I recently had the pleasure of spending time with my older siblings and their families. Between them, they have three children under the age of three years old, and they are both adorable, a lot of fun and a handful to keep track of. Hanging around with both kids and parents for a couple weeks straight really opened my eyes to a lot of subtleties about our culture that have been up until now lost on me as a single childless person.

The thing that I noticed the most strongly was how television is designed to work on parents. Parents are busy; there’s no doubt about it. Between working and make ends meet and caring for their children and the myriad of small responsibilities that arise as a result of kids, most parents don’t have a lot of time to focus on things outside of their immediate environment. Enter the evening news. The evening news gets turned on after a long day at work, or of caring for the kids, and for most parents it serves as a window to the outside world, and a vitally necessary lifeline to keep them connected to important events of the day.

Media companies seem to be aware of this dynamic, and are also aware of the need to provide news coverage that interest parents and with which they can identify. As a result you’ll see lots of human interest stories about parents and kids, and community issues. But the flip-side is that a preponderance of those stories seem to be negative. Just watch any five or six o’clock news broadcast to verify this for yourself. During a recent stint in front of the television at my sister’s house, they featured multiple stories about children drowning in pools. It’s important to consider the emotional effect this has on the parent. They automatically project themselves into the story. They imagine it is their child who is injured or killed or put at risk, which causes great anxiety - whether it’s consciously recognized or not. During that same broadcast, when they cut to a commercial, I saw television ads which are designed to sell you products that alleviate that anxiety. Buy insurance to protect your family. Buy this car because it’s safer for your kids. Shop at Lowe’s so you can baby-proof your house and provide a sanctuary for your little ones. The proximity of these ads to these types of news stories simply can’t be accidental. It is too common, too consistent.

Unfortunately, this is only part one of a two-pronged attack on parents and children by corporations seeking to manipulate and profit from them. The other major element that I noticed was the intense cross-over branding that nowadays goes into children’s products. Say your young child regularly watches and absolutely loves particular kids show, such as Dora the Explorer. Now imagine that you need to buy some ordinary everyday items for your child such as forks, plates, bibs, and any variety of toys. You have three objectives in this situation: get what you need, spend your money wisely, and please your child - if possible. The best would to do all three. And this is where cross-branded products come in. Why not buy plates, forks, bibs and toys that you know your child will like and identify with because they have Dora and her friends featured prominently on them? If they are available and the same price, or maybe only a little extra more money, chances are you will shell out in order to keep your child happy.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this transaction, of course. Parents need to buy certain things and companies have every right to sell them the best way possible. But what happens to a child who, from birth, is trained to only buy products which feature cross-over tie-ins through other media franchises? What happens is that you create a consumer who is so well-trained and so deeply programmed that they will never question the possibility that all-encompassing marketing and promotional schemes might not be in their best interest. Why might they not be in their best interest? Because what right do corporate entities have to colonize all of human existence and experience with products and services? Who gives them that right?

Did you know that expectant mothers are given by their doctors parenting magazines and product samples? Who do you think pays for these things? Who gives them to doctors? Who benefits from imprinting in the mind of a woman anxious to bring a new life into the world a sense of which products to buy and where to shop? Humans have been having and raising children for thousands of years. When you get down to it, encoded within our biology are all the instincts and knowledge we could ever need - but we’ll never hear it if we continue to let so many other outside voices scream at us day and night.

Thanks to Jared Drew Moody for the awesome illustration that accompanied this article.

The code rested on three basic principles:

1. No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.
2. Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.
3. Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.

And in watching “He Walked By Night,” along with other film noir examples, you can very readily see how these principles played out on screen. The film is narrated in a sort of quasi-documentary style and is combined with “normal” movie action and dialogue. Somehow though, the juxtaposition of the narration adds a layer to it that almost seems like it is a propaganda film - which in many ways it essentially is.

One of the first things that struck me was a line in the opening narration: “A policeman’s work, like a woman’s is never done.” Something like that would seriously not fly nowadays. But there it was, large as life. Throughout the film after that, the detectives solving a case are consistently portrayed as suave high-class heroes. Literally any time a woman is in the room, she blushes, bats her eyes and smiles demurely at the officer, staring at him longer than she ought. Even subordinate beat cops adopt an atmosphere and physical posture of awe in the presence of the detectives. And then we have a whole host of secondary characters who practically jump up and down to help the police solve the case. What’s the case? Well, they keep reminding everyone that a police officer has been shot - which, in a world where police are the perfect ultimate heroes, is the worst possible crime.

The thing that really got me about the way the narration was done is that whenever it occurred, it almost seemed to be telling you the audience member what to think and how to react to the events of the story. It almost seems instructional, like a helping hand guiding you towards particular conclusions. I would be very interested to track down and watch other films which make use of this narrator-documentary technique from that time period and see what they are like. Part of me wonders whether this narrative technique was eventually abandoned simply because through consistent exposure to it, people had learned to internalize those types of reactions while watching a movie. They no longer needed the explicit narrator, because they had one inside of their heads.

It strikes me also that the thirty-odd year period that the Hays Code lasted (from 1934 onward) was essentially the advent of mass visual media. Talking pictures had only just been invented in 1927, and for the entire movie-going nation, people needed to essentially be “taught” how to understand this new form of media. This theory would make the voice of the narrator make all the more sense. So too, it would make the Hays Code all the more appropriate. If you are already endeavoring to teach people how to interact with a new media, then it only makes sense to simultaneously teach them civic virtues and moral codes through what are essentially “teaching stories.” The net effect is that you are able to normalize moral and social order among what had been, up till then, a very diverse group of Americans: from different regions, with different backgrounds and upbringings. Movies acted to bring everyone together onto more or less the same page culturally - in exactly the same ways as government educational films about hygiene and ettiquette did in the classroom.

Consider this quote from psychologist R.D. Laing when you think about the purpose of mass media:

All those people who seek to control the behavior of large numbers of other people work on the experiences of those other people. Once people can be induced to experience a situation in a similar way, they can be expected to behave in similar ways. Induce people all to want the same thing, hate the same thing, feel the same threat, then their behavior is already captive - you have acquired your consumers or your cannon-fodder.

People suggest that the Hays Code ultimately ended because it became unenforceable and was replaced by the Motion Picture Association of America rating system. But part of me wonders if maybe it’s work was simply done. Maybe they saw the need to indoctrinate the first generation who was exposed to mass media (besides the radio, that is) into how to be proper media consumers and citizens, and once that foundation was laid, they simply moved on to another stage of engagement which on the surface seemed more free, but perhaps is still just as propagandized as it ever was. The main difference being that we have been taught to internalize the voice of the narrator, so that the propaganda is implicit within us at all times.

The Subversive Use of Sacred Symbolism in the Media is a recorded speech and PowerPoint presentation which can be viewed in it’s entirety on Tsarion’s Taroscopes website. The lecture rounds out at about 100 minutes and was originally delivered at the Conspiracy Con 2003 conference.

While I enjoyed some of the thinking in Tsarion’s video, it is roughly what you’d expect from a presentation at a conspiracy conference. It is big on outrageous connection-making and small on factual accuracy. And it goes without saying that it’s extremely paranoid.

One of Tsarion’s main theses seems to be that graphic designers and marketers the world over have access to secret occult archives, from which they are consistently drawing visual and thematic inspiration in a concerted effort to subjugate the human spirit. It’s exactly as preposterous as it sounds - especially if you’ve ever done any graphic design work yourself, or have friends in the business. Like any business, graphic design and marketing are about maximizing your time, effectiveness and profits. With scattered real-life exceptions, esoteric concerns simply do not enter into the picture.

In any event though, the real message that I took away from this video is one that I agree with: that advertising is manipulative (if not always evil). It plays on people’s insecurities, and it attempts to hurl useless and sometimes dangerous products and services into the gaps we all have in our lives as humans. To seek spiritual salvation through consumerist avenues only opens you up more and more to this system of deprivation and domination. So, for that reason, I find Tsarion’s efforts to pull people out of this negative spiral both noble and worthwhile.

I also do think that there is something to the chaotic way he just slams together symbolism and weird imagery from media and occult sources. It shows how the same themes important to humanity have essentially never changed. And it very effectively shows you how to think not in rational/linear terms, but in clusters and by chains of (loose) associations. This can be a very valuable skill for creative thinking and the exploration of truth - or it can simply make you snort in derision as your rational mind is violated again and again. Either way, it is unfortunate that the only explanation he chooses to employ is one of shadowy international conspiracies controlling the media.

However, if we ourselves were to apply this same level of creativity to the meta-narrative he’s employing as to the symbols themselves, we could come up with any number of equally “plausible” possibilities:

1. That graphic designers haven’t got a clue about any of this
2. That graphic designers are intentionally and covertly injecting sacred symbols into mundane media to wake people up and spiritually enrich their lives
3. That media and pop culture nowadays are the natural containers of spiritual symbolism and transmitters of value systems today in the same way that mythology and folktales were in ages past
4. That it’s all evil - business, advertising, etc - but that God or the gods have begun a secret spiritual invasion to transmute this lead into gold, and that the symbols of the divine appear initially in the trash stratum.

The point of all this conjecture is simply this: if you’re going to go in and tinker with your belief systems and worldviews using the methodologies of conspiracy theory or occult investigation, then you owe it to yourself to explore all possible explanations - not just the ones that are sinister and paranoid. And remember that life is more convoluted and confounding and complex - and downright beautiful - than any theory or thesis could ever account for.

But as Nicholas St. James, the president of one ant tank, discovers when he ventures to the surface to find an artificial pancreas for a dying repairman, the actual truth is something different altogether. The war ended long ago, but the powers that be kept going the lie so that those dwelling under the earth would be motivated to keep the system going while living in virtual slavery.

The plot twists and multiple layers of reality inverting again and again are all pure Philip K. Dick. The overall thrust of this book deals with the necessity of lies and violence to sustain a social order - and whether they really are necessary at all. You could easily draw parallels between the imaginary war in this book to a lot of what’s going on in the world today in the “War Against Terrorism.” But this book is nowhere near as polished as a lot of his other work, especially the later stuff.

One of the things that really got to me was his excessive use of made up jargon and abbreviations. The book is chock full of it and it really impedes the reading process. Also very aggravating is the constant internal italicized monologues that take place right in the middle of conversations. It’s almost like Dick started out with a basic fifty page story and then fleshed it out with all these damned italicized passages later on so that he could push it towards 200 pages. Whatever the case, they really slow down the reading process.

About halfway through though, the damn finally breaks and the novel starts to pick up. I don’t want to spoil the fun of what happens, but I think the second half makes the first half worth reading. Overall though, if you’re anything but a hardcore PKD fan, I would recommend you start elsewhere, like maybe with Ubik, Flow My Tears, or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?