The Kubrickon

[tapitsbo]

Is it being prevented from becoming embodied (sounds like a repression theory)

or is its embodiment getting redirected?

or both?

Also is RI analogous to the Kubrickon?

[guruilla]

Is it being prevented from becoming embodied (sounds like a repression theory)

or is its embodiment getting redirected?

or both?

Is one the means the other the end? And vice versa, both are the means to the other. MKULTRA fragmented the psyche in order to create alters that could be directed towards specific tasks, but also (possibly) to harness the psychic energy that is released via the splitting of the psyche. This is dependent on preventing the psyche from locking onto the body and landing in it, which is the ultimate goal, as well as the means to achieve the lesser goals which ensure the ultimate goal for future generations. Cohen was MKULTRA-ed into a fragmented entertainment operative whose work entailed spreading of dissociative disinfo via music and lyrics to "trigger" other victims of abuse and perpetuate their disembodiment...? (This is a free-roving question that is open-ended and requires no answer, only contemplation.)

Also is RI analogous to the Kubrickon?

How so? You will have RI-ers scratching their heads, and only be adding to our benevolent moderator's already mounting concerns, if you don't qualify that question!

[tapitsbo]

Yes, there is a feedback loop, both lead to each other (disembodiment and alter-embodiment/altar-embodiment)

You make Cohen sound like a mini-Crowley. Something sure is up with Cohen but maybe not quite that? I'll contemplate further.

Jeff Wells might have not been so much evoker/summoner as summoned. Drawn with lures/bait into a vortex that he had the cajones to arrange a representation of, just so. Thereby kickstarting a strange attractor/hypersigil to feed a nebulous darkness with the libidinous attention of eyes unable to unsee or to look away.

[guruilla]

Jeff Wells might have not been so much evoker/summoner as summoned. Drawn with lures/bait into a vortex that he had the cajones to arrange a representation of, just so. Thereby kickstarting a strange attractor/hypersigil to feed a nebulous darkness with the libidinous attention of eyes unable to unsee or to look away.

Which then spewed forth its very own police force to contain any ideological renegades. . .?

[tapitsbo]

You see a police force, I see someone with intense convictions and and an identity that requires extensive maintenance work

The actual police force here, Wombat, is a "fan of the universe" and seems to be taking a judiciously permaculture approach to weeding this organic accumulator...

[guruilla]

You see a police force, I see someone with intense convictions and and an identity that requires extensive maintenance work

The actual police force here, Wombat, is a "fan of the universe" and seems to be taking a judiciously permaculture approach to weeding this organic accumulator...

This is the first time I have got the impression that you are behind the times/out of the loop. It's been a long time, IMO, since policing required a badge (or moderator status). Not sure how this is pertinent to the Kubrickon, but it probably is. Something to do with mob rule?

[tapitsbo]

I see several mobs...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Entry

Proto-Kubrickonicks at play?

[Elliott Jonestown]

I would suggest that, as ever, this centers around an ideological problem. To me, the endless sifting through Kubrick-artifice for meaningful clues indicates a form of ideological enslavement to Kubrick and the work. AOC argues that writing about Kubraphilia is no less obsessive, libido-squandering or (I presume) ideological than writing about Kubrick-trivia. But there is at least one key difference: in the former case, there is the exploration of human behavior; in the latter, what is being engaged with is the dead matter of popular culture (and with apparently very little focus on the psyche of the investigator). There’s even an objection to the term obsessive, when to disallow obsession as a designator for this style of behavior would effectively mean invalidating the very word “obsessive” ~ presumably as politically incorrect.

Again, I'm unsure what exactly is the difference between the person who deploys Kubrick trivia as part of a SM analysis--which includes culture, life at large, the individual psyche--and the person who is a Kubraphiliac. This distinction seems, at a minimum, artificial. Maybe if you were to categorize shawnfella and each of the interviewees in Room 237 as examples of one or the other of your categories, we could understand better your position.

From my own perspective, one might just as well argue that there’s no difference between writing endless homages to Leonard Cohen’s music, and analyzing it for proof of the depth of his wisdom and genius as an artist, and the sort of explorations that I or Ann Diamond have done. But surely there is the world of a difference, if the one serves to perpetuate the spell of culture, the other to break it?

Again, your distinctions about analyzing an artist's work are murky. Most "Kubrick-obsessives" (and I'm using this as a catch all term for the various Kubrick-triviaists, Kubraphiliacs, Kubrick fans, etc.) would welcome Ann-Diamondesque analysis as part of a more general analysis of Kubrick's films. See this thread for example, where questions about Kubrick's intelligence connections and possible MK Ultra involvement have not been challenge as somehow degrading the Kubrick-guru, not by anyone in this thread I can tell.

the meanings which those questers so fervently believe in.

Can you site specific meanings offered by the specific questers that you're describing? Again, the specifics would greatly assist understanding your position.

On the other hand, as with Strieber, I am validating that Kubrick’s work is of profound interest, even or especially for those who are turned off by it. Oh, for just one ally who can see that Kubrick made some pretty poor (and, in at least one case, REALLY BAD) movies, and still want to explore this mystery with me!

Well, for what it's worth, at least two or three folks are willing to explore with you in this thread, all of whom like Kubrick films. Everyone that's posted here is interested in your theory and presumably is trying to better understand your position.

Can you move from this 666 business to either present compelling evidence that Kubrick, or someone, deliberately engineered it that way, or to show why and how they might have, without going off into highly subjective interpretations of symbolism and occult arcana? And if not, can you explain how this is helpful to you? As I said to AOC, where does it end and what’s the actual goal?

To me "oddity" itself can be its own end. I surely don't want a life without it.

No one that I'm aware can present evidence as to exactly who, what, or why the 666 oddity exists. (If so, I'd love to see it.) But none-the-less the 666 oddity does exist. We could conjecture galore as to explanations--and probably have quite a bit of invigorating fun doing so. I personally think the answer lies in explorations of "interdimensional" entities of some kind, though I know that's a vague concept. Certainly Jungian topics about the collective unconscious and symbols would be relevant, as well as things like AI, "Aliens," etc. I guess the point isn't as much the end result of the search, but the search itself. Process can often be as or more important that result. An open-minded way of approaching the world--one that doesn't exclude "oddities," "syncs," or other non-socially accepted ways of thinking--has it's own benefits. That same way of being in the world actually undergirds and supports the kind of work Ann-Diamond has done. It's a place of being willing to see connections and explore them further.

By the way, you don't strike me as one who is a hard materialist. Meaning, you seem open to ideas that non-physical realities exist, can be sought after, and could possibly bleed through into our current one. I don't mean to put words in your mouth, it's just that your position seems to underestimate the power of symbol and the subjective as valuable in reaching conclusions. Much of the Ann-Diamond work is highly subjective: this connection implies that conclusion. Cohen was at this hospital therefore he was part of the Cameron's experiment. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for subjectivity. But ultimately each individual is left with his own discernment and his own subjective conclusions, really about most phenomena in the world.

Can you explain to me how exactly it blows the whistle on anything? Were elite sex rings scrambling to cover their tracks after the release of EWS, desperately shredding evidence and burying bodies? This to me is the sort of claim that Kubraphiles make that only points to their emperor’s nakedness by their own imitation of it.

The film depicts an occult sex ritual, which includes a murder. Most viewers of the film likely had never seen that king of thing depicted, nor had they ever been aware of those thing existing. (This would be my Joe and Jane Six Pack). Let's take the common definition of whistleblower as "a person who informs on a person or organization engaged in an illicit activity." With a small peak outside the world of the film, and one very quickly finds evidence of these kinds of sex parties, murders, etc. So the film, by depicting such scenes, causes viewers to be more likely clued into these nefarious happenings. The film isn't fantasy. It's realism. And historical "fact" has proven Kubrick correct. Since the release of the film, scandals like Jimmy Saville and Jeffrey Epstein, etc. have emerged. Plus there's those Rothschild party pics from the 70s that show a party much like the one depicted in the film. The internet in the mid to late aughts has caused this information to be disseminated much more widely than the 1999s media climate would allow.

This is a critical area to get into, but for now I will just say that my own thesis is very different, and that the sort of consciousness which Kubrick films are designed to bring about is not what you call “AI thinking”; on the contrary, it is a highly charged and particularly “human” sort of thinking (the obsessive sort). Not in order to engender it in the species, but in order to harvest it.

Let's get into it. Specifically who or what is doing the harvesting in your model? My thesis is not about Kubrick per se, but more about narrative as a propaganda technique. Films that are easy to watch and play on the emotions in conventional ways bring about the desired emotional reactions in the viewer. See Shindler's List, The Martian, etc. These films embed certain strong emotions with certain politically convenient symbols/ideas. A film that is "strange" or "difficult" does not as efficiently do this. Viewers might even leave the theater, which I witnessed most recently during a screening of Malik's Tree of Life. What's the difference in your model between watching a film multiple times to uncover it's meaning and artful opacity, and the so called obsessive, human thinking that is being harvested? It seems like every serious film student out there would be a victim in your model as these students watch and rewatch films of all kinds by many directors.

Is this true though? A Clockwork Orange was a big hit, apparently with violent thugs as well as gentile academics. 2001 was a big hit with LSD-dropping hippies. I don’t know this Joe 6 pack guy you talk about, but I do know quite a few really intelligent guys who seem to have been fooled by Kubrick. Including the idea that someone who worked in close collusion with the military-industrial-entertainment complex was really anti-military. It might be good to cross-reference this thread with the prescriptive programming one, which suggests how seemingly “conscientious” content can be useful to strengthen a weaponized meme. A Clockwork Orange is a very obvious, to me, example, of a film that promotes a certain form of behavior while pretending to denounce it.

Have you read any of Pasolini's ideas about film? He's got this essay called Observations on the Long Take. http://htmlgiant.com/random/pasolini-ob ... long-take/ In it he says:

"Man expresses himself above all through his action–not meant in a purely pragmatic way–because it is in this way that he modifies reality and leaves his spiritual imprint on it. But this action lacks unity, or meaning, as long as it remains incomplete. While Lenin was alive, the language of his actions was still in part indecipherable, because it remained in potentia, and thus modifiable by eventual future actions. In short, as long as he has a future, that is, something unknown, a man does not express himself. An honest man may at seventy commit a crime: such blameworthy action modifies all his past actions, and he thus presents himself as other than what he always was. So long as I’m not dead, no one will be able to guarantee he truly knows me, that is, be able to give meaning to my actions, which, as linguistic moments, are therefore indecipherable.

"It is thus absolutely necessary to die, because while living we lack meaning, and the language of our lives (with which we express ourselves and to which we attribute the greatest importance) is untranslatable: a chaos of possibilities, a search for relations among discontinuous meanings. Death performs a lightning-quick montage on our lives; that is, it chooses our truly significant moments (no longer changeable by other possible contrary or incoherent moments) and places them in sequence, converting our present, which is infinite, unstable, and uncertain, and thus linguistically indescribable, into a clear, stable, certain, and thus linguistically describable past (precisely in the sphere of a general semiology). It is thanks to death that our lives become expressive."

For me Kurbick's MK Ultra years would be essential because they help us understand his life arch. How could one have blown any whistles without first being in the inside? Jay Weidner's take on Kubrick's biography is pertinent here. He claims something happened in Kubrick's life (a person was killed that Stanley might have helped cause) and Kubrick felt remorse. Kubrick wanted atonement and so his films became inscrutable so that he could encode them with information. By the time EWS came around, code-heaviness was abandoned for more overt depictions. His film AI was going to be about sex with boys until Spielberg whitewashed it. That's the theory at least.

Your very astute write up of the Burgess connections to MK Ultra, and possibly Kubrick, may explain some things about Kubrick of the 60s and early 70s, but they are not the final determination on his life. For that we have to, as Pasolini says, take his full life resume into account. And the final years of whistleblowing films ( about the moon landing, sex abuse rings) may very well have redeemed his earlier years when he appears to have been an inside man.

And let me be clear, I do not have a fixed position. I am prepared to examine any research and analysis of Kubrick and his life. Weidner's biography of Kubrick to me seems like the theory that best fits what we know about him. But it's still a theory. I don't take it as fact.

I did a series at the blog of 100 posts, "What is Embodiment?", starting here.

Thanks for the links! Very cool. I like the first post and the idea of pithy explorations rather than a heavily intellectualized examination. For me embodiment as been about silence and body awareness practices.

Oh yeah. For the record, the ones I dislike are 2001, Clockwork Orange, FMJ, and, most especially, EWS. Besides FMJ (which I think I only saw twice, once recently), I’d say I have seen these films an average of maybe six times. I used to like 2001 & Orange. I used to dislike The Shining but more recently I liked it. Who knows what may still change?

You're even more of a Kubrick-obsessive than I am, if the number of viewings is a determinant.

BTW, my plan is to read all of your responses, then make one more round of exchanges, and then maybe a final conclusion post. This task has required more of my libido than is ideal, given other writing projects, day-job, other projects, etc. I very much appreciate the exchange while it lasts!

[Elvis]

If anyone hasn't already read it, here's a somewhat revealing peek at Kubrick and some of his process, by his EWS co-writer Frederic Raphael...

Onward and Upward with the Arts June 14, 1999 Issue
A Kubrick Odyssey
By Frederic Raphael


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/ ... ck-odyssey

(may or not be a way around the paywall, I can probably get it if needed)

[guruilla]

By the way, you don't strike me as one who is a hard materialist. Meaning, you seem open to ideas that non-physical realities exist, can be sought after, and could possibly bleed through into our current one. I don't mean to put words in your mouth, it's just that your position seems to underestimate the power of symbol and the subjective as valuable in reaching conclusions.

See above. I am not a hard materialist. The psyche is as real to me as the body. But I am a reductionist, in a certain sense. Both the body and the psyche are infinite mysteries that can’t be reduced to a system of symbols, so why waste time trying?

(Course, language is a system of symbols, so….)

The film isn't fantasy. It's realism. And historical "fact" has proven Kubrick correct. Since the release of the film, scandals like Jimmy Saville and Jeffrey Epstein, etc. have emerged. Plus there's those Rothschild party pics from the 70s that show a party much like the one depicted in the film. The internet in the mid to late aughts has caused this information to be disseminated much more widely than the 1999s media climate would allow.

EWS is realism? I didn’t find a single scene in it remotely realistic, and the film’s defenders generally argue that this is because it is meant to represent a dream reality. The sex party was, to my eyes in 1999, extremely tepid and so far from shocking that I honestly can’t imagine how anyone even slightly versed in the horrors of systematic ritual abuse could see it as having any sort of revelatory power, to Joe 6 packs or anyone else. I am inclined to put it in the same class of disinformation that has been widely disseminated in the 90s and auties, via Alex Jones and other, even hokier dispensers of conspiratainment. Again this is a somewhat subjective reading, but at the very least, it may be good to question the assumption that all kinds of material that represents systematic abuse or high level corruption in an entertaining way is necessarily part of a genuine attempt at whistle-blowing. What about Enemy of the State (directed by CIA-asset Tony Scott)? Or American Ultra? If real crimes are being trivialized (and even turning them into mass entertainment is a form of trivialization), reduced to bad acting, implausible dialogue, and clunky storylines (i.e., EWS), couldn’t it also be argued that this undermines the work of sincere researchers by tainting the subject matter in people’s minds? Or would you consider The X-Files whistleblowing too?
(Not trying to be argumentative, genuinely curious.)

Let's get into it. Specifically who or what is doing the harvesting in your model? My thesis is not about Kubrick per se, but more about narrative as a propaganda technique.

In my quasi-fictional model, the internet is doing the harvesting, at a purely mechanistic level. There’s another level I am not sure I am ready (or able) to talk about yet. Nonphysical realities, and all that.

What's the difference in your model between watching a film multiple times to uncover it's meaning and artful opacity, and the so called obsessive, human thinking that is being harvested? It seems like every serious film student out there would be a victim in your model as these students watch and rewatch films of all kinds by many directors.

Again, a spectrum. Like I said, culture is a cult. Movie-watching is a hypnotic chamber in which we are, or at least can be, implanted with unconscious ideology.

If anyone hasn't already read it, here's a somewhat revealing peek at Kubrick and some of his process, by his EWS co-writer Frederic Raphael...

I am guessing it's the same material that ended up in a book form, Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut, which I have read. It has this great line in it:

“Directors are a cannibal breed. Their nature is to seek out those whose destruction will give them the greatest charge (and the squarest meal).”

Strangely, I now see this description of SK fits with the Kubrickon. (I had quoted it for a novel about Sam Peckinpah. Peckinpah got screwed by Kubrick on One-Eyed Jacks, then Kubrick got screwed by Brando.)

[Elliott Jonestown]

If anyone hasn't already read it, here's a somewhat revealing peek at Kubrick and some of his process, by his EWS co-writer Frederic Raphael...

Onward and Upward with the Arts June 14, 1999 Issue
A Kubrick Odyssey
By Frederic Raphael


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/ ... ck-odyssey

(may or not be a way around the paywall, I can probably get it if needed)

I'd be interested in seeing this article in full, and yes, there was a paywall I couldn't get around.

The term doesn't carry especially negative connotations to me, & I use it because it seems accurate. We could talk about the pros & cons of obsession, but that would be a separate & more general discussion. In some ways, perhaps the Kubrickon is very much about this already, only using a very particular and fantastic example. In the end, however, I consider all obsessions to be dead-ends. Yet immersion is an open road, and what appears to others to be obsession can really be a means to immersion.

This approach seems very reasonable to me. To what extent "Kubrick-obsessives" are immersed in an open-road, or not and actually obsessed, is unclear and as you say a spectrum. There don't seem to be bright lines or definiteness as to which behavior is a dead-end and which are not. These judgments would seem to be subjective and individual.

This is interesting, because part of the Kubrickon thesis is that when individuals, wittingly or not, join an audience cult (in this case Kubrick's), they do become an amorphous, generalized group, and this is very much how the operation works (and how culture and ideology takes over organisms and prevents embodiment/individuation). So I am not sure of a way around this, as shawnfella's work is only, or at least primarily, of interest to me as an example of this phenomenon, a fact which I made clear to AOC at the start. Otherwise, this thread would be no different from a Kubrick audience cult and/or synchro-mystical discussion.

So does membership in an audience cult trigger by simply viewing a work more than once, or taking in a work with a more focused eye? Again, your lines seem drawn roughly and are thereby confusing. There are surely many counter-examples of individuals choosing to study a film, or novel, or area of history, etc. whereby those individuals are not made amorphous and generalized. Instead, when a person has a thesis that is worked out through research, thought, and writing this can often produce unique and individualized additions to a body of literature.

You are citing consensus now as proof of ontological reality. "History decides." This is directly at odds with the premise AOC cited of history being a fiction narrated by gatekeepers. If Kubrick was one of those gatekeepers, a leading culture-maker, then he himself (with a little help from his friends) created the narrative of him being a great and influential film artist. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy-narrative, since people are greatly influenced by those the culture puts forward as greatly influential. Your premise presupposes that culture itself is a kind of byproduct of a planetary meritocracy, with no underlying deception or injustice driving it. Is that so?

Since I do not see the inherent value in many of Kubrick's films (or in culture at large), value which I have been told is there, I feel fairly secure in referring to it as a spell that's been cast ~ especially as I have been under similar spells, and only come out of them through a massively painful process of self-examination and confrontation.

Culture is a cult.

The quote I offered was simply to underscore what we can already assume true, that is many see Kubrick's work as important to the form. My point doesn't rely on that being an ontological truism. It is a fact, for instance, that Stanley Kubrick is one of only four directors with 4 or more films in the AFI 100 years .... poll. I am citing consensus to support the point that at to American culture, Kubrick is considered a film great. This doesn't to me seem in any way problematic (though I do not discount explorations into how certain directors get to their positions, and I am certain what happens behind the scenes is occluded and often sinister). And because of this fact alone, setting aside all other factors aside (MK Ultra tests, Kubrick being complicit in off-world entities designing a Kubrickon, etc.), individuals would naturally be drawn to his films. That people focus on his films doesn't alone support your Kubrickon theory. There needs to be more evidence drawn from other parapolitical research. I've been trying to get the discussion off "because they watch his films several times it's a master plan to harvest the viewer," to another reason why that might be true, or might not be true.

If your theory is about a "Culture con," then maybe renaming it would bring greater understanding. Consider being explicit out of the gate that it's about culture at large, and not specifically about Kubrick.

Oxford defines culture as "the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively." It defines cult as "a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object," and "A relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister." I'm reminded here of the Warhol quote: “An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.” Your point has some merit, but is another idea best seen on a spectrum. I've just finished reading PKD's The Man in the High Castle, and he's got a long write up about how a novel can be revolutionary, how it can be used to push back against oppressive governmental regimes. So if a work of art can be at its best a religious experience for the audience, and can provide humans with release from suffering or point them toward self-actualization, etc., these artworks would naturally engender a cult following for very understandable reasons. This spectrum would on the one had have sinister connotations (cult a-la Jonestown) and on the other connotations of devotion toward objects deserving devotion (like a cult film, a film people are devoted to because brings joy, understanding, knowledge, etc.).

Sure. I don't see much point in or need for people to defend SM at this thread, it's just another practice that can be helpful and can also be indulgent and obsessive. I do yoga twice a week, but it's not the basis for an ideology; its mostly so I can stay flexible and have at least some of my time dedicated to placing attention on and in the body. I see existential detective work as using but very different from SM. I imagine Jung did too. Observing syncs can be a tool, but it should not become a methodology or a practice, IMO, much less a lifestyle. Also, the syncs that really need our attention (i,e., that offer meaningful clues) come to us; we don't have to go looking for them, and to do so undermines the whole process, IMO, because looking for these sorts of things is a way also to bring them into form and focus.

Yes, I agree SM can be a tool and is just a tool. But insomuch as your Kubrickon theory questions the validity of the various SM practitioners, then a general talk of why SM can be beneficial is worth touching upon. You've summarized my experiences with SM well when writing "observing syncs can be a tool ... to stay flexible and" have time dedicated to attention. I know I've conflated your yoga quote with SM benefits, but intentionally. The SM mindset is a nice counterpoise to the rigidly constructed, militarized reality we now face in mainstream media and culture. Being exposed to it, and dare I say dabbling in practicing it, can help loosen the mind and keep it open to the syncs that "come to us." I bet many people have syncs coming to them but are shut down to them and therefore miss the message. For example, my policy on books is if I get two or three references in a short time from random sources, I figure something/someone is trying to send me a message. But I still have to procure the book and take the action of reading it. Jung devoted much of his life to studying symbols and writing about them, both very synchromystic practices.

If you mean the work is to uncover what sort of social engineering agendas were behind Kubrick and the creation of his oeuvre, then that's part of the work (with Kubrickon), but certainly not the whole of it. The larger portion I keep referring to, relates to ideological contamination (ideation contagion was a phrase I heard one of the Collins brothers use recently), audience cults, group think, and what happens to libido and awareness (the psyche) when it is prevented from becoming embodied: how it can be redirected, siphoned and harnessed.

Yes, all of what you write is important in my view. Research into "conspiracy" plus symbol literacy, etc. All stones are available to be turned over. I look forward to following your work into the all of the matters you list.

If real crimes are being trivialized (and even turning them into mass entertainment is a form of trivialization), reduced to bad acting, implausible dialogue, and clunky storylines (i.e., EWS), couldn’t it also be argued that this undermines the work of sincere researchers by tainting the subject matter in people’s minds? Or would you consider The X-Files whistleblowing too?
(Not trying to be argumentative, genuinely curious.)

No argumentativeness perceived, and even if so, nothing is wrong with a healthy argument to get ideas to clash and change. Conspiritainment is often a distraction, but in most cases truth is mixed with untruth. In all cases really. Even Alex Jones did a lot of good "waking people up" to 9/11 in the early years. He's since become a shill of right wing political factions. Maybe it's my personal experience with EWS. When I first saw it in 1999, I wasn't yet aware of the sex crime underbelly of the world. I was 18. And the power players in that movie, and sex party participates, are implied to murder a girl as part of their ritual. I left feeling very uneasy and with a seed planted in my mind, one that would later flower. This was the seed that the elite of the world are doing unspeakable things behind the facade. I have not seen any of the other films you list. But I do think the narrative feature film can be disguised as entertainment and all the while do a lot of truth conveyance. Manchurian Candidate is a good example. Or even films about the horrors of war, films like Apocalypse Now, Platoon (leaving the obvious Kubrick choices off this list). Novels like All Quite on the Western Front, or The Yellow Birds could be cited here. I'm also thinking of the opera the Magic Flute, which tells an entertaining love story but exposes certain masonic rituals in the process.

Again, a spectrum. Like I said, culture is a cult. Movie-watching is a hypnotic chamber in which we are, or at least can be, implanted with unconscious ideology.

Giving how ubiquitous movies, TV, videos, etc. are in our culture, the defense against hidden ideology being planted is film literacy, with practices like traditional film criticism, SM practices, and really anything that allows a viewer to take in a movie with the head that things might not all be what they seem. Since being involved in the SM scene, I can say I'm much more equipped to watch films consciously and deliberately. This is even after studying film in the American university system. My experience has been the SM techniques add to, not take away, one's defense against the unconscious transfer of messages.

[Elvis]

I'd be interested in seeing this article in full, and yes, there was a paywall I couldn't get around.

Well, that was easy, once I actually looked for it... this site has the full text: http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/sk/page12a.htm

From: The New Yorker - June 14 1999

Title: A KUBRICK ODYSSEY - The director's last screenwriter recounts his lahyrinthine adventure on "Eyes Wide Shut." by FREDERIC RAPHAEL

(Glancing over it again—it's been 16 years since I read it—a close re-reading should be useful to me because I'm, uh, er, in the process of writing a screenplay.)

[guruilla]

So does membership in an audience cult trigger by simply viewing a work more than once, or taking in a work with a more focused eye? Again, your lines seem drawn roughly and are thereby confusing. There are surely many counter-examples of individuals choosing to study a film, or novel, or area of history, etc. whereby those individuals are not made amorphous and generalized. Instead, when a person has a thesis that is worked out through research, thought, and writing this can often produce unique and individualized additions to a body of literature.

It's got nothing to do with how many times people watch a movie. It has to do with how the values conveyed by the movie become internalized as personal values and provide meaning, purpose, and direction (hope) to the percipient. As for "producing unique and individualized additions to a body of literature," if that's your goal, or one of them, then you'll get no argument from me about achieving it. For all I know, shawnfella's work will someday be considered that. But that doesn't impress me personally, as a meaningful goal (adding to the culture), and perhaps that's close to the "point" of Kubrickon and the culture-con: tricking us into believing that cultural goals (such as artistic "immortality") have some value besides what we assign to them, as a way to provide meaning to our lives?

That people focus on his films doesn't alone support your Kubrickon theory. There needs to be more evidence drawn from other parapolitical research. I've been trying to get the discussion off "because they watch his films several times it's a master plan to harvest the viewer," to another reason why that might be true, or might not be true.

As I said, it's not the watching but the quality of attention and the kind of investment in the content, which is then evidenced by shawnfella spending months of his life sifting for clues that are almost certainly in his own fevered imagination, or John Fell Ryan discovering that his life has turned into The Shining.

If your theory is about a "Culture con," then maybe renaming it would bring greater understanding. Consider being explicit out of the gate that it's about culture at large, and not specifically about Kubrick.

It's about Kubrick as a specific and particularly clear example of how culture cons us into adopting values and meanings that are sourced outside of us, within the social body, rather than within our psyches.

. I've just finished reading PKD's The Man in the High Castle, and he's got a long write up about how a novel can be revolutionary, how it can be used to push back against oppressive governmental regimes. So if a work of art can be at its best a religious experience for the audience, and can provide humans with release from suffering or point them toward self-actualization, etc., these artworks would naturally engender a cult following for very understandable reasons. This spectrum would on the one had have sinister connotations (cult a-la Jonestown) and on the other connotations of devotion toward objects deserving devotion (like a cult film, a film people are devoted to because brings joy, understanding, knowledge, etc.).

Where you see a dichotomy between good cult and bad cult, I see a spectrum of cultism, within which there may be individuals who benefit, despite having been drawn into a cult. I like P. K. Dick and he is a good example here, because he's as close as I know of to a highly influential cultural figure who seems not to have been affiliated, before, during, or after his career with any obvious social engineering agendas. He does seem like a real outlier, and one proof of it is how he spent the last years of his life writing something he believed no one would ever read. This doesn't mean I see Dick-heads as an inherently superior form of audience cult, however (my impression of them is that they are well-named). Admiration for any artist or artwork is a mistake, in my view, however much I might still feel it and covet it from my own "audience."

All this stuff is just ways to relax while integration/individuation happens. What counts about any work we imbibe is that the "artist" in question is following his or her own soul-signal to the source, and not just fiddling while Rome burns. Dick was, or seems to me to have been, quite dedicated to discovering the truth of himself. Kubrick does not strike me as that. Dick is an exception, I think, where Kubrick isn't. But this may be no more than an expression of taste, or affinity. Your Kubrick is not the same as mine. And this is really a side issue to "Kubrickon."

For example, my policy on books is if I get two or three references in a short time from random sources, I figure something/someone is trying to send me a message. But I still have to procure the book and take the action of reading it. Jung devoted much of his life to studying symbols and writing about them, both very synchromystic practices.

It is to do, for me, with being responsive to what is happening. Syncs are cues from our unconscious that are coming through everyday incidents and data, and if we follow the cues, we wind up going down pathways we would never have discovered otherwise, and never have imagined we would have gone down. This is why SM or Kubrick or whatever becomes a trap, IMO, because to stay fixed on one thing means ignoring those cues that might lead away from that thing. One gauge for me of how this process proceeds is that, while my underlying interest becomes steadily clearer, my surface interest keep moving and changing.

This forum is a good example of seeing how themes emerge and interconnect and give rise to new themes, and how it is always in constant motion. What you call that attempt to be fluid, spontaneous, and response-able doesn't matter, call it surrealism or SM or liminalism. But what draws us to specific subjects is NEVER found in the subject matter itself. Kubrick-analysis bores me as much as almost any sort of film analysis does, because very rarely does the analysis point back at the person doing the analysis, to reveal those personal patterns of obsession, trauma, and abuse that are invariably driving any quest. At best, they try to transcend the subject matter by talking about the implicate order it reveals, but in my view this is almost invariably a form of "spiritual bypassing," i.e., using the dissociating trick of going "up" and "out" to escape the pain of the personal, rather than down and in (a bypassing which I think Kubrick did, and which he does the least in his two best, later movies, Shining & Barry Lyndon).

It is a bit like going to therapy and making up everything you tell the shrink. It may be enjoyable, possibly for both parties, but it won't lead to any sort of transformation, because the rubber of the soul never meets the road of the outside world.

Maybe it's my personal experience with EWS. When I first saw it in 1999, I wasn't yet aware of the sex crime underbelly of the world. I was 18.

That's fine, I am not going to argue with personal experience. Someone else saw FMJ and said it compounded their desire not to join the army. I'm not going to argue with the idea that a cultural artifact can intersect with an individual psyche and cause change, for good or ill, or both. Just that our subjective experience of a work doesn't really tell us anything about the intrinsic value or meaning of the work. I was massively influenced by Castaneda & Strieber in my 20s an 30s. If someone had told me I would, in my 40s, come to see those influences as at least as negative as positive, I would have been highly skeptical. Yet here I am saying exactly that.

Giving how ubiquitous movies, TV, videos, etc. are in our culture, the defense against hidden ideology being planted is film literacy, with practices like traditional film criticism, SM practices, and really anything that allows a viewer to take in a movie with the head that things might not all be what they seem. Since being involved in the SM scene, I can say I'm much more equipped to watch films consciously and deliberately. This is even after studying film in the American university system. My experience has been the SM techniques add to, not take away, one's defense against the unconscious transfer of messages.

There's definitely truth in this, even if it overlooks something pretty major by presuming that traditional film criticism and SM are free from hidden ideology! The Spanish have a saying about using a nail to drive out a nail (it refers to rebound sex, I think); the risk is that the new nail just fits right into the space where the old one was, and yet we think we have actually changed something!

I think you mentioned limiting this discussion to a set number of posts, but out of curiosity, did you read the recent material synthesizing Lloyd de Mause, Rene Girard, and Donald Kalsched at the Liminality thread?

Just keep reminding yourself, It's not about Kubrick. It's not about Kubrick. It's not about Kubrick.

[guruilla]

RI & specifically this thread are discussed in latest Sync-Book Podcast Always Record # 142. (Download will only be available for a while AFAIK) by two of RI's newest members.

Apparently I am "wriggling out" of something at this thread, though what it is I am wriggling out of (besides validating a fervently-held belief system) is never stated, so if anyone wants to clarify that for me, that'd be nice.

[guruilla]

Cross-posting this, from Moon-hoax thread.

Compare the voices in this clip: http://auticulture.com/wp-content/uploa ... n-Hoax.mp3

First voice: "..amateur night ... that's not a toy" = "Bill Hutchinson" as "Moon Crater Controller" in the fake moon landing film-set sequence from Diamonds Are Forever (1971). (Video below)

Second voice: "Villains ... serve in Hell," = Stanley Kubrick, in a 1972 interview, here.

Bill Hutchinson is a bit player who did about 20 movies and TV shows between 1966 & 1992, making it hard to find any online footage of him to compare his voice to "Moon Crater Controller." I did find Carry on Emmannuelle, in which he plays "First Reporter," seen in the sequence beginning 1:12:05, here. No obvious similarity of voice that I can detect (unlike that between Kubrick & MCC).

Ken Adam, who did the production design on Diamonds Are Forever, worked with Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Barry Lyndon, in 1975.

Not a smoking gun, for sure, but better than a poke in the eye. Of course voice recognition is highly subjective, so I'm curious to know if others hear it too, and to what degree.

Here's the full sequence from the Bond flick: