I really am a little obsessed with zombies. Even this bizarre video caught my attention, and even kinda gave me the chills.
At the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines, inmates have found the perfect way to pass the time: memorizing the dance choreography to American pop anthems of the 80s. The crowning achievement has to be their rendition of Michael Jackson’s ”Thriller” video, complete with a guy in drag playing his date, while they’re surrounded by hordes of unruly undead (performing pretty awesome zombie dance moves!).
Now, is it just me, or at the beginning when that “couple” is suddenly surrounded by a thousand orange-jump-suit clad zombies, and the trannie girlfriend is acting all terrified - well, it’s really a little scary, isn’t it?
“When I was growing up, only the geeky and socially marginal people were into stuff like Spiderman and JRR Tolkien. But in the last five years they’ve become the biggest entertainment phenomena around. How did it get so nerds are suddenly driving popular culture?
“I almost miss the stigma that used to attach to these things. Now everybody’s into Tolkien. And I feel a little like, hey, I’ve been into that stuff my whole life. And in fact, you used to beat me up for it.”
“Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe. you see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It’s just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. And, not content with what we were given, we create a whole other set. Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you.
“And that has to do with what I’ve always called the gap between intention and effect. I mean if you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic. You know it really is totally fantastic that we look like this and you sometimes see that very clearly in a photograph. Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it.”
The corrupt and brutal regime of President Ceausescu of Romania was infamous across the world. His ferocious government had run the country emphatically for many years, crushing any sings of dissent ruthlessly. In November 1989 he was re-elected President for another five years as his supporters at Party Conference gave him forty standing ovations.
On December 21st the President, disturbed by a small uprising in the western city of Timisoara in support of a Protestant Clergyman, was persuaded to address a public rally in Bucharest.
One solitary man in the crowd, Nica Leon, sick to death with Ceausescu and the dreadful circumstances he created for everyone started shouting in favour of the revolutionaries in Timisoara. The crowd around him, obedient to the last, thought that when shout out “long life Timisoara!” it was some new political slogan. They started chanting it too. It was only when he called, “Down with Ceausescu!” that they realized something wasn’t quite right. Terrified, they tried to force themselves away from him, dropping the banners they had been carrying. In the crush the wooden batons on which the banners were held began to snap underfoot and women start screaming. – The ensuing panic sounded like booing.
The unthinkable was happening. Ceausescu stood there on his balcony, ludicrously frozen in uncertainty, his mouth opening and shutting. Even the official camera shook with fright. Then the head of security walked swiftly across the balcony towards him and whispered, “They’re getting in.” It was clearly open on the open microphone and was broadcast over the whole country on live national radio.
This was the start of the revolution. Within a week Ceausescu was dead.
- from graffiti artist Banksy, in his book “Wall and Piece”
Source: John Simpson BBC News
The LOST 2-hour season finale tonight was a little bit mind blowing, hunh?
Those guys are going all the way out now. They’re not holding anything back.
They have once again, completely transformed the scope and even the underlying concept of the show.
This thing is like a “serial” the way Alan Moore’s WATCHMEN was a comic book.
It’s true, at points along the way this season, I’ve felt like these guys have had no idea where they’re going. And I think some of that comes from their need (and orders from on high) to stretch the series out for five to nine years. But they’re answer to that is different that most TV shows, which try to recreate the same show season after season. Like CHEERS, most shows are all about giving you a place of comfort and familiarty to come to, where everyone knows your name.
But LOST, at the end of two seasons in a row now, have instead completely transformed the idea of what the show is about.
We now know that they are not on a normal island.
And we know how they were brought there.
And we know that when Desmond, the last inhabitant of the hatch, tried to escape by boat, he sailed for some eight weeks away from the island, and the first sight of land he saw - was this island again.
This brings up a few potential readings.
1) They’re in some kind of snow globe. A massive dome. And on the other side is:
a) Some kind of TRUMAN SHOW-like other world. Some huge experiment is being conducted on them from outside. The entire island is like the hatch. The hatch which was being watched by someone in an abandoned post for a very long time. The entire island itself is inside some kind of self-contained unit, and it is being watched.
b) Or maybe it’s some kind of virtual reality, where the edge of the world - like in a video game - just leads you back into the game platform.
c) Or there is nothing else out there, the rest of the world has been destroyed.
d) Or maybe, as Sawyer guessed, they’re on an alien planet. (Which would be backed up by the giant stone foot, the ruins of some colossus on the coast, which had only four toes.)
But I think the answer is clearer than that.
I’m leaning toward option:
2) It seems now that the island is, in fact, built on top of a massive magnetic energy generator.
The generator is controlled by the pushing of the button, which dissipates the excess built up energy every 108 minutes. When the button isn’t pushed, and the energy is allowed to build - the magnet effect builds so intensely, that anything with a few hundred miles is sucked toward it.
It’s this magnetism that, when Desmond failed to push the button, pulled Oceanic Flight 815 out of the sky and crashed it into the island. Just as the drug plane from Nigeria crashed, just as the 16th century slave ship crashed, just as Desmond’s boat was drawn there and the real Henry Gale’s baloon.
This explanation of the magnetic island seems to answer a lot of questions with some clarity. And, in terms of what the generator is, maybe even some kind of BLACK HOLE, pulling everything toward it with a gravitational sucking force.
But, then… there’s one clue at the very end that suggests one of the more wild first theories might be right.
After Locke doesn’t push the button, and the vast bright light fills the sky (which suggests a light coming from above, perhaps from the top of a dome), there’s quiet aross the beach… And then something falls out of the sky, from high, high above, and crashes in the middle of the camp.
What is it? …. The front door of the hatch.
The metal door of the hatch which seems to have been somehow sucked high into the sky, and then dropped back down when the button was pushed and the magnet when off.
So perhaps the island isn’t the source of the energy.
Maybe the source is high above…
At the top of a dome.
Or hey, maybe there’s a link of some sort, between the island and somewhere else - somewhere high in the sky. Maybe a dimensional portal or a gate is in the hatch. Or, maybe a black hole…?
6.1.06 - Theory Addendum
Remember that big re-stocking shipment of food and materials that fell from the sky during the hatch’s lockdown about 6 episodes back? Remember that nobody heard a plane fly overhead?
How much you want to bet it fell from a hole in the sky - like at the top of a big dome?
This theory’s really been floating around in my head a lot lately. The only problem with it - and it’s a big one - is how the hell did they get in there? They all left on a plane from Sydney, in the real world. At what point did they cross into the snow globe?
MUSIC:
In honor of the vast conspiracy that ABC is allowing these very clever writers and filmmakers to spin for us happy and hooked audience members, here’s some conspiracy and Lost-themed tunes to download and listen to on your iPod today:
And here’s a relevant couple quotes from a radio show I heard today on my iPod, while wandering around through a summer’s day in New York today:
On Kurt Anderson’s STUDIO 360 podcast from PRI, he was talking with the novelist Anne Rice about conspiracy theories, and specifically about the popularity of the DAVINCI CODE.
Rice said she understands why so many people are so drawn to the conspiracy story Brown has invented. “Most of life,” she says, “for most of us, is meaningless. Things happen at random. There’s always been a great desire on the parts of journalists and historians and the media, to try and find threads and meaning. So, conspiracy theories are glorified versions of that. Because the random nature of life is pretty scary. And it’s comforting to believe that things happen for a meaning and that there are connections.”
Of course, the other obvious tale-weaver she leaves out is religion, which provides exactly the same kind of vast and cosmic cover story, that explains everything.
Kurt Anderson agrees, that conspiracy theories and religious narratives spring from the same impulse. “To try,” he says, “to impose absolute clarity on an existence whose purposes and meanings are murky and mysterious… It’s why fundamentalism of so many stripes is so appealing to so many people. And why 60 million copies of THE DAVINCI CODE have been sold.”
And perhaps why LOST is attracting record numbers of viewers back to the dying technology of the boob tube.
Watching Pasolini’s Salò this weekend – a suggestion from the director on my current screenplay Kite – seems to have had a lasting effect on my psyche.
Kite’s based on an X-Rated Japanese anime, that we’re attempting to reimagine as a gritty, 70s style, artful exploitation flick, that pushes imagery of violence and sex in daring and uncompromising ways. Our influences are ranging from Lukas Moodyson’s Lilya-4-Ever to Chan-Wook Park’s Oldboy to Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible.
Salò, which I had never seen, seemed an obvious reference to add to the list. But it’s had a deeper impact on me than I expected. It’s made me particularly, queasily sensitive to images and descriptions of violence – which suddenly seem to be everywhere around me.
If I went to sleep after watching Salò that night (or rather, early that morning) with dark and disturbed dreams – the dreams have spread into my waking life in the days since…
- Reading this morning, references to rich young women being raped and scalped in Salman Rushdie’s Fury – imagery that was directly out of Salò.
- Reading in bed last night, an unexpected scene of gay erotica, a man being shaved by a straight razor, in David Benioff’s short story “Merde for Luck” – which was not violent, but turned my stomach with fear as it conjured images from Salò in my head.
- Over my coffee at Jack’s on West 10th, where I’m sitting now, a description in the New York Times by the French woman who had the partial face transplant last week. She describes the moment of waking up from an attempted sleeping pill suicide, and trying to light a cigarette. Confused that she couldn’t get the cigarette to stay between her lips. Looking in the mirror, and discovering that her labrador had chewed off her lips and chin and nose and cheeks.
- An article in the Village Voice I picked up, about the extended scenes of torture in the new horror film Hostel, comparing it to recent films of unrelenting cruelty, Wolf Creek and The Devils Rejects. How Hostel has been the highest grossing film for two weeks. And how Americans seem hungry for deeply disturbing images of sadism in our current political climate.
In the recent past, I could have let these descriptions filter into my consciousness without too much disturbance – maybe even, some titilation at their subversive button-pushing. But these past few days, since witnessing the deeply realistic acts of torture and sadism on my bedroom television screen, the merest mention of violence has made my stomach twist viscerally. And I’ve felt a heavy darkness fill up my chest, like from an imaginary gas pump shoved down my throat.
There’s a positive side to this, sure. Salò has removed my defenses – my mind’s normal ability to dismiss violence in the real world – by simply not engaging it. This modern inability to be shocked that we all worry about publicly, but secretly congratulate ourselves on. I had this same experience last year, after daring myself to watch one of those internet videos from Iraq, of a young man having his head sawed off. That instantly and deeply tore away my defenses, and for weeks afterward, I was incredibly sensitive to violence. But, to what end?
I’m not a violent person. I don’t need to have my awareness of the reality of violence raised, in order to inspire compassion and curb my cruel sadistic tendencies.
I’m an artist. (Well, a screenwriter.) Struggling with the question of whether or not, or to what extent, to include images of sadism in my work.
Because, I feel like there’s another, deeply negative effect that Salò has had on me. As my stomach has become increasingly susceptible to the violence around me, as my skin has become more porous and quick to crawl at sights of blood, I’ve started having very dark flashes. I’d describe them as waves of existential nausea. Where I suddenly become filled up with the feeling that this world is a very, very sinister place – inescapable and slaloming toward the abyss.
It’s a feeling I imagine people in asylums for the criminally insane have filling their heads on a permanent basis. Where all you see around you is the horrific. Where every new description of terror, every sight of a chewed up bone on the street, every disintegrating old man in a wheelchair staring helplessly as they’re pulled out of the world, compounds the horror you feel.
But for me, it’s only come in brief waves. Like a stab of adrenaline when the floor drops out from under you.
I’m very lucky. I have the kind of constitution that quickly overpowers the deep fears, with a strong assurance that the world is good.
And maybe that means I’m blind. Maybe I’ve been absurdly lucky, one of the rare people in the world to have witnessed no horror, to have experienced no trauma, no war, no genocide, no holocaust. And maybe films like Salò exist to wake me out of my stupidity, to see the true violence of the world.
But, as I lay in bed the other night, feeling the tremors and the guilt – another idea came to me.
Maybe there’s a reason I’ve been so blessed. Maybe there’s a higher purpose, if such a thing exists, for why I’ve been given both a peaceful life and a gift of writing.
Because, this world is a very sinister place, filled with horror. But it is also a stunningly beautiful place, filled with everyday acts of exquisite kindness. For every person whose head is sawed off on the internet by a desperate extremist or whose face is chewed off by their labrador while they try to escape from their life in their sleep – someone else falls in love. For the first time. And sees a world suddenly filled with light, brimming with possibility. Someone’s life is saved by an unexpected kindness, someone opens their home to a stranger and is rewarded with gratitude, someone passes out of this world in peace – and feels only joy as they are lifted away.
And it is that simultaneous crashing of contradictory realities that makes this world so complex and delicious.
Heard a great line on TV at 4 in the morning last night when I couldn’t sleep: “Know what the two best words in the English language are? Things Change.”
And maybe, this is my job. To see it all, and to write about what I can see. To remind those whose eyes are mired in the darkness, that the world is also made of light and that things change. And to remind those who are incapable of feeling the darkness, because they’ve never seen it, that the world is not kind to everyone and that everything changes.
Here’ some of Pasolini’s own writing on Salò I found.
Quite an intense subversive character. Poet, filmmaker, radical - murdered by a gay lover, or possibly a political assassination the week he finished editing Salò.
He makes it very clear here that his reason for making this film was to sensitize an audience to the horrors of fascism. And it’s hard to look at the images in this film - and not think of Bush’s Abu Graib.
…The entire film with its unheard-of atrocities which are almost unmentionable, is presented as an immense sadistic metaphor of what was the Nazi-Fascist ‘dissociation’ from its ‘crimes against humanity’.
Sade’s characters (who are clearly SS men in civilian dress) behave exactly with their victims as the Nazi-Fascists did with theirs. They considered them as objects and destroyed automatically all possibility of human relationship with them.
Practical reason says that during the Republic of Salò it would have been particularly easy given the atmosphere to organise, as Sade’s protagonists did, a huge orgy in a villa guarded by SS men. Sade says explicitly in a phrase, less famous than so many others, that nothing is more profoundly anarchic than power - any power. To my knowledge there has never been in Europe any power as anarchic as that of the Republic of Salò: it was the most petty excess functioning as government. What applies to all power was especially clear in this one.
In addition to being anarchic what best characterises power - any power - is its natural capacity to turn human bodies into objects. Nazi-Fascist repression excelled in this.
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