With a new version of The Wicker Man to be released in theatres September 1st, I thought it would be appropriate to review the original in the hopes that others will see the classic horror flick for what it’s not. It is not a typical, generic, movie that carries itself on cheap scare tactics. I’m not impressed by the amount of remakes that have been plaguing the screens, especially when most remakes didn’t need or deserve to be done. I would rather see a remake that takes a magnificent plot, and adds effects that could not have been accomplished at the time, like The Langoliers. But because I’m such a fan of the first film, I’m going to see the remake anyway. I might change my opinion, but don’t hold your breath.

The Wicker Man was a horror film unlike any other. It banished the stereotypical creepy environment. No eerie dead trees and mist blanketing a full moon. Instead, you have lush green Scottish fields and fruit, horseback-riding, women dancing naked, drinking, merriment, and song. The very thing to get me in the mood to whip out the djembe and sing to the stars. Here to spoil the fun of these hedonistic Heathens from Summerisle we have a copper from the mainland: Sgt. Howie (Edward Woodward). When this buzz-kill receives a letter from the island about a girl missing for many months, Howie goes forth to investigate. The virgin Christian gasps in horror at the sight of jarred foreskins, public lovin’, and school children dancing around the maypole. Everywhere he goes the humorless Sgt. is subjected to this strange foreign culture, convincing him that the missing girl was murdered under circumstances of Pagan barbarities. I’m of the opinion that a horror film should be balanced out with some good humour, which is well met by the locals. Lord Summerisle, played by Christopher Lee, embodies the classy, fun loving, cheeky High Priest who contrasts Howie’s tight-assed character absolutley. Everyone conducts themselves innocently in the face of his annoyance and confusion, but each person is telling a different story. Something is definitley amiss. In comparison to the rest of The Wicker Man, the conclusion is blunt. I had spent a few hours trying to decide what the director was trying to say. I finally decided that he wasn’t actually trying to make any moral point, but rather meant to make the viewer uncomfortable. It succeded. But I must admit that a part of me was giggling, and that made me a little more uneasy.

A good horror film makes you think and forces you to address the feeling of uneasiness it leaves in the back of your mind. This classic does just that. There is no real sense of closure. With most horror films you can easily identify who the villains and heroes are. The Wicker Man dosn’t give you such an illusion, and so is just a bit closer to reality. There seems to be a bit of light and darkness with all the characters, and the fact that you don’t neccesarily see it right away makes the mystery that much more exciting. I am determined not to spoil the ending for those who haven’t seen it. So, as tempted as I am, I’m just going to leave you with this: As far as the ending is concerned, before you draw a conclusion about anything, consider that the producers thanked the real Lord Summerisle and the Heathen populace for helping to make the movie. Aside from that, look up the historical facts before you take it too seriously. It is a great horror movie that is also very fun and nostalgic.

[Originally appeared on No Official Capacity]

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.

For those not as familiar with the entirety of Dick’s catalogue, much of his work is plagued by cheap prose and a pulp-sci-fi ethos that, while still brilliant, fits far more with his reputation as a cheap sci-fi hack than a literary giant.
A Scanner Darkly, however, is one of those books that really shows that Phil was more than just a hack– he was indeed a genius, an excellent author who struggled to understand the human condition. The book is only very negligibly science fiction; the sci-fi elements take a back seat to the interactions between the characters as they lived their lives under the shadow of “Substance D,” the drug of choice “Seven Years from Now.” How could anyone possibly translate this subtle work into film?

So, with this in mind, and after having read Tim’s not-so-positive review of the film, it was with some trepidation that I purchased my ticket for yesterday’s matinee at Seattle’s Egyptian Theater.

And you know what? I loved it.

It’s a very talkie film, and, as a friend commented afterwards, more like an essay in film than a standard three-act movie. But, if one keeps this in mind, it really works. The thing to remember if you choose to see it is that it’s not a work of science fiction, it’s a very serious drama about addiction from the perspective of both users and those who persecute them, rightly or wrongly.

The cast was especially impressive. Surprisingly, I found Reeves’ performance rather nuanced (I wonder how much of this was due to the animator, of course). Downey Jr.’s portrayal of the perenially tweaked drug nerd Barris steals the show, and his plus-and-minus rapport with Woody Harrelson made their shared scenes a joy to watch (especially considering that neither actor is a stranger to illicit substances).

I also enjoyed the rotoscope technique Linklater used. Contrary to Tim’s analysis, I found that it served to establish the tenuous nature of reality, to ground the viewer in Phil’s Ultimate Question: What is Real? Small glimpses of segments and areas that were left unanimated provide the viewer with questions which must remain unanswered. The animation also allowed for drug-induced hallucinations in a far less contrived manner than any computer effects could have; really, I can’t honestly think of a better method for the translation of PKD’s work into film, and wonder if the same process should be considered for future films based on his work.

Don’t get me wrong; it was far from perfect. There were a couple of minor plot points, and one major one, that deviated from the book, but I didn’t find them too obtrusive. There were also a few scenes where voiceovers were used to a questionable end (and one scene in which the voiceover fit perfectly).

However, it’s one of those movies that, even though you might love it, you can understand why someone else might not. In my opinion, it is by far the absolute finest adaptation of a Dick novel to date. There are no shootouts with killer robots; nobody runs away from a giant explosion. It’s the story, as Dick presented, of a group of people caught up in various bad places. When the next movie based on one of PKD’s stories comes out (an action-filled schlock-fest based on “The Golden Man,” called “Next”), I have a feeling we adherents of the Cult of Kindred will be looking back on “Scanner” with fondness.

Look for a cameo from the illimitable Alex Jones, a friend of Linklater who also appeared in Waking Life. Also, if you keep your eyes peeled in one of the early scenes, you might notice the visage of Phil himself, making his motion picture debut a mere 24 years after his death.

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 movie, as you may have guessed, is a re-telling of the story of Jesus and his ministry, and it is not to be confused with Mel Gibson’s splatter gore-fest, The Passion of the Christ. The story is centered around the conflict between the spiritual and the human aspects of Jesus’ existence. On the one hand, he is (or at least strives to be) an ordinary man. On the other, he is tormented day and night by the Voice of God urging him to rise up and become the Messiah of the Jewish people. Possibly my favorite scene dealing with this rending personal conflict is when Jesus goes to the desert to pray with the monks. He is having a conversation with a monk who says that he wishes he could hear God’s voice, because he never knows for certain if God is really there. Jesus responds saying that knowing God’s will is constant awful torture.

That is, until he finally gives in to it. But giving in to God’s will is no easy task. Just because Jesus eventually decides to go ahead with God’s plan, he isn’t really given any instructions on how to do so. He is only told to open his mouth and that the words - God’s words - will come. From there is an excellent depiction of a man, a leader, coming to terms with himself and understanding how to teach something of value to people and actually have them understand it. Easier said than done as this movie (and the also excellent Monthy Python flick Life of Brian) aptly illustrates.

I also love in this movie that Jesus simply (and often) changes his mind during the course of it, and that it drives his followers - especially Judas - a little crazy trying to keep up. We often look at great figures in myth and history as these monolithic characters who are always at all times 100% logically consistent. But really, who lives like that? Nobody. Speaking of Judas too, the relationship between Jesus and him is awesome. Judas is portrayed as a soldier and an assassin of the radical Jewish sect, the Zealots. Originally sent to kill Jesus, he ends up following him and becoming best friends. Which makes it all the more bittersweet when Jesus ultimately asks Judas to intentionally betray him so that he can fulfill his destiny. This closeness and the reluctance of Judas to betray his master are excellent renditions of this story which are also born out by the recently popularized gnostic Gospel of Judas.

Without giving away the end of the movie, the climax of the story happens on the cross, when Jesus is tempted by the Devil to come back down and live a normal man’s life with the pleasures of a wife and children. Also wait till the very end of the movie at the final moment of Christ’s triumphant crucifixion for some strange camera effects which director Martin Scorsese swears happened naturally on his film reel during that exact moment of filming. He was apparently so taken by these colors and shapes and their correlation to the rest of the film that he decided to leave it in as perhaps evidence of the miraculousness of the story. One other note: don’t miss Peter Gabriel’s absolutely amazing soundtrack to this movie. It is exceptionally well done - as is everything else in this movie, start to finish.

I was, honestly, a little embarrassed to be part of the demographic in either case. The previews and advertisements that preceded the movie seriously turned me off. From the pathetic attempts to use kung fu movies to market McDonald’s trash to college age white men to the previews for the abominable looking Clerks II, by the time the actual feature presentation started, I was already in a bad mood.

I will admit to having gone into the movie with a heavy skeptic. A Scanner Darkly is one of my favorite PKD novels, and also what I would consider one of his most personal and emotional works. It would be hard for me to be satisfied with anything but the best rendition of this book to the screen. I had similar reservations about Waking Life as well. I thought the weird shaky animation style of tracing over people was going to get on my nerves and I thought the philosophical stuff was going to just come off as wanking. In that movie it somehow worked though, and the part where Richard Linklater gives a speech about Philip K. Dick in that movie made me believe that he really and truly understood what Philip K. Dick was all about.

The Scanner Darkly movie, however, completely unraveled that for me. To be totally and brutally honest, it was the kind of movie that I was ready to walk out of after five minutes. It just rubbed me in all the wrong ways and it was honestly a little bit torturous to sit through the whole thing.

I know it’s like Linklater’s “thing” to use all this animation stuff, but I just don’t get what the point of it is. If you took some still frames from the movie and showed them to me, I would be like, “Hey, those are sweet drawings!” Because they are. The illustrators who worked on it did some beautiful art. But the way it all ties together just seems sort of - I don’t know, lame. More than that though, it’s distracting. I kept getting hung up on the visual surface of the movie, which prevented me from entering into it emotionally.

Which is my second main gripe - that the movie lacked emotion. The book is basically a depiction of a phase in Dick’s life in between two of his failed marriages. And the book for me follows the further unraveling of this man, Bob Arctor’s life as he gets heavier and heavier into drugs. Which of course, he got into perhaps as a means of liberation from the woes of his original life. And the book uses an intricate sci-fi plot device of this man’s mind literally splitting in two and fighting against himself and becoming more distant from himsefl as he proceeds further and further down the spiral.

So the story is almost entirely internal. There is no real outward “action” in the book, nothing to hang a classic Hollywood action movie on. But Linklater didn’t go that way. He tried to stay true to the letter of the book, and perhaps failed to capture what I see as the real spirit of the book. Maybe it’s just been his type-casting, but Keanu Reeves for me is an actor who lacks any interior. I can’t, for the life of me, imagine him or his characters having any kind of meaningful interesting internal monologue - which sabotages the movie for me from the start. And I am soooo tired of him delivering the same drawn out husky line in every movie with just the words changed depending on the story:

“You mean… I can dodge bullets?”

“You mean, the hemispheres of my brain… are competing?”

I thought Robert Downey, Jr. was pretty much a dead ringer for how I’d imagine Barris to be; he did a great job - far superior to Keanu’s. Winona Ryder, I thought, was also expertly cast in the role of Donna, the “little black haired girl” who comes up so frequently in PKD’s many novels. However, the chemistry between her and Fred seemed totally weird. One of the things I love about Dick is this ability he has to capture a very specific frustration and complexity between male and female characters. It’s a love that is sort of non-sexual and almost spiritual at times, while also bordering on weird and psychotic at others. For me, that very important under-current of the book was totally lost on screen.

Also left unaccounted for are some of the stranger experiences of the plotline. In the novel, it sort of makes some kind of sick sense that Arctor/Fred sees the girl (Connie, I think) morph into Donna on the scanners. But in the movie, you’re just sort of left scratching your head over it. Same thing goes with his spiral down into split hemisphere-land. In the book, many small moments build up into the strange realization that the viewpoint character has become two characters somehow. In the movie though, that transition is confusing and haphazard and if you didn’t already know the book, I’d imagine it would be hard to understand what was even going on.

One of the things that was done pretty well though was the stoner dialogue they all share. For anybody who’s ever stayed up late smoking pot and drinking beer, those conversations have a ring of authenticity about them.

My final judgement on this movie is - sadly - that it’s not worth seeing. If you’re a die-hard Philip K. Dick fan, I think you’ll be disappointed. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, I think you’ll still find this movie boring and confusing. I would say wait for it to come out on Netflix, and maybe fire up the bong before you watch it and you’ll have a better time with it than I did.

As we are taught by countless television crime dramas like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, police try to solve criminal cases by looking for perpetrators who have the means, motive and opportunity to commit crime. What this means in a broader sense is that police investigators are a type of historian. They look at events in the past (crimes) and try to explain them in a meaningful way. We call the conclusions and meaning that they derive from their historical investigations “justice.” Justice is a genre of narrative or story-telling in which a person (or group) is victimized in a crime, and in which the person responsible is found and punished appropriately. If the plot points conform to this narrative within reasonable parameters, we say “Justice is served.” If not, then we worry about things like a “miscarriage of Justice.”

On most of these shows, the police go to great lengths and sometimes great personal risk to find out who and why a particular crime was committed. The intrepid investigators almost always prevail by solving the mystery and catching the bad guy. In the investigative process, we will see those concerned trying out many narratives to make sense of the situation and of the forensic evidence which they have collected. In one, the perpetrator will be the husband. In another twist, the bad guy will be a stalker ex-boyfriend. In a third interpretation of the same events, it might be revealed that the killing was completely random or accidental. But the common denominator in most of these shows is that one explanation is ultimately settled on. Whether or not it is indisputably proven or thrown out in court later, the police always end up knowing who the bad guy was and why he did it.

History in a broader sense is hardly ever as black and white as it is on television crime dramas like CSI. Crimes in real life aren’t always solved - or sometimes even properly investigated. And when no crime is committed, historians are often left with scant evidence to conduct their own investigations. They may have to rely on second, third and fourth hand accounts of events which happened hundreds or thousands of years before DNA identification, finger-print databases or blood-splatter analysis techniques were even invented.

As a result, historians too will go through countless narrative iterations to come up with a story about the past that “makes sense” to people today. When it comes to history, we may not be looking for justice so much as we are looking to understand how we stand in relation to that which has come before us. The Da Vinci Code offers an excellent example of how this works on a cultural level.

While the novel itself is a work of fiction, it has provided people with a new story (well, new for most people), a new narrative explanation concerning the life of Christ and the history of the Church and the world as a whole afterwards. Since we don’t have conclusive evidence of what happened - such as video footage, for example - we find ourselves in the position of having to reinterpret old information based on the new narrative theory. As you may have seen, a huge cottage industry has sprung up around the Da Vinci Code - either trying to refute it, to expand on it, or to offer alternative explanations. What many church groups are attempting to do, of course, is to settle on one explanation. Like the CSI investigators, they believe that “justice has already been served” and that the historical evidence has been both explained and uplifted by the commonly accepted traditional story of Christ’s life and teachings.

And yet for the rest of us, we relish the opportunity to do some investigative work for ourselves. We enjoy sifting through the forensics of history, combing over ancient documents and works of art, looking for clues that others may have missed. And really, you can’t blame us. The heroes of our pop culture in both television and movies are so often police on a quest to uncover the ultimate truth. They are teaching us about nothing unless they are teaching us about how history works, about the push and pull between theory, evidence and other forces. And they teach us about the powerful human need to “close the case” - to finally settle on one explanation and move on with our lives.

It makes for effective drama, that much is certain. But is it always an accurate reflection of life? Are the mysteries of day to day existence ever really conclusively solved? Or does their importance simply fade as we move farther away from them in time? Who says we have to ever settle for one explanation? What if no explanation ever really satisfies all the conflicting evidence of something? What if the original experience - as in the case of Christ - goes outside the realm of accepted human reality? It may be that for ordinary events, like “Who rear-ended my car?” there may be one single satisfactory explanation. But it may also be that the “why” of it all, we can never really settle. Did they mean to hit my car? Did their breaks fail? Were they stopping short to avoid hitting a squirrel in the road?

The thing I like about the ubiquitous cop shows today is that they give us the tools and imagery to ask these questions and they encourage us to look for the truth. I believe that the most powerful lesson we can take from them though is to internalize this process of searching and explaining. Do your own research. Get out in the field and ask questions. Don’t always settle for the simple solution. Be prepared to change and grow and let go of your preconceived notions as you search and explore. And if you do finally settle on one final explanation, be sure you’re doing it because you know it’s the truth, not because your one hour television slot is drawing to a close and the audience demands a satisfying conclusion.

Originating in Iceland and played on the Noggin network, it features a heroic male adult character named Sportacus, who is played by the show’s creator Magnus Scheving. Sportacus is sort of a health fanatic who flies around in an airship promoting healthy activities, eating and lifestyles among the children of LazyTown. The children of LazyTown are a bizarre mix of real kids and semi-realistic puppets.

The yin to Sportacus’ yang is an over-the-top bad guy named Robbie Rotten. Robbie Rotten is always trying to turn the kids of LazyTown away from healthy lifestyles by getting them to eat junk food, and lots of weird schemes and disguises like that. Robbie Rotten is a bizarre looking dude, featuring some prosthetic make-up work that makes him a sort of hybrid between the real kids on the show and the puppets. He is kind of reminiscent of those plasticized-looking people from that Energizer commercial or the Primus music video for Winona’s Big Brown Beaver.

Since this is a kids’ show though, you can rest assured that Robbie Rotten’s evil schemes are always foiled. He doesn’t just fail, but he is typically humiliated in the process. He’s made to look ridiculous, infantile (especially compared to the dashing Sportacus) and the episodes will often end with all the children of LazyTown laughing off the whole thing.

We could also compare this to the recurring “evil” character, Swiper the Fox, in Nickelodeon’s wildly popular children’s television franchise, Dora the Explorer. Swiper runs around with a little bandit mask trying to steal stuff from Dora and her friends. But Swiper’s negative energy is easily dispelled by repeating the mantra, “Swiper, no swiping!” three times in a row. After which, he will slink away, saying, “Awww, man!”

In general, I think this is a positive message for kids - one which even adults could benefit from. As we get older, we tend to think that the power of evil in this world is absolute and unbeatable. The Bible says that the Devil is the “prince” of this world we are stuck in, and we’re often left waiting for an external savior or rescuer to come and release us from our suffering. But what would happen if we were able to retain our ability to laugh away the power of the Devil? What if we could remember that evil is ridiculous and absurd and in the end is really only there to make things interesting for us, and to give us something to struggle against?

Maybe it sounds ridiculous that you can learn how to overcome the forces of darkness by watching children’s television shows. But they offer powerful lessons for those with ears to hear: Laughter breaks tense moments and brings more oxygen into our brain and body, better enabling us to cope with difficult situations. Our bodies loosen up, our posture changes. Telling Swiper that this is a no-swiping zone is a powerful statement of intent and personal values. It gives those who would manipulate us a clear statement about who we are and what’s acceptable to us.

It may be that the power of evil is directly related to how much power we ourselves invest in it. As we grow older, we seem to surrender more and more of our psychic energy to evil. For good reason of course. We can’t just laugh away government atrocities, nor can we yell to a potential mugger or rapist, “Swiper, no swiping!” and expect them to stop. But what we can do is pioneer similar techniques for ourselves by which we can diminish the fear that allows others to take advantage of us - whether they be mischievous fox, cartoonish villains or the very real faces of evil that we struggle against every day.

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.

I found the film to be incredibly misogynistic, surprising because I didn’t think one could express so much vitriol towards the female body in a film in which no character has more than 40-odd lines.

Jean Grey’s character, The Phoenix, is brought back in a deluge of water imagery, imagery which pounds you until the climax of the film. But she’s no longer Jean, we find out, not the Jean we saw at the end of the second film, who gave her life for her compatriots and her husband.

The audience is informed that as a student under Professor X, she developed some kind of split personality, the more destructive and carnal of which Professor X had to confine to some region of her subconcious keep her safe (from herself, ostensibly). Upon her rebirth, the Phoenix is released, with pleasure-seeking hedonism and destructive, chaotic tendancies in tow. As is evidenced by her first action after she is reborn, the sexual pleasure and the destruction go hand-in-hand.

In painting her character this way, the filmmakers depict a female body which is to be feared for its appetites and destructive powers. And worst of all, she is not in control of her body - instead, her appetites control her.

Attempts by Professor X and Magneto to either control or use the Phoenix are met with failure. Professor X’s “noble” desire to help Jean is “necessary” because she cannot control herself, and is ultimately futile because the Professor’s mental powers, and attempts to reason, do not match Jean’s telekinetic powers, and her powers in the physical world. Magneto’s attempt to recruit Jean, or to use her as a figure of revolution (something very unclear that the film never articulates) is thwarted because she simply will not serve a cause other than herself.

It takes Wolverine, a man whose carnality and impetuous attitude matches hers, to bring about an end to her rampage, which of course involves an act of physical penetration. But even before the climax, he notes to Professor X that one cannot “cage the beast.” He knows this from experience, and he sees in the Phoenix a beast to be feared. That beast, of course, is the feminine sexuality, and all the accompanying mystique, fear and destruction.

Part of the reason the misogyny is so blatant is because the filmmakers refused to characterize Jean in any substantial manner. She rarely speaks, which is curious. Even stranger is the fact that she is rarely spoken about, besides in hushed tones regarding location and a vague sense of danger. The name “Phoenix” is merely mentioned once or twice, and its connotations are completely glossed over. Rather than say something about the Phoenix representing the destruction of mankind and the rebirth of humans as mutants, Magneto makes his grandiose speeches with Jean at his side, standing there like a statue, or a queen on a chessboard. The chess imagery is obvious, as it was central to the first film of the series as well.

But this is a queen that stands for nothing - not Magneto’s cause, nor the death-rebirth imagery of her name. She is but power embodied in the female form, sexual, silent, and uncontrollable. She never even expresses a purpose for herself, and instead embodies some kind of vagina dentata, a threat of castration which endangers all of mankind.

If I were making this film, and had to work with the same plot (the Phoenix as Jean’s uncontrollable alter ego, Wolverine as the one who has to save everything), I would have at the least presented some kind of allegory between the two characters of Jean and Logan. Jean and Logan would make excellent stand-ins for the Hindu God and Goddess Shiva (Logan) and Kali (Jean). Kali, like the Phoenix, represents death as well as birth. Shiva is the destroyer of evil, as well as the ideal lover and the husband of Kali. They still represent distinctly male and female entities, but there is at least a significant amount of meaning to be explored there (death and rebirth, energy and substance, and most importantly, one’s codependancy on the other), as opposed to this film, which merely presents Jean’s uncontrollable form as a sexual, mindless destroyer.

Now, one might point out that the world of comics, especially Marvel and DC, have never been the greatest medium for progressive women’s roles. But for a series that has been recently (and often) hailed for its metaphors that pertain to homosexuality and treatment of minorities, we might want to re-examine the other sexual stereotypes and metaphors presented in the film before we start applauding.