I've been puzzling on the whole thing about where and when did tattoos become so acceptable, warranted, needed, in fashion insofar as this generation. Excuse me for saying so, but I think I have found it. However, this is not my overall point. Just follow me on this. Start here:
Here is what stands out to me on this clip. They are really focusing on the fact Barrymore has tattoos. The camera is focusing on it, then it turns into an act of "pleasing" a man by her getting up on his desk, flashing him etc. Keep in mind this is 1995 -- tats on a female then were easily a novelty. Tats weren't yet in fashion as they are to the extent they are today. Well, I was about to let the clip go and keep it at that (ah! this appearance on Letterman must have set into motion the whole tattoo craze). BUT. Letterman begins to talk about Barrymore's first film. At first he says ET, but Barrymore corrects him. ACTUALLY, she was in one other movie before that and what was that film? ALTERED STATES!
A child starring in two films at a young age, both of which being topical films of such subjects we discuss here and increasingly within the MSM as well. Extra Terrestrials and Altered States AND (Hugh may want to weigh in) the importance of Steven Spielberg in Barrymore's life.
I then wind up watching a much more recent clip of an appearance of Barrymore on Letterman and it has to do with Letterman's dog being "from hell".
[youtube]7rxT1cE4Cxs&NR[/youtube]
Barrymore now is "grown up" and is treated as such. She has no need to prance across Dave's desk. However the topics of "hell", "sinfulness" is the same. Hugh, don't you call this "priming" or something?
So then I go looking for other information and ran into this:
http://pseudoccultmedia.blogspot.com/20 ... -door.html
Read the whole thing, but this is the part the refers to Barrymore.
Other likely Monarch slaves have attended parties at the mansion such as Drew Barrymore (Altered States [pure MK], E.T. [standard Spielberg Alien programming movie], Firestarter [government human experimentation/testing leading to special abilities (very Monarch programming symbolic; fire/pyrokenesis symbolizes the chaos/primal fear ((all mammals are instinctively afraid of fire)) in trauma-based Monarch programming)], Stephen King's Cat's Eye, GunCrazy [she plays a sexually abused girl by her stepfather whom she kills, it's important to note her mother 'Jaid' (Jade = old slang for prostitute) was also in this (as "Woman with Dog" [dehumanization]) in terms of Monarch intergenerational programming (Jaid was born in a Displaced Persons Camp; Monarch programming hugely benefiting from the chaos of World War 2 as mentioned in previous posts) this couldn't be more significant; she posed in Playboy shortly after her daughter too (multigenerational playboy kittens)]. See the Barrymore acting family for more on this Marionette puppet (of course many/most of them probably aren't actual Monarch programmed multiples) acting dynasty.
She posed for Playboy in 1995, the photographer consciously focusing (instructing her to lift up her shirt to show it) on her butterfly tattoo (see Paris Hilton's at this post) for the cover, showing what Playboy is all about.
I thought the first Letterman clip I linked is kind of a specimen in the wild, as it were.
Well, what about this Rabbit Hole? The time we all took the plunge has to do with this:
The rabbit rides again
Donnie Darko, a story of death and crashing jets, flopped in the US, not least because it came out just after 9/11. But British audiences turned it into a cult hit - and now it's back.
In the solitude of a cinema, there are still times when it's obvious what the whole audience is thinking. Don't go in the basement. Watch out for the shark. So it was with Donnie Darko. From its very first scene of a freaked-out teenager waking on an empty hilltop road at dawn, before cycling back into a lush, suburban morning with an unknowable grin etched on his face, you could sense every mind in the place silently uniting in one question: so what, exactly, is this then?
I'm not sure I ever got the whole answer. But part of it, at least, was clear. It was a story of young love, time travel and, encompassing both, that same mysterious kid, Donnie (played by the bleary Jake Gyllenhaal), a sleepwalker and semi-reformed arsonist in small-town Virginia circa 1988.
Not that sleepwalking was his only nocturnal pastime. There were the visits from Frank - a monstrous, 6ft talking rabbit warning in creepy, Darth Vaderish tones of the imminent end of the world. Which was precisely what seemed to be under way when a stray jet engine promptly fell from the sky and crushed Donnie's family home.
So that was the story; and the film wrapped around it was (whatever else) pretty much a masterpiece. It was also the UK's surprise hit of 2002, a smash whose ardent fanbase helped found an ever-swelling reputation. So much so that now, two years later, a director's cut is to be released, the preserve of time-honoured classics. There will be additional footage, a buffed-up soundtrack and what its now 29-year-old writer-director, Richard Kelly, calls "new layers of information, ambiguity and mystery".
The movie was never short of those. Driven by its own wired internal logic, its narrative twisted into a puzzle that audiences delighted in trying to crack. Yet that wasn't the whole picture. At first, Donnie Darko was something else entirely - a disaster.
It was late October 2001, and the film had just opened in America. Reviews, squeezed into pages not given over to 9/11 and anthrax in the mail, were polite, if baffled. But at the handful of cinemas playing host to Kelly's debut, business was somewhere between funereal and nonexistent. By the time it limped away from its theatrical run and into Blockbuster, it had made a sliver over $500,000: 10% of its production costs.
Anyone searching for reasons need not look far. Stumbling into US cinemas in the wake of the attacks on the twin towers, audiences weren't yet ready for a meditation on death and metaphysics involving planes as sudden tools of destruction. After all, why seek out talking rabbits warning of the end of the world when it already seemed to be happening? "It was a really upsetting time for all of us involved with the movie," the affable Kelly admits. "Just getting it distributed had been a struggle, so I knew the typical industry executive felt it would never connect with anyone. And at that point it felt like they'd been right. But looking at it now, the fact that it came out in the middle of this chaos had a definite role in that."
But apocalypse or no, maybe this first sad chapter in Donnie's strange trajectory was just what happens when an unknown director offers up a story this odd without a wall of marketing or, crucially, a major star. Gyllenhaal may now be the chiselled hero of the likes of The Day After Tomorrow, but back in 2001, the glow of his celebrity would barely have illuminated a shoebox.
The result was what looked like a premature, but conclusive demise. Until, a year later, the film arrived in a largely oblivious Britain for what should have been a few days of scattered blank expressions in a couple of London art cinemas.
Critics were, once more, as bemused as impressed. But this time, when it opened, people came. And they kept doing so. Enough so that rather than shuffling out of cinemas after a week, the film expanded out of the capital and around the country.
Within a fortnight, Kelly's movie had made half as much money again as in its entire American run. Six weeks later, 300,000 tickets had been sold. More remarkable still, this triumph was based almost wholly on word of mouth - the unfakeable, ever-snowballing real thing. Suddenly, everyone you ran into had either just seen the movie, or was about to see it, or was about to see it again and tell their friends to do the same.
"It was incredibly pleasing and incredibly weird, both at once," Kelly says. "I'd always clung to the thought that somehow the movie would survive, but to see it do so well in another country was astonishing." Ask "Why Britain?" and he's flummoxed, though. "I guess there's a lot of material about teenagers and religion and what you could call the American mindset, and I think those ideas transcend America itself. But as for why Britain specifically, well," he bursts out laughing, "can you tell I don't know?"
The quality of rival releases at the time may have helped (Red Dragon, anyone?). Perhaps the relatively stable UK of late 2002 was simply more receptive to a kid like Donnie than the wigged-out, traumatised US of a year earlier; or maybe movies this good always find their audience eventually.
More likely, the key to its success was a convergence of all of these and a less tangible factor besides: a strange and Darko-esque something in the air. Because, by then, Kelly's movie had been granted a second life in its own country. The awestruck word of mouth behind the film's rise in Britain had, it seemed, also inched its way across the same America that had rejected the movie. Only, banished from the cinemas, Donnie had reached his acolytes by the scenic route of DVD and video. Yet the end product on both sides of the Atlantic was the same - a bona fide cult.
Inevitably, there were websites. The screenplay was published and eagerly received; eBay overflowed with posters, T-shirts, badges. And all of it was pored over by an ever-growing band of devotees, each drawn to exactly the same qualities that had helped doom it first time around - the hairpin swerves of tone between comedy, drama, sci-fi and horror, the plot that left a question hanging for every one it answered.
"I'd always conceived of the story as this dense experience," Kelly says, "because that's what I'm drawn to myself. My favourite books and movies always took time to process and required further investigation, so if I hadn't made the film, I'd probably be trying to figure it out along with everyone else."
The ripples of the film's extended life have ranged from the obvious (booming DVD sales) to the even-by-its-standards peculiar (the soundtrack's version of Tears for Fears' Mad World by LA bar singer Gary Jules randomly becoming last year's Christmas No 1). But however diverting the phenomenon of Donnie Darko, the pleasures of the actual film shouldn't be forgotten.
Witness Donnie himself - in superficially stock adolescent turmoil and yet a universe away from it. That's partly testament to Gyllenhaal (shudder at the thought of, say, the bloodless Tobey Maguire in the role). Yet it also says much about Kelly's writing that he could play so artfully with the dread cliches of teenage alienation. Few characters can have had a more woeful influence on recent culture than Holden Caulfield, but in Kelly's hands the gifted but troubled boy-savant becomes a magnetic force once more.
Which is perhaps the film's real signature. After a while, Kelly's boundless imagination is a given - what's extraordinary is his renovation of the most clapped-out devices. Watch the film's first narcotic pan through the corridors of Donnie's high school - the endless lockers, weary principal, sniggering bullies - and it's as if you've never seen such exotica on film before.
Every now and then, you can discern a sinister hint of David Lynch. Otherwise, Kelly's operating in a world entirely his own. The film may brim with references to other movies, but they're less stylistic influences than loving homages to a ragbag of totems from 80s cinema: Back to the Future, The Evil Dead, Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, ET - the Extra-Terrestrial.
"One of the most gratifying things ," Kelly says, "is that kids, teenagers, love the film so much. Because there's that idea they can't deal with narrative sophistication, but in fact they instinctively handle what a lot of adults can't - that the film's about a high schooler who talks about the Smurfs and philosophy and metaphysics."
Indeed, it's those co-existing opposites that underpin the whole movie. From the outset, its comedy is inspired, yet every time any other film would go for the belly laugh, Kelly instead amps up the sense of dignity and hidden depths.
Equally, for what is on many levels an arcane slice of sci-fi, never once does it lose touch with its human pulse - flawed, bizarre and stubbornly optimistic. And as such, in Kelly's words, "hopefully as relevant in 2104 as it is now". Few re-releases could be more valuable. Whatever Donnie Darko is, it will, after all, be some time before we see its like again.
Maybe she's just typecast. However, I doubt it is as simple as that. That first Letterman clip to me was like a glimpse at time travel and by way of which, explains a lot about this 9/11 shit and how they were able to hypnotize people of all, every, personality type. I used to get stoned and watch Donnie Darko over and over. And I've always wondered why I did so. This post is part of my journey of why.
