Movie Magic and You: Your Guide to the Apocalypse
Tread softly in the hall of the immortals. The slumbering heroes,
long-suffering grim ones, stir within you in the temple of the moving
picture. The nocturnal and extraordinary, forbidden day to day, reach
out from within you to clothe themselves in the archetypes playing
across the lit screen. The world reduced to microcosm, wherein it is
explained, and exalted; you are exalted with it, knowing the world in
miniature, and a part of, all its heroes sleeping within you.
It has been said many times afore here and by persons more esteemed,
to the point of truism, that culture, drama and tragedy are of their
substance right-wing. And yet, this Vesuvius lays untapped, which
could send forth countless chariots of fire and unmistakable signs and
portents of the dawning of a new heroic era.
Film is meme magic, extended in time and space, rounded off to be a
self-contained system of meaning, an entire memeplex in a single
cultural artifact. It is both ordered and chaotic, or rather the
attempt to order chaos. It is not its own power, but a conduit through
which the chaotic drives and powers of the viewer are awakened and
redirected. We know to what ends they have been heretofore channeled.
Shock and inutterable awe to the service of atomized individualism.
Apple pie and all that’s comfy to reverence an abominable alien power.
But the sovereign source of film’s power is our opportunity. What has
been kissed off from the life-giving mouth of its creator to become
independent Creation can be looked at askance, the false props
becoming thin lines of no consequence, the heroic and outside of time
laid bare in new surroundings. Until we have our Riefenstahl, we
shouldn’t shy from understanding what techniques the director is
using, what he is saying, and what we can draw from the example.
Films are the most ritualistic, and therefore religious, cultural
works in our time. As interplays of resonant symbols, they can come to
have a significance wholly other than their creator intended, vessels
for the latent psychic energy of their viewers.
We will, in the weeks to come, culture jam the culture jammers. We
will become aware of the techniques the directors are consciously
using. We will note synchronicity and serendipity they didn’t intend.
We’ll use film to understand what meme magic is and what it tells us
about reality.
We hope you’ll join us.
