitive, and of such a low standard of intelligence and artistry that it serves as little more than an insult to the individual)—creates in the viewer a kind of funk, a trancelike state, which in turn makes him or her susceptible to all kinds of conditioning; such conditioning may include conditioning towards aggressive or violent behavior. Hence, scenes of murder, rape, mutilation etc, may indeed have a harmful effect upon the TV viewer, but only because they are part of a general conditioning process performed by television itself. 

 It seems to me that viewing violence, per se, even the crude, exploitative violence of TV shows or Hollywood action pictures, does not actually cause the viewer to become worked up or in any way more aggressive. On the contrary, it is likely to serve vicariously as a release or outlet for his or her feelings of anger and aggression.30 On the other hand, asinine commercials that deliberately arouse the viewer’s sexual desires simply in order to sell some worthless product or another, simultaneously frustrate these desires (after all we can’t, like Max Renn in Videodrome, fuck the TV) while causing the viewer to feel inadequate or impotent for lacking the various products that would make us attractive to the opposite sex. All this I think is almost bound to have a negative effect upon the viewer. Feelings of frustration, resentment, contempt, hostility, and outright rage, are likely to be aroused in us for being so ruthlessly and cynically manipulated. If this viewer is then bombarded with images of rape and torture and what-have-you, then it becomes altogether less fanciful to imagine that he might just (if already somewhat inclined in this direction) put two and two together and come up with five, begin to get “ideas”—ideas that, like poor Max’s “hallucinations,” do not originate in his own head. 

 Joseph Natoli writes—in his study of postmodernism and the movies Speeding to the Millennium (p. 96)—how, “in a culture working hard to link personal identity with consumption, people will enact this connection by any means, fair or foul.” He argues that, seeing as the greater part of the populace is, and must be, incapable of attaining the consumer dream dangled under their noses, at least a portion of them will inevitably resort to any means at all to make a grab for their rightful piece of the pie. “Frustrated, with violence looming, an anger sets in that is itself without mind. . . That undiagnosed anger . . . is there to be directed, to be given a ‘mind.’. . . Under this light, we are all distracted to the staging of nightmares of depravity.”
 With slightly less of an alarmist tone, over thirty years earlier, Norman Mailer discussed the subject with Playboy magazine (December 1961, “Petty Notes on Some Sex in America”):

There’s a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business word is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements. . . . I think this bad “art” that one gets in the mass media, on television, in the movies, does the nation far more harm than if one were to remove all controls from pornogrpahy and obscenity. Being half excited and half frustrated leads to violence. Whenever one is aroused sexually and doesn’t find a consummation, the sex in one’s veins turns literally to violence. 

 The links between sex and violence have been more or less established I think, and anyone who has ever lived in a big city knows that late Saturday night is not generally a good time to be out and about on your own. Drunken kids coming home without a “score” will express their libidinous frustration any way they can, and violence, in such circumtances, is clearly an “alternative” means of expression to sex. If pornography—and especially soft-porn advertising—arouses primal desires (latent energy) in young men who have no way to satisfy these desires, then there’s a good chance this latent energy will find some other way of getting out. So, it stands to reason that excess exposure to pornography, and to sexually provocative imagery in advertising and the like, without the corresponding outlet being available, can only engender sexual frustration. And in the era of AIDS the gulf between demand and supply is growing ever wider: You can look but you can’t touch is the message on the hot lips of most every “babe” whose luscious form adorns subway walls and billboards throughout the urban world. All this false stimulation leads inevitably to an excess of undirected, hence frustrated, male sexual energy. And what do you do with all that energy? You go to war. 

 All this is of course an unpardonable diversion from the basic point, which is that certain imagery has a powerful capacity to invoke emotions in the viewer, and that once these emotions are invoked, subsequent imagery might serve to direct the release of these emotions (and they will be released: one way or another boiling water has to let off steam). And although it’s far-fetched to say that this movie or that TV show caused that crime or this tragedy, I don’t think it’s far-fetched to suggest that TV in general, and a large majority of factory-line movies—is of such execrably low quality that it does invoke a feeling of anger and disgust in the public, however unconscious such feelings may be. This disgust and contempt and unacknowledged hostility may even be directly (if only partially) related to the ever-increasing demand for more screen violence, such violence being the only way to satisfy—or release—this growing sense of hostility against the medium itself. 

 Everybody knows that TV is addictive; few people bother to ask just why, considering that it is also practically unwatchable. Obviously the standard of TV programs has nothing to do with their popularity—it’s not the programs that are addictive (even people who watch a lot of TV will often admit to feeling contempt it), it is the act of watching itself that somehow hooks us. The reason is—I believe—that TV quite literally casts a kind of spell upon us.33 And if watching television (and, to a lesser extent, movies) is roughly equivalent to falling into a hypnotic trance, it begins to make a scary kind of sense—TV is the ultimate drug (or penultimate perhaps, with virtual reality just around the corner) to which we are all hooked. It sucks us into its world and makes us forget about everything else outside it, and as such, TV (as Gus van Sant’s To Die For satirizes) has indeed become a new kind of reality for us. And in the world of TV, which is after all a make-believe world (not myth- but kitsch-making)—anything goes. Sensation is the only real requisite, and even there the sensation doesn’t necessarily have to be ours: if the laughtrack is loud enough, we may not even notice that we’re not laughing ourselves (or else, we laugh despite ourselves, even though nothing funny is going on). If TV tells us rape and mutilation is “cool,” the latest thing—hell, that’s OK! It’s only entertainment. Our responses are becoming as much a part of the “package” as everything else; we’re lost on a laugh-track, running on an infinity loop to nowhere. So when Max Renn gets hooked on the snuff torture movies coming out of his TV set, he’s no different from the rest of us. He’s curious to know where they’re coming from, sure, but only so he can buy shares in the business. He is ready and eager to be seduced, because the TV he’s been getting just can’t cut it for him anymore—he needs a new sensation: we all need a new sensation. “Millennium” has answered this demand to some extent, just as “Twin Peaks” did before it, and “The X-Files,” but the thing about sensation for sensation’s sake—it’s a desensitizing process. We need always a little more just to feel anything at all.

 Max Renn is too jaded to question the moral implications of what he’s getting into—he knows he’s going too deep, but he doesn’t care. Humanity’s lost its allure anyhow, so he doesn’t really have anything else to lose. And when “the new flesh” takes over (and he becomes an organic video recorder), it’s like reverse possession—the machine is in the beast, and a new race of TV babies is already in the can. It might be something we’d have done better to avoid.

*

What Price Civilization? (From Schizo Cinema)

In A Prisoner of Sex, Norman Mailer wrote that paranoia was nothing less than belief in the devil. If so, then Religion, as collectively embraced by the masses, is faith that God is better, bigger, and stronger than the devil. It functions as a sop and a comfort for our ever-encroaching terror and despair in the face of the world, a tonic for that sinking feeling that the devil has gotten the upper hand. Seen in this light, movies serve a dual purpose. They may disclose unpalatable truths to us indirectly and thereby allow our unconscious necessary expression. But they may also cover up these truths, placating us with skillfully fabricated lies designed to create the very opposite impression: that everything is fine, that nothing has really changed, that all this madness is just a passing phase and love will conquer in the end. (It ought to be noted that the conclusion of these saccharine movies need not be false, only the means by which they arrive at it.) The sap-headed affirmations of these old, long-outmoded values (of sentimental Hollywood of the ’80s and ’90s), as well as the cynical brutalism of action movies, served to suppress and divert the growing sense of paranoia and schizophrenia in society. The fact that 90% of these movies are not only dubious vehicles for propaganda but thoroughly lousy movies only confirms this suspicion. 

Since the schizophrenic experience has always been, now more than ever, the closest equivalent to the artistic one—that of the creative individual in an increasingly machine-like world—it follows that interesting and challenging movies are invariably also subversive ones, ones that address, and effectively partake of (with the awareness of the artist), the madness in which we live. This doesn’t mean they can’t have a religious or life-affirming dimension; one of the best of these recent movies (The Matrix) owes much of its appeal precisely to such a dimension. But as a general rule, the schizophrenic movie, like the schizophrenic individual, is driven into a corner by the overwhelming nature of its impressions, and takes refuge in societal rules based, above all, on a denial of soul. What better way for the schizo to protect his soul than to deny he has one, that such an idea even exists? The schizophrenic is tormented only secondarily by the world in which he lives; what torments him first and foremost is his own psyche. By rejecting the one—the world—he effectively is left with the other—his soul. Finding this to be the true source of his torment, he naturally rejects this also. As a result, the religion of our time—a schizophrenic time in which few values can be seen to have value—is nihilism. This is the chosen belief system of the younger generation: to reject all beliefs whatsoever. It is the ultimate expression of the postmodern, fragmented, schizophrenic experience, of paranoia beyond paranoia: to deny everything as not only worthless and meaningless, but as unreal. With movies like The Matrix and Fight Club, the schizophrenic experience has come into its own.  

If 1999 was the watershed year for schizo cinema (Being John Malkovich, Bringing Out the Dead, Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty, Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, The Insider, Ghost Dog, The Sixth Sense, Sleepy Hollow, Run Lola Run, Boys Don’t Cry, Man on the Moon), the years since have also afforded a surprising wealth of movies that describe, to varying degrees of success, the schizophrenic experience. Memento, Requiem for a Dream, Gladiator, Waking Life, Mulholland Drive, The Pledge, Prozac Nation, Julian Donkeyboy, A Beautiful Mind, Insomnia, Adaptation, In America, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Punch-Drunk Love, 21 Grams, The Mothman Prophecies, The Others, Matchstick Men, Mystic River, United States of Leland, The Corporation, The Singing Detective, Around the Bend, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Aviator, I Heart Huckabees, Closer, Sin City, The Libertine, Matador, Mirrormask, Down in the Valley, Harsh Times, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Edmund, V for Vendetta, Capote, A Scanner Darkly, Alpha Dog, The Fountain, Stranger Than Fiction, The Departed, The Hoax, Inland Empire, Michael Clayton, You Kill Me, Reign Over Me, Lars and the Real Girl, There Will Be Blood, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Synecdoche New York, The Changeling, Choke, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, even silly dreck like Mr. Brooks and Awake or mainstream pulp like X2, Dark Knight, and Watchmen, are all doing their best to represent the ever-deepening split in the collective psyche between haves and have-nots, sane and insane, disempowered mass and super-powered elite, young and old, believer and non-believer, ignorant and informed, deluded and disillusioned, paranoid and complacent. They may not be offering up a cure, but they are doing an excellent job of deepening the diagnosis.

*

If, as Freud taught us, Civilization = Repression, there are three questions we may wish to ask.

First: Repression of What?

Second: Repression How?

Third: What Price Civilization?

The first consideration is crucial, since there are inarguably things that need to be repressed, if only for the time being (while other, more pressing things are acknowledged), and at least if civilization is to continue existing at all (a question which will be addressed subsequently). Ergo, some repression is worse than others. The urge to kill our fellow men when they annoy us, it might be argued, is something that needs to be repressed. Which brings us to the second question: How?

This is precisely where (and why) the arts come in, be they fine or base, blessed vision or damned advertising. The arts, and the various bastard media technologies they have spawned (devil’s tools all, from the printing press to virtual reality), possess an authority in our lives that we rarely, if ever, become aware of (they work best when they work surreptitiously). In the beginning was the word, and the word was a command (though today it is more of a subliminal suggestion). Thou shalt not kill, for starters. In movies, it’s clearly a different affair; in movies, killing is not only acceptable, it’s the best way to get ahead. This is not a million miles away from the Law of the Jungle: “kill or be killed.” 

If movies “help” us to repress our (now outmoded) killing instinct, they do so at a price. No instinct can be repressed without being rechanneled. There is always a safety valve, and in the last forty years, movies have served as a safety valve for the violence in civilized man’s soul probably more than any other single factor save sports. What is really being suppressed is not the killing but the sexual impulse, however. That is really all there is—in animal man—to be suppressed. Presumably this accounts for why our violent fantasies have become so twisted, our sexual fantasies so violent. Schizophrenia is the price of cutting ourselves off from our life force. By such a reckoning, civilization comes to be seen as the primary blight upon the schizophrenic (would-be shamanic) mind. Which brings us to the third question.

The product of repressing humans’ (animal) sexual nature was civilization. The price of civilization, for the animal man, is schizophrenia: a splitting off from the reality of our sexuality. The only sane conclusion for the schizophrenic, at this point, is that civilization itself is unreal. As in The Matrix and Fight Club, such a realization banishes all inhibitions, for better or for worse, for sorcery or savagery. The schizo is released from bondage, to become One, in the precise moment that civilization collapses around him. That is the solution, but it is also the price. Where we go from here is anyone’s guess.