The Illuminati, Hypnosis, Paranoia, Schizophrenia, Kubrick, and Tom Cruise

Masters of the Fantasmatic Dimension, from left: Klytus (Flash Gordon), Dwarf from Twin Peaks, MC (Eyes Wide Shut), The Wizard of Oz, Evil Queen

In the end, the paranoia around the Illuminati is "which came first, the chicken or the egg"-style ingenious: if you let even a small amount of it in, you find suddenly everything clicks, and yet doesn't -and paranoia stars fusing with your skepticism. It's like hiding the fact you've been swimming by standing out in the rain. If anyone accuses you of swimming you just point to the sky, nature your ultimate alibi. In the Illuminati case, their ceremonies either mimic paranoid schizophrenic delusions in order to provoke split personalities for neural programming (a kind of mimetic mental magic) or their ceremonies are purely the product of pre-existing schizophrenic delusions / dreams / unresolved Oedipal tensions of the kind a kid will grow out of naturally unless he winds up hypnotized by an ambitious DA, or if he has an inherent genetic predisposition towards mental illness.

But what does it matter which is which?  aside from why everyone else seems to be having such cool sexy time but you? In the end we should be grateful for the trickle-down, because any other response than to dismiss it with a chuckle is self-defeating. How can you kill a serpent you can't even see? Why live in fear of an idea? That kind of thinking can lead to madness.

And let's boil it all down to basics: there's one ultimate signifier for all this: the serpent in the garden of Eden, or to use Kubrick terms, the 2001 Obelisk. Even the sexual trauma crimes of Humbert, Alex, Quilty, all come with this backhanded baggage leading back to that rat snake. We can only gain wisdom and self-reliance by having some higher intelligence 'blow up our spot,' to force us out the door of our parent's Edenic house, either via lies, a boot out the door, sexual molestation or some other form of brutal, traumatic, invasive ejecting. The military training in FULL-METAL JACKET is trying to achieve this same effect, to shape the lazy material of complacent man into something more advanced, and unfortunately (as per Nietzsche) nothing is more advanced than someone who is able to kill without conscience. Quilty empowers Humbert to kill him, as the drill instructor empowers Pyle, and Alex empowers the grotty old man in the alley singing for cutter, me brothers. They are evolution's bouncers, booting us out of any room, second womb, or early tomb we linger too long in.

"Oh? And what's so STINKIN' about it?"

Still I can't imagine the CIA or anyone getting it together enough, or feeling insecure enough, that they feel they need to hypnotize mass armies of hot girls to do their perverse bidding. Just having an endless supply of good cocaine is enough to get armies of hot girls to do your bidding, and a hell of a lot easier. And the first thing you learn in Lacan is that the drive is the circulation as such and therefore more than one orgy is a drag. The 24/7 availability kills the desire, and the whole round robin of desire becomes just more desolate post-orgasm blues.

But again, that's irrelevant. As per Zizek via Lacan (or vice versa), the Big Other's whole purpose is to remove the 'constituent anxiety," to make sure there is no "traversing" the fantasy which would dislocate the subject from its void-circumscribing orbit. In EYES WIDE SHUT, Ziegler's positing Dr. Bill as an outsider who will never be a member of this exclusive shadow society, no matter what mask he dons, is doing him a massive favor, because this forbidden society exists solely in order to exclude him, and thus perpetuate constituted (rather than constituent) anxiety. It's a gift, son! This lack of a gift is the best gift he can give.

A similar effect occurs with UFO crash sightings wherein the military steps in, harasses and bullies witnesses into silence, and reports it was a weather balloon or crashed satellite, then hauls it away never to be seen again. In doing this they perpetuate the revolution around the desire. They fan the flames of the need to know, and so perpetuate the illusion that they have this thing well in hand. If they announced a spacecraft was found, the world press would swamp them and create panic, but by simultaneously threatening witnesses and lying to the press they create a subliminal consolation. Instead of worrying about aliens we're angry at the government for not telling us the truth. We always feel protected when denied knowledge.

A key aspect of this fantasy-traversing orbit is the desire to 'retrace one's steps,' to find the fork where you and your fantasy parted ways (for we feel innately we were once within the fantasy rather than orbiting outside it). In EYES, this is what Cruise's Dr. Bill does the next day after his orgy dismissal; the return is always built into any orbit, with the illusion of linear time transcended. Danny retraces his steps in the Overlook maze snow; Dr. Bill retraces his ominous journey through the mask store; the star child returns to earth, presumably to drop down into the lap of the very same ape who had tossed the bone up at the start of 2001; Alex re-encounters all the people he beat up in the first part of the film. The old men get to hurl some spit and fists in retaliation, his poor long-suffering mom cries as he's kicked out by his replacement son, and the man who was forced to 'viddy well' his wife's defilement gets revenge by forcing Alex to 'auddy well' his dear Ludwig Van's colossal degradation; Humbert's visit to the pregnant, bespectacled, de-sexualized Lolita mirrors his visit to her mother in the beginning, and the shooting of Quilty both opens and closes the film.

This is why the ultimate realization scene for Dr. Bill is when the odious Ziegler begins to back up over his 'charade' story and he realizes he's met a man even more of a fake than he is. That's what nails him, more than the mask, which is just another reminder both of these rich elite's powerful omnipresence, but that it could be Ziegler himself who is the mastermind of all the things, right down to the call girl Mandy's O.D. which may be fake anyway. Is anything real at all? In clouding the issue Ziegler shows Dr. Bill the very painting of his fear, the refractions created by falseness and the empty cold of his cocksure grin, which its smug wearer presumes sweetens any amount of evasive bullshit.

This sounds horrible, but so what? We've been dealing with its trauma ever since mom first made us sleep in our own room, with at least one door between her and our quivering, longing self. But without that trauma, we're Norman Bates or worse. Without shadows all is pure light, indistinguishable from other light; there is no division between shadow and self anymore than one sunbeam can be portioned off from the rest, reserved to shine only on the elite. The introduction of evil into the world is inseparable from the introduction of choice, the possibility of free will. We all are welcome to join a yoga class if we want, and know the perfect grace and joy of breaking free from our 'programming' and merging with the divine through our breathing, but let me tell you, what a bore it is to live in that 24/7. I've done it, bro, and while I was perfect love and in the moment I was also very open to scammers, without the capacity for any resistance against temptation or exploitation... no wonder all the cult leaders end up committing all sorts of sexual abuses; they go crazy from being so free and yet so 'chosen up' as far as the light or the dark, so sure they know which is which - at first all the evil seems gone from their soul, but it's just sneaking around the back. When it comes, it's masked in heavenly light which the cult leader's ego never dreams might be anything but what he wants it to be. In denying he's still subject to root reptilian (Satanic) urges he gives them free choice of masks, so they come dressed as God.

(In No Way a) CONCLUSION:

We won't ever rise from our shackles of sleep until we learn to not judge those who keep us in the cave of Morphius. We simply need to recognize this is once again ourselves. We have to go back to Freud because if we boil it down to some exclusionary cult we're only choosing to exclude ourselves from our own story. We're kissing with a mask on. I'm sure the mask kissing connects to a Monarch MK-ULTRA program, but by now it's time to look inward for relevance rather than this arcane projection, the which came first, the paranoia or the conspiracy, and might conspirators deliberately invoke paranoia in those who try to unravel their secrets, and might the engendered paranoia be the whole point of those secrets.

LOOKING INWARD NOT OUTWARD:

The issue that sets the events of EYES WIDE SHUT in motion is really begun the night before by Nicole's feeling attracted to the Satanist at the party and projecting her desire on the screen of jealousy over Bill's two models. His evasiveness and and inability to admit he was turned on by those beautiful ladies is what drives her insane. The confession of love from the woman whose father just died mirrors this; loving a man she barely knows but marrying a blander version (a Tom Cruise variation with glasses) mirrors the two sides of Alice, who oscillates between wearing glasses and being her darker Mandy self. He's trying to find his own asleep wife, but he can't even find his own sleeping self. The double in the glasses represents the castrated, limited version of Dr. Bill, the one who is known, tamed, outside the realm of murky desire, the party Bill is trying so desperately to crash.

Bill has neglected this darker self, the Mr. Hyde, who could revel in this kind of sexualized madness, and so his nocturnal wandering becomes a sad attempt to find the real corollary, the place where sexual dreams are reality, i.e. Through the Looking Glass, because he has made no peace with his unconscious he grasps onto the white lapels of Nick Nightingale, his unconscious corollary, a blindfolded musician at the ritual, a nocturnal wanderer in between realms (for musicians at rituals can traverse both realms, conduct the orgies of the damned without taking part, i.e. the organist in CARNIVAL OF SOULS).

From left: Mary Henry (Carnival of Souls); Nick Nightingale (Eyes Wide Shut)

 Alice is more evolved because she encompasses both sides in one person. Her double is the drug abusing Mandy (they're both tall and have red hair) which is the only way it makes sense, since it's absurd to think that Mandy would even remember Bill if she was that zonked upstairs at Ziegler's party especially since he's wearing a mask at the orgy. Why even bother to warn him?

Personally, anyone who threatens me with rehab just because I pass out at a really dull party after giving a boring blow job for whatever vast sum, I say kill him.

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The Cockiness of Impotence

The saving grace of so much Kubrick is that he casts doubt on the truth of events in his films, creating space for them to be read as the deranged clinical sadism of an impotent egghead. Impotence is a recurring theme, from the fluoride in the precious bodily fluids in DR. STRANGELOVE (which as we all know pollutes our third eye reducing our spiritual awareness) to the lack of visible sex in LOLITA. The absence of the phallus, the impossibility of union with the objet petit a creates the desire, while for Dr. Bill the only sex he actually sees or becomes a part of is the sex witnessed at the masked orgy. He's cut off from everything by a cocky smarm that won't even allow him to admit he was nearly lured over the rainbow (just as Alice was nearly lured upstairs to the 'Renaissance sculpture room'). It's cocky boyish persona that is blocking his every attempt to stray from his wife, the internalized mask that cuts him off from all his desires on his magical night, so that the following day, retracing his steps, he finds that all the once open avenues are closed, and that he narrowly missed possibly contracting HIV, being killed, and so on. His wife's phone call saved him from contracting HIV (presumably this was Kubrick's meaning), the same way Mandy's OD kept him from going over the rainbow, and at the orgy Mandy saves him from presumably being killed. In each instance Mandy/Alice are hovering in the ether like a cockblocking guardian angel.

"I'd never belong to any club that would have me as a member." - Groucho Marx

Cruise's insistence on going to this masked orgy is itself cause for his exclusion, in the Kafkaesque double bind of desire. No one in the elite wants this rube wandering around like a freakin' Times Square tourist, maybe calling his frat buddies to come hoot it up, taking credit for its existence via 'finding it' bragging rights When a real nice party doesn't want you, and you know for sure you wouldn't be welcome, have nothing to offer, well, you deserve everything you get for crashing anyway. Maybe you should stay home and work on your attitude, Dr. Bill!

An example of this 'deserved exclusion' occurs in the first season, second episode of the X-FILES ("Deep Throat"): Mulder really wants to see what's at this experimental military airbase that has been causing pilot zombie suicides... he has the suspicion the pilots are going insane from test flying captured alien discs. Mulder is denied entrance to the base of course-- the signs are posted to keep out-- but he's really curious so he sneaks in. Then he's caught and brainwashed to forget everything he's seen. Man, he's so indignant about that. We're clearly supposed to think this treatment is wrong but since when does curiosity alone warrant you to trespass against clearly-posted and authorized keep out signs? Everyone knows the FBI is riddled with Communist spies. Mulder could be one of them. Who the hell knows? I've had parties crashed by loathsome cretins I'd never let in if their masks weren't on, preventing me to know who they are, and if I wasn't tripping so hard I couldn't ask.
The scariest thing was when at one of our last Halloween parties a HUGE guy came in wearing an ugly full head latex monster mask, I mean he just radiated menace, and me in my lysergic funk I could just imagine pulling his mask off and seeing something a hundred times worse... I was afraid to even talk to him let alone kick him out as he lumbered back and forth across our pad, chugging our whiskey and looking around like any minute he was about to get the boot and wanted to make sure he stuck it to us enough first.

I'm still traumatized about that godless night. So no, I have no sympathy for Dr. Bill. He doesn't deserve to crash this soiree for the very same reason that he wants so desperately to. In this instance I think it's because he's gradually realizing his cocky sureness, his rich cutesy youth, is drawing hypnotized gorgeous druggy models to him like flies, and he desperately wants to belong to the last club that won't have him as a member, to keep pushing it until he makes it to the top of the heap he thinks he's already at. By denying him entrance Ziegler/the Illuminati forces Bill back into his marriage, gives him something better, in the end, than knowledge, gives him fear of knowledge.

All along he didn't want to become Ziegler, the Primal Father, but to connect. The masks in the orgy are at least removable, but his doesn't come off until he finally breaks down and even then he overdoes it, sobbing to Alice, "I'll tell you everything." In other words, he proves he can't keep a secret, he can't compartmentalize. He's a Fox Mulder. If he could, then he might even be invited to join the orgy eventually. Maybe these women, even his wife, are tests of one sort or another, to gauge his strengths in compartmentalizing. But he can only deal in rational facts the way Fox Mulder can't accept the reality of a UFO presence and continually has to see for himself, and even then no amount of evidence is enough for him, he has to convince everyone to believe it too. Scully at least doesn't want to believe, regardless of evidence, while he wants to believe but regardless of evidence can't be satisfied.

Thus unquenchable curiosity is the sure sign you don't deserve to find out. Knowing the whole truth, without restraint or border would certainly be too much for us, unless we're ready to take it all in with a poker-faced calm, ready to watch our conception of a distinction between the real and the fantasmatic dissolve like the chimera it always was.

In the end, there's a weird symbiosis between that orgy and Kidman's dream and the question of which is worse: a sex-saturated dream you are enjoying (Alice's, where she's the center of attention -- she 'belongs' there) or a reality in which you are out of your depth, uninvited, and unwanted?

As someone whose had a panic attack after being hit on by two spooky models at a 2006 Halloween party, I no longer envy and hate Dr. Bill the way I did when I first saw the film in 1999. I was also kind of arrogant back then and couldn't stand the fact that he let those two hotties go, or even got them in the first place. But now I'm beaten down, broken on the wheel of time like a scarecrow. If I had another encounter with those two spooky models I would still run away but wouldn't hate myself so much later. Why? Because now I've read up on EYES WIDE conspiracy mind control theorems.

Here's a detail I remember about those girls: one was dressed as a dominatrix, the other wore a black bikini, had a perfect body, AND REPTILE EYES, though they were presumably contacts for the a Halloween costume. OR we were meant to assume so, just as we are meant to assume that all of the masks at the orgy hide human faces. Are the existence of reptile contact lenses allowing reptilian-human hybrids to take their human ones off without attracting undue attention?

Now that we're talking about it, I'm remembering another pair of spooky girls, hippie chicks (and one guy) up in Syracuse in 1987. They were gorgeous and way too sexually advancing, to the point I found myself backing up away from them and was not sure why, as I was hardly a virgin, or sober. I can barely remember what any of these girls looks like now. If I did hook up with them, would I even be alive today? And are all my subsequent peccadilloes just my long night of the soul trying to get revenge on womankind for making me feel all itchy and strange and guilty for missing these encounters? Were these girls even human? Was their whole mission just to seduce men and steal their DNA, and/or leave us with a lifetime of sexual anxiety over our cowardice, an anxiety that they could siphon off with their orgone harvesting matrixes? My roommate Eric did sleep with one of those hippie chicks and was super weirded out afterwards. He told me that something about her vagina didn't look right, though he couldn't explain exactly what was so wrong about it.... not a writer.

Another weird metatextual element to EYES is the way Kidman's off behavior mirrors both the aformentioned drugs, mind control and ALSO the breaking down of an actor through trust exercises and the Stanislavsky method. It's very similar to hypnosis, the repetition of phrases and other occult chanting mechanisms; they are all used in shamanistic ritual, hypnotic regression, occult indoctrination, and acting. So the issue is, why aren't these things overlapping more often, along with sleep paralysis and alien abduction, a whole melange of fantasmatic 'other realities' that invite us ever deeper into a magnificent madness maze? Aside from Kubrick, are there any other filmmakers this paranoid?

We get some of these links from David Lynch (are Audrey Van Horn and Laura Palmer both SRA-programmed sex toys?), One Eyed Jacks, the Roadhouse, and the mysterious room with the dancing dwarf could compare to the ritual spaces in EYES, as well as the Emerald City Oz room, the wicked witch's castle in WIZARD OF OZ; the lair of the evil queen in SNOW WHITE, and the leader's mask and hood resemble Klytus' from the 1980 FLASH GORDON (1980), which as we all know is bathed in Illuminati and Masonic symbolism.

Naval officers as signifiers of the subconscious (sailing the surface of the deep archetypal oceanic unconscious)

 For example, while I'm writing this CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG is on TCM, with an automaton girl standing before a series of mirrors (which they use in mind programming) singing that she's under a spell and waiting for her first kiss, an almost exact description of sexually subjugating mind control techniques (including occurring before an assembled audience of mysterious attendees, which mirrors our standard dreams of being exposed naked in a class we forgot to study for, etc.). In reproducing the iconography of normal subconscious dreaming, the programmers tap into the control state, programming as it were, their automaton women, the "standard pleasure model" ala BLADE RUNNER, DR. GOLDFOOT, etc. (see CinemArchetype #16 - the Automaton). I don't believe this was what CHITTY was trying to achieve, but it shows you that once you let this paranoid stuff into your mind, it mutates and transforms even dull children's movies.

Staged Programming, from top: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Clockwork Orange, Manchurian Candidate

I remember the first time I saw A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, my mom rented it for us when I was around 13 years old. it was the first movie I ever got to choose at a video store. I had seen the poster as a child and been intrigued by it, and imagine I'd see, you know, some boobs... which I had never seen outside of a stolen Playboy. You could certainly argue some kind of sick mind programming was underway for me, considering the horrors in that film were just not seen outside of a dirty movie house, I would imagine. I thought it was weird and was certainly shocked by the home invasion scene and the way we're not really supposed to have a clear 'rooting for' character, unusual in the (pre-cable) TV I was used to. But this was art. I had to figure it out.

But in real life, or at least the headlines, of 1980-1983 ritualistic abuse of women, children, people, kept coming. The horrors of Satanic panic coincided so perfectly with the dawn of the VHS that it's impossible to ignore. I still think we've only begun to gauge the effect of sudden availability of all these 'video nasties' (as the Brits called them) had on middle America. There was no ratings mechanism in play at all the first few years of the rental business. Stereo and TV and appliance stores were the only ones who rented out videos at first, and no one thought much about the traumas of TV violence because we hadn't really had any to speak of, a few shoot-outs on the cops shows aside. The home invasion scene in CLOCKWORK was a parallel to the invasion of these disturbing images into our house right at that moment, and we reacted.

I firmly believe that Satanic panic was a response to this new at-home availability of X-rated films and the flood of disturbing slasher movies and sleaze that had formerly been shown only on 42nd street or adult drive-ins. It was an undiscovered country we were gleefully exploring, unaware of the subliminal trauma accruing like waxy resin in our moral cortex.

I don't think these Satanic abduction reports are entirely fantasy. I think these cults do exist, but I don't believe most include seemingly normal families. Still, I am nonetheless fascinated by the phenomenon of recovered memories, the similarity between Satanic and alien abduction recall, and sleep paralysis.

To this of course I propose that there are levels between our ordinary collective reality (objects, spatial relations / time) and unconscious dreaming (Jungian collective unconscious, or the anima mundi) and in between the layers there is no clear line, but a grey area where one level can easily be confused for another.

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS: Reality in conventional 3-D space time, i.e. global news, shared opinions, measured distance (You are there, I am here, the stars are light years away, etc.)

CONSCIOUSNESS: Emotions, processed input from the five senses, shaped to correspond to the collective; 'true' memory (We are all in 'this' together, the stars are within our reach)

------in between ------Hypnotic state of 'repressed memory' regression / recovered           memory, solidifying the subconscious (lower) into a reality (upper) memory, leading to a revision of one's concept of the collective consciousness as one's repressed desires from childhood are remembered as real. 

SUBCONSCIOUS: Repressed desires; Oedipal and Elektra complexes; incestuous or criminal desires; id; sexual dreams (we are all lying about our true natures, the stars shall be dominated by us one day)

COLLECTIVE SUBCONSCIOUS: Satanic orgies, incestuous fantasies / reality, sleep paralysis / repressed memories of alien abductions / bizarre ceremonies / demonic possession

UNCONSCIOUS:  Jungian Archetypes; anima/animus; superego, 'unfinished work from the past' (PTSD carrying over from one life to the next) dreams, personal devils, demons, angel projectors. (astrology, archetypal constellations, the stars are no farther than our fingertips)

------in between ------ Hypnotic imagery reflection, here caught between the universal                      and personal unconscious, dissolving ego into the collective; the oceanic; can recover memories from other people, past lives, channeling spirits. 

COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS: Anima Mundi; Collective Unconsciousness; 3rd eye reality (4-9-D nonlocalized intelligence); true hallucinations - i.e. matter appears as energy slowed, every movement or thought triggers myriad possibilities branching off like tentacles, aliens, transpersonal devils, demons (the stars are inside of us, there is no distance or space at all, ghosts, demons, angels are all visible and separate from any one of us, and yet joined to us)

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The question of 'is mind control MK Ultra real?' doesn't really make sense when approached pragmatically based on the theoretical layers of consciousness outlined above, because the figures in a subconscious dream (repressed sexual) mirror exactly the allegedly real figures in a repressed memory recovered during hypnosis. If one applies this formula to Salem witch hunts for example, the repression of their Puritan religion created such a hard wall between the subconscious and conscious that the pressure resulted in an autonomous complex, i.e. the subconsicous warps the floorboards with its built-up pressure and some of its contents burst out, like a broken sewer pipe, onto the conscious perception/reality living room carpet; since the Puritan mind has no means of discerning the real from the vividly imagined (Freud is more than two centuries away), it can only believe its own senses, its own intuition, and since the deep dark woods are such an unknown, and the fortunes and fates so dependent on random circumstances (no cure for diseases or crop blight), there are a lot of great screens for these dark unconscious sewer mains to project onto.

In other words these things all exist, but only if you widen your notion of what existence is, and you should. It's foolish to think that aliens only come from far away in big ships traveling through 3-D space. Do they ever sleep? Maybe to them our waking life seems to them so narrowed it's like we're asleep, while our dreaming selves are more approachable - and seen as the 'real' us! Why not?

I'm not attempting to dismiss the claims of SRA survivors, only suggesting that hypnotic regression / repressed memories occupy such a slippery slope between the levels of our consciousness that they expose the whole foundation of ordinary reality as a delayed reflection of the deepest level of the collective. In other words I'm saying the SRA memories might be false but consensual conscious reality may just be falser.

--

Later in his sojurn, Dr. Bill is harassed by a gang of B&T toughs for being gay (a real life 'accusation' he vehemently denies), which could be said to represent, in one of the few appearances thereof, the non-New Yorker young boorish weekend drinker tourist, a swath of kids who come rolling in on the LIRR and NJ Transit every Friday and Saturday evening that makes weekend bar scene collectively known as amateur night (cool NYC-ers enteratin at home or go to private parties instead). These are the morlocks, the droogies, the bridge and tunnel marauders, relying on their gang's drunken cheering for constant support, the type of dudes. It's that shove, however, I wish to mention, for it knocks him into an alternate state of reality for it's shortly afterwards he runs into the girl whose demarked as a prostitute by, apparently, the red door she takes him through, maybe because Kubrick thinks no girl would come onto a man in the West Village who wasn't? When Tom says while in her apartment, "Maybe we should talk about money." I wondered if she would have normally even expected or asked for any. In a way he shows himself to be as much of a tourist amateur night boob in this moment as the businessman who leaves a bunch of money for Diane Keaton in LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR. But has Kubrick really even been to New York City, ever? Is the red door a signal, as in ye olden times, or Amsterdam, that this is a brothel, of sorts and he just presumes its code here too? We know he reads a lot and that's often the surest mark of a man who doesn't party. If he'd done any serious drinking in the Village he wouldn't be so easily labeled as a doofus bridge and tunnel tourist like those shovers.

Of course that's the problem with filming a NYC movie in a UK studio. Kubrick did not think he needed to come here and absorb the unique flavors that may have opened his eyes shut in under 90 minutes. We're not all rich, Satanic, and successful or MK-Ultraficial sex zombies. Seeing this film in a New York City theater uptown, I could hear the disappointed sighs over moments like this shoving, the random pick-up by the hot model, the lispy hotel manager played by Alan Cumming, the choice of the very Jewish Pollack as the secret society member and hot hooker connoisseur (see here my rant associating his character here with his hooker enthusiast in Woody Allen's HUSBANDS AND WIVES) the bizarre fantasies like that he could get a cab to take him way out on Long Island, no matter how much he paid, and then make it back by dawn, on what is presumably a Saturday night, before Xmas no less. The time incongruity (it would take like two hours each way just to go a few miles and on a night like that, forget about traffic, it's bumper to bumper in and out all the way). Secondly, why the hell does he leave the prostitute in the first place if he's seeking a thrill? it's as if he keeps getting a life line which he's only too quick to grab and even quicker to throw back in pursuit of a thicker one:

Gayle: Do you know what's so nice about doctors?
Dr. Bill Harford: Usually a lot less than people imagine.
Gayle: They always seem so knowledgeable.
Dr. Bill Harford: Oh, they are very knowledgeable about all sorts of things.
Gayle: But I bet they work too hard. Just think of all they miss.
Dr. Bill Harford: You're probably right.

Here Harford doesn't even know if she's right but naturally he suspects it's true. "Just think of all they miss" applies twofold to the title of the film. How on earth can we think about all we've missed, unless of course we're talking about the associative process of hypnotic recollection of subliminal signals? Are the arcane symbols on the walls triggering an autohypnotic programming response in all these beautiful women? I wouldn't be surprised. All you really need to win the attention of a lot of hot models is cocaine. But a party like Ziegler's that shit is in the wind, and just a few trigger signs, like the star on the wall, indicate that there is something there that they all miss, that trigger signal that brings us into fantasmatic dimension.

"Nothing is ever just a dream, Alice." But then again nothing is ever just reality, and that's where the fantasmatic enters, for if you were to ask me if I believed in all the harrowing SRA recovery memories and conspiracy stuff on the web, I would say it depends on what you believe 'belief' is. I don't think that stuff necessarily "happened" in 3-D space time reality, but I don't think it was all a paranoid fantasy either. I think people who believe in it tend to get defensive if you talk about these phenomena in terms of psychology and myth but just because I don't believe this stuff is real I don't trivialize the unreal as being false. The fantasmatic dimension is in some ways even more real than our normal reality. The whole idea behind this being that there is an area of reality where collective experience--one set of sensory inputs grounding the other--works to prevent the supernatural from forming. Kubrick's entire filmography is about weening the human experience from the teat of this collective miasma, what the Hindu theologians call Maya, the goddess of illusion who spins her web around the eyes of men. In other words, these memories are in some ways 'truer' than reality itself! Once they are exposed, once the mind is free of the web, all is love and light, even death, decay, and suffering. Desire and fear are just the carrot and stick used to keep you circling around the track. Realize this and move off the track towards the center.

And of course this all has bearing on psychoanalysis, which in this case may read Ziegler as the analysand, 'performing' the role of the anal father, the 'one who enjoys' and excludes Tom Cruise from the mother's bed, denying his desire, playing the non du pere while flaunting unseemly wealth and power. Bill's beautiful boy face and confidence have gotten him just so far; girls fall in love with him in a heartbeat, drawn to his flawless 'performance' of a handsome young doctor, a 'normal guy' who misses a lot of things because he's continually called away to the next thing, a mirror perhaps to Kubrick himself who has clearly missed a lot of things by being so reclusive, though this is natural to someone with a high IQ or artistic bent, he reads way too deeply into everything, so his shoots are the longest in history, with 100 takes at a time of someone just walking through a goddamned door.

We know what he's looking for, of course, but he should know better than to try and find it.

A bug-eyed look at UFO Disclosure

If you ever want to really understand why shadowy government agencies continue to hide the existence of alien life visiting earth, watch CLOSE ENCOUNTERS (1977) again, and really study the behavior of Roy (Richard Dreyfuss), the immature "everyman" who makes mountains out of his mashed potatoes and frightens his family half to death with his lunatic ravings about UFOs. He's the guy we're supposed to identify with, one of the "chosen" invited to the party. And yet he's unable to accept the "truth" of the aliens until he's right there seeing them and touching them, even then he's more a wide-eyed kid at Disneyland than an adult trying to grasp this vast importance of this cosmic event. By making himself a mere patron on a UFO ride, Roy once infantalizes himself as a glorified spectator, a fan.

By contrast, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS regularly switches to the "insiders" led by Claude Lacombe (Francois Truffaut). While Roy seeks answers from an authority figure, someone to tell him what he already knows to be true, Lacombe knows the truth and hides it from the Roys of the world, who "can't handle" it. In other words, Claude assumes the role of leader, parent, role model, Roy that of the child, citizen, follower. Roy demands the government explain and assure. The Lacombes of the world can only pretend to be hiding more than they know, as a favor to the panicked who can then presume the government really does know what's going on, and so all must be well. It's a classic distraction move, allaying all fear by switching the focus from "are they going to attack us" to "tell me what they are!"

There is a scene early in the film wherein a group of air traffic controllers are gathered around a radio listening to flying saucer reports from one of their planes. They ask him if he wants to report a UFO: "No. I wouldn't know what to report," the shaken but professional pilot answers.

By the terrified citizen standard, not reporting the incident that pilot is "hiding" from possible peer ridicule, but the reasons are actually more muddled: If this unseen pilot had chosen to make a report he may be ostracized, not for "believing" in aliens but for reporting the encounter, for clinging to the lie of "real" authority, expecting that someone higher up will have an explanation for him. In other words, these men in the military are forced to grasp the notion of the ungraspable real, the other, the "stain" in Lacanian terminology. By choosing to not allow the UFO into their consensual reality in this way, the pilot and those gathered maintain their positions within the symbolic order. They know there are UFOs, and they know there is no explanation for them; but they can "handle" the truth, and the way they handle it is by realizing and accepting that there is no possible rational explanation and not letting it get them too rattled. There's still a job to do. Roy can't go to work or function in society once the 'truth' overtakes him, that's why he's not ready for it.

This split between these "grown ups" and "adult children" is further borne out in a scene in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS where panicked citizens meet with government officials in a press conference. The government officials basically acknowledge that the citizens saw something that no one has an answer for. If the townsfolk were to really "hear" this news, they would just sit there, pale and shaken, but they clamor. These citizens cannot recognize that the symbolic authority of the adult government has been removed by the presence of this advanced alien intelligence. The explanation they are looking for does not exist; but this is simply not good enough for them, so they throw a mass temper tantrum, which is in itself a sign they are not ready for the truth.

Another popular consciousness movie touchstone might be examined here to see how a person can move from one level to the other. (Roy never does, even when going off into space he remains dependent, merely "joining the children.") That movie is David Lynch's BLUE VELVET (1986). In this movie, Kyle Mclachlan plays Jeffrey, a young would-be detective out to solve the mystery of a severed ear he finds in the nearby park from his childhood home. He winds up embroiled in a scandal that includes a crooked cop; yet Jeffrey is also dating the daughter (Laura Dern) of the local police chief. He's already presented the chief with evidence against the crooked cop so when Jeffrey walks into the chief's home after dinner to pick up Audrey for a date, and finds the crooked cop in the living room with the chief, he's fairly startled - is the Dern's dad crooked also?

 
This is a key moment in Jeffrey's evolution as a male, and this psychic growth is something that's present in all of Lynch's films: Jeffrey doesn't panic, but rather greets the crooked cop with a smile and a handshake, as if he knows nothing of the matter. The chief is impressed and later when Jeffrey denies he knows who the cop is to Laura Dern, the chief says, "Good boy, Jeffrey." -- an acknowledgment of Jeffrey's newfound complicity within the social order. Jeffrey proves he can keep a secret, in this case the most important secret of all being the complete lack of 'truth' or solidity at the center of the social order, and this is the secret all true adults must guard. The 'dumb' citizens seldom realize that they need their politicians to lie - need to not believe in their leaders, so as to always presume there's more, rather than less, going on 'upstairs.'

We have a similar thing going on today in the world as we approach 2012: global warming, water and oil shortages; inflation, over-population, whatever you want to obsess on. We know something's up, but at the same time as long as the president doesn't come on national TV and proclaim any of this as officially doomsday, evacuate in a calm, orderly manner, say goodbye to your ass, etc., we're going to be all right. This is the trap we find ourselves in as we enter the age of total digital reality.

The infantilization of the masses by the ruling elite--both in film and in real life-- is no joke, and anyone with any authority knows that a large part of their job is simply to "embody" the "one who knows." By acting contemptuous and dismissive towards the citizenry's concerns at the aforementioned press conference scene in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, the government agents allow the citizenry to continue to live in the illusion that somewhere along the chain of command there is someone who has the situation well in hand. 

Now to bring this to our own current situation, which is the slow--presumably permitted--leak in information about the existence of aliens that's coming through on the internet, which manages to disperse information so rapidly that the shadowy government insiders would be hard pressed to stop it even if they wanted to, but one gets the impression they don't want it to. Rather, they want to continue to release the information with just enough disinformation to let them keep control. As long as there's debate about whether it's factual, we won't panic. People have an option not to believe if it scares them.

Again we turn to cinema for our example-- the censorship codes enforced by Joseph Breen from 1934 through to the early 1960s. The idea in these films wasn't that no one was allowed to have sex, but that there were simultaneously two different interpretations available: one that was "above board" and nonsexual (for the church matrons and children) and one sexual.... the did they or didn't they have sex during the 3 1/2 second dissolve from Rick and Ilsa kissing, to the watch tower at the Casablanca airport, for example as discussed by Richard Maltby and Slavoj Zizek:

To put it in the Lacanian terms: during the infamous 3 1/2 second, Ilsa and Rick did not do it for the big Other, the order of public appearance, but they did do it for our dirty fantasmatic imagination - this is the structure of inherent transgression at its purest, i.e. Hollywood needs BOTH levels in order to function.

As Zizek points out, this two-sided reading is not only present but essential for control to exist. By a similar token, it is safe for us to believe in aliens because the government does deny their existence. Once the president comes out and tells the actual truth, civilization as we know it will instantaneously collapse, the way the Soviet Union instantaneously collapsed - when all the people decide, en masse, to abandon an ideology, this change is inevitable. Thus any social order must involve a sort of mass hypnotism to function. The truth is, even the movie itself doesn't know what happened in that 3 1/2 seconds, but in implying something went on, it creates room for pleasure to emerge, the pleasure of feeling protected from the truth.

The lesson to glean from all this is that we all need to learn to be adults, to fix ourselves first, so we can be ready for the changes that are coming. The question is, are you free? And if you are free, why are you waiting for some "authority figure" to tell you what you already know? You know if aliens are real or not, and if you don't there's no one who can tell you but yourself. There is so much information being released now, so many sworn testimonies from NASA and military officials that by any standard you could name, the alien question is on the table. Do you still need some sort of "official" statement? Or have you let the truth in -- to the point where you are in despair at the fact that evil runs our country, that we're soul food for the reptoids? That only love and an expanded soul can free you from the bondage of self?

To really begin to believe in the alien conspiracy is to invite a complete collapse of values into your psyche; there are myriad "truths" to believe in, but one of the more obvious ones is that most humans are alien-ape hybrids. One of the most depressing is that we are a "soul farm" and gray-reptoid aliens eat our pain and suffering as snacks before they devour our souls. (which explains the fearsome appearance of Tibetan Demonology), and this is the reason why overpopulation runs amok, and that governments doesn't want us experimenting with drugs that will show the man behind the curtain, why they want to burn and destroy anyone who shows the way clear of bondage. It may be depressing, may not even be true, but it's one of the more acceptable all-encompassing answers to life's mysteries (the alien gene splice is, then, Darwin's missing link). No wonder we'd prefer to think what the TV tells us as we chew our morning cud.... "All is well... all is well..all is a disaster so keep watching, but it's nothing we can't fix, eventually." And that if we're worried about global warming, we can avert the crisis by buying seventh generation paper towels on our next half-hour SUV-drive to Wal-Mart.

The challenge is not to wonder what in that preceding morass of horrible truth and CIA disinformation is real or not, but to realize that if even one shred of it is true, just how vast and incredible its implications are. If you're not completely freaked out by the idea of alien life on this planet then you're not thinking about it clearly. You're thinking about it in the same abstract way you might think about death if you're not enlightened. You're still on the fence, wondering if its all true, still denying your own death, your own mortality, still clinging to possessions and temporal space like a kid grabbing his mom's ankles to prevent his having to go to school. You may believe in Jesus, but aren't sure if he rose from the dead, maybe believe in Santa Clause but not the Easter Bunny, and maybe you don't really believe in anything 100% and that's probably the smartest tactic, but it leaves you awfully numb.

In Sogyal Rinpoche's THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING he tells of giving a lecture about impermanence and afterwards having a jaded, seen-it-all new student proclaim: "All this seems obvious, tell me something new."

To which Rinpoche replies:

"Have you actually realized the truth of impermanence? Have you so integrated it with your every thought, breath and movement that your life has been transformed? Ask yourself these two questions: Do I remember at every moment I am dying and that everyone and everything else is, and so treat all beings at all times with compassion? Has my understanding of death and impermanence becomes so keen and so urgent that I am devoting every second to the purpose of enlightenment? If you can answer yes to both of these then you have really understood impermanence." (p. 27)

to the concept of alien life on this planet. Have you truly grasped the implications of "the truth" of alien existence? Have you overcome the egoic blinders that make you run to snap judgments and ridicule, the same defense mechanisms so overworked to keep you from thinking about death? If so, wouldn't you be spending, as Rinpoche describes "every second to the purpose of enlightenment?"

The mechanisms that keep you from thinking about death all the time are important for your functionality and sanity, but when you listen to them exclusively, life loses its scent of danger and excitement, and the dour wardens of your inner asylum start slowly taking away privileges. They only let go of your throat when they hit the wall of cancer or a gun in the face or death row... or psychedelics or meditation or exhaustion obliterates them temporarily. Is it any wonder that mind-expanding drugs are illegal and meditation such a hard habit to integrate into your life?

Or even more understandable--and chilling-- is it any wonder that even those convinced of the alien presence prefer to focus on issues of disclosure and evidence gathering, rather than actually altering their world view to the point of nervous breakdown? For once you "let it in," the truth about aliens cements so many missing connections, answers so many questions, that you find yourself on a whole other level of consciousness. Now that you believe in greys, anti-gravity propulsion, inter-dimensional doorways and reptoids, you can begin to deal with issues like the Pleiadians, angels, God, reincarnation, and the  light to dark ratio of your own immortal soul. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," the man behind the curtain shouts. But he's doing you a favor; the man behind the curtain is you.