How did media incubated from a trickle of primitive symbols and signals to a close-knit network of drums and voices, through the enlightened fountainhead of the printed word to the digital pipeline of our present information age? What largely propelled this transformation is the struggle to gain control of “the official story”. The nightly news is a primary vendor of “the official story”. It’s a viewpoint, someone’s account of past events and a claim of authority to load the time capsule of history.
The official story proposes to make everyone’s point of view the same. However, just as no two camera’s can occupy the same spot at the same time, neither can two individuals see things exactly the same way. This accounts for all cultural ambiguities. The official story adopts a viewpoint, takes a stand, polarizes ambiguities embedded in our culture, converting them to prejudices. When we adopt these prejudices, it sets up an artificial need for affiliate groups.
Polarized individuals are powerless. The powerless are eager to merge with affiliate group. When we adopt the viewpoint of the leadership, we defend their opinions as our own. Relying on strength in numbers, we look to our party for the power to assert our prejudices over those of the opposing party. When the leadership betrays our trust and acts for its own selfish gain, it perversely appears as if we backed them.
Just as no photographic image can encompass the total picture, no official, or their story can claim to have done all the necessary listening and thinking for us. We must fill in the missing gaps with our own story and the stories of those around us, particularly those with whom we differ most. Good listening requires at least a momentary suspension of prejudice.
Good movies bridge the artificial gulfs that divide us by allowing cultural ambiguities to exist, unencumbered by prejudice. The best movies open our minds, coaxing from us a suspension of disbelief. The best stories condition us to genuinely listen and reward us with bona-fide insights that safeguard us from any need for an official story.
A new psychedelic movie I watched last week thrust me back to bardos I had not wandered since the 70’s. “Enter the Void” concerns the “Tibetan Book of the Dead”. The movie is shocking and heavy-handed. The acting isn’t really very good, but the film is relentless once it hooks you. You’re glad they’re not better actors or it might leave a deeper scar. At more than one point I had to take my eyes off the screen. It was too long. So is hell. I looked around at the audience. No one was breathing. The movie theater felt like a Petri dish. Images and sound suspended us in a synthesis of color/shadow, movement, noise/music, editing, “high” art and blood red drama.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKRxDP–e-Y
For an entirely different example of psychedelic cinema, have a look at another recent popular film, “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.” This hilarious and prolonged derangement of the senses comes courtesy of the video game that is teenager Scott Pilgrim’s life. Hallucinogenic stories like these are able to sell their hyper-realities thanks to a firmly established psychedelic appetite in the modern audience. Like acid tests, the lens tracks themes of Pilgrim’s progress from random to ego shaking. Scott racks up more and more multidimensional payoffs as he learns new rules and adapts to shifting circumstances.
It is good to see the psychedelic experience imaginatively presented in popular movies because of how much that can help us think outside the box.
Drugs get all the credit for psychedelic culture but motion pictures have always probed those possibilities. As far back as the 1929 silent classic “Man With A Movie Camera,” pioneer filmmakers undertook experiments to alter perceptions. They ingeniously employed superimposition, speeding up or slowing down, bending, blending, splintering, splicing; wielding light and shadow to peck away surface appearance and reveal essence. The current reach toward perfecting 3D and digital FX are the continuation of that tradition.
Before film came along altered states were cataloged by anthropologists, but early hallucinogenic accounts turn up everywhere from the Book of Revelation to the Rig Veda. Who can say which visions were drug influenced and which were not? The “Tibetan Book of the Dead” catalogs elevator stops, or “bardo’s,” of a soul’s journey back to reincarnation after death without mention of drugs. Timothy Leary re-published the same text as a tripping manual.
Drug experimentation became a fad in the 1960’s. Hallucinogens inoculate culture with what medicine societies and shaman of many traditions have known for millennia. Plant medicines provided an alternative perspective, a glimpse outside the box. Sound familiar? The digital revolution carries this potential now.
These days “outside the box” is a commonplace term for innovative thinking and drugs are by no means the only way to achieve it. Movie makers keep on paving the way in popular culture. Whether or not you ever ingested hallucinogens, we all experience them through their influence in music, movies, fashion, advertising, games and so on. For half a century now, psychedelic culture has branched upward into mass consciousness.
The digital revolution, it was said by drug guru Timothy Leary shortly before his death, is the new LSD. It allows for an increase of information to pass between ourselves and the larger living, breathing organism of which we are all part. Psychedelics work to inhibit the brain filter that prevents overload. Take that filter off and senses, emotions, memories expand, awareness roots and blooms. With psychedelics then, and cyberspace now, heaven and hell are states of mind.
Social networking is not a new phenomenon. It has been studied for at least as far back as the late 1800’s. This rapidly expanding online industry is dependent on an imperative that developed in our brains long before our species took human form. The social network has been a dynamic artifact of evolution going back to our single cell origins.
At this current apex of social evolution, each of us is a channel or wave of information passing through the global mind. Our claim on this virtual reality is substantiated by photographs, videos, posts, friends networks, emails, texts, tweets, peeps, treats and how far out our contacts reach to meet. Social networking sites have already eclipsed pornography as the prime generators of traffic on the Web. The popularity of these sites is largely due to their efficiency in helping us conduct the mating ritual and they help us do so by getting our story out.
Every story combines three essential elements, plot, character and point of view. A social networking website is a point of view in search of character and plot. We hear stories all the time. Stories are so important to us that everyone wants to be the main character in one. The point of view in social networking is that a person with an interesting story makes valuable contacts. We want that story to be told to as many people as possible so that we have the best chance of finding good contacts. Stories inspire us to want to be extraordinary, to raise the level of our game, to do something that everyone recognizes as worthwhile.
A social networking site is a place where a person puts their best foot forward and shows us the character that they want to be. It is also a place where we explore the characters and stories of others. We search for people with common values and complimentary needs to enrich our story and theirs, or to reconnect with people who enriched past chapter’s of our life’s story. In cyber-culture, the mating ritual has found a place to express many latent emotions. This is good. This is healthy. We keep a wary eye out for predators, but also trust in the benefits of widening our social circle.
For the corporate interests, consumer profiles are pieced together from demographic data gathered by the way we perform the ritual. How old we are, where we live, who we live with, what we like and what we buy make up the character and plot of that story but who supplies the point of view? If every story combines three essential elements, plot, character and point of view, we must realize that the creators of these social websites are are supplying the point of view to the story that we are supplying with our character and plot .
Facebook, for example, is a blank page upon which a person’s story is written. What and how we write about ourselves, our choice and use of language, our preferences in friends, music, television, movies and popular websites make up the character and plot of that story. The viewpoint of that story is imposed by the author of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. Mark is the one unifying connection that runs through the entire Facebook demographic.
We may not all be Mark’s friend, but we are all actors on his stage and legally, he has a legitimate claim to authorship of the entire digital output of his enterprise including our profiles. However it is important for us members to keep in mind an online community is made up of individuals who are connected in ways more significant than a social networking site can encompass. The real social network exists whether or not Facebook or BoobTube take part in it. The social network was not invented by any one. You are the social network. They can take away all the computers, cameras, recruiters and programmers and the social network will still be alive and well, because no one can take away your story.
I was fifteen years old when I watched my first pornographic film and mostly recall being nervous. I was underage. Even after getting past that hurdle there was the fear someone might see me, so I wore my sunglasses until the house lights dimmed. The on screen scenario went something like this: a cowboy discovers a farm girl in his barn. She gives him pleasure through a hole in the planks between the stalls. Live horses loafed in the background munching oats and passing gas.
I loved it, but as a Catholic boy turned born-again Christian, the experience was spoiled when I peeped in at the projectionist after the show and came eye to eye with one of my fellow church members. The awkward moment left us both so embarrassed we never made eye contact again.
Around that same time, I took in my first foreign film, “Brother Sun Sister Moon.” Based on the life of St. Francis of Assisi, it is about a man who renounces sex and dedicates his life to selfless service. The picture moved me more profoundly than any porn flick ever could.
No matter which side of the spectrum we are drawn to, most of us have a desire to express ourselves freely, sexually or otherwise, and we are drawn to examples of free expression in the movies. It is this same natural curiosity that draws us to pornography.
One can argue that porn promotes sexual slavery. It’s probably true, but marriage has taken at least as many prisoners, and as an adolescent I was touched inappropriately by a priest, so who, exactly, is responsible for more sex crimes? It is tempting to conclude that religion and pornography are two sides of the same coin. One could not exist without the other.
In previous centuries leaders maintained power by binding the populace with feelings of guilt and shame for our carnal urges, but the real goal was to enslave minds. They didn’t really want people to stop fornicating. How could they maintain power without overpopulation? They would not be able to keep raising armies and taxes.
When modern birth control blew away the Victorian fog and opened our senses, a cultural renaissance gave rise to the moon shot, civil rights, feminism, ecological awareness, religious ecumenicism and many other breakthroughs. Many motion pictures of that period foretold of this present quantum leap to global consciousness.
Pornography is bringing sex back out into the open where it was before the New Testament. It is teasing most of us into a collective openness toward sex; one that can be engaged without fear of damnation or disease. So why have porn profits on the web leveled off already? Because porn’s big secret is, there is no big secret. After the novelty wears off, most of it is about exciting to watch as animals in a barn.
The institutionalized repression of the past several hundred years is responsible for the sexual obsessions currently exploited by our modern media. It can’t last forever. Widespread sexual openness will ultimately neutralize our obsessive/repressive deadlock. Once this cultural wave crashes, pornographic movie making will either adapt or something even truer to our nature will take its place.
A picture is worth a thousand words and a motion picture is worth a thousand fetishes. The first definition given for fetish in my dictionary states, “A material object believed to be the dwelling of a spirit, or to represent a spirit. It may be induced or compelled to help and safeguard the possessor and to protect from harm or disease.”
The first part is clear; actors in a movie represent characters in a script in the same way that spirits inhabit an object. Actors confirm this with statements like, “I lived and breathed that role.”
The second half of the definition sounds superstitious. How can movies be induced to safeguard and protect us? Assuming primitive tendencies are played out everywhere, the ways of old are practiced at the multiplex too. Movies seem to safeguard and protect us primarily by confirming each person’s individual belief in what is right and wrong.
Under fetish, in my dictionary, definition number two reads, “Any object of devotion or blind affection.” If paying admission can be construed as devotion then audiences turn film into fetish simply by going to the movies. The suspension of disbelief that a good story extracts from us amounts to a kind of blindness.
Moving from the conceptual to the concrete, nearly every thing in a movie can be branded a fetish. Look anywhere and be prepared to find one. Set design, props, costumes, all are undeniable beachheads of fetishism. The stories themselves become fetishes the way they are presented. All the key elements of a movie are showered with torrents of devotion, and something like blind affection, as they are created, fit together, lit together, photograph and trafficked through the new media.
The camera itself is a fetish, as is the projector. Framed production stills from movies, become fetishes of fetishes. The big screen is an ultra-potent fetish. The small screen may eventually catch up. Before screens came along, mirrors were the most popular fetish.
There is a third entry for fetish in my dictionary, “Sensual gratification derived from touching a part of the body of a person, or a piece of clothing belonging to it.” Considering the glaring fact that sex is the most consistent theme in movies, is it too big of a stretch to connect movies to this type of fetishism? Observing the actions of dating and lovemaking in movies becomes a sort of participation in the rites themselves, in which audience members are touched by characters and receive sensual gratification from them.
Even watching something as tame as a romantic comedy in a movie theater becomes a kind of, soft-core group sex but with no added emotional baggage to deal with and zero disease. There must be something worthwhile about sitting together in the dark and watching other people touch and kiss. We make regular sacrifices for the experience. We pay for the privilege and we are doing it in dark rooms, with total strangers, at all hours of the night and day, all over the world.
