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The Metaphysics of Media
Movies & Reality-Modeling
Among conspiracy theorists, there is a sort of “classic” way of deconstructing movies and other media offerings. You go watch it and then you sort of deconstruct it to understand the themes and figure out what the “subconscious message” of the whole thing is. The basic premise of the exercise is that movies and other media act as sort of instructional videos for people, to teach the masses a certain type of behavior, idea or attitude which the “controllers” can then manipulate at will.
It’s a pretty useful way of looking at media, I think. But it’s not the only way. And it’s certainly not the weirdest way I have thought of…
Coming hot off the heels of some rampant speculation about the Bible and alternate reality shifts is my latest effort at reformulating how I look at the media, what it is doing and why it is being done. While this approach builds on the deconstructionist conspiracy-theory approach outlined above in certain ways, it doesn’t require you to believe in it. In all actuality, it is a great deal more occult or perhaps magical in its focus.
Ok, here goes…
Let’s work with movies, since they are sort of a prototypical “holy” form of media. What is a movie? A movie consists of a bunch of people performing particular actions. Some of those actions consist of acting out a story-line while others have to do with filming, editing, props, costumes, etc. I used to think of a movie as a simulated event. But it is not. It is a complex of inter-locking purposeful real events performed by real people, which are then re-arranged and presented so as to create a new event.
Let me start over. I live in a “funky old house” as my landlord first put it when we moved in. There is a room in the back by our kitchen (lovingly nicknamed “the Safari room” for whatever reason), which is in a sort of perpetual state of disrepair. It is filled with bikes, our recycling, bits of old carpet and things like that. But most interesting of all though is that for years prior to our occupancy the walls of the room were used to write notes on. Some are phone numbers, some observations and some quotes. The other night I spotted the following written lightly in pencil over the doorway:
“Art is the selection, collection and arrangement of objects.”
Applying that to the matter at hand, we could think of a movie as being a complex set of events, out of which certain events are selected to be filmed. Those events which end up on film are then collected together, edited down and arranged in a linear sequence. The result is what we call a movie or film.
The trick lies in that this movie is composed of selected and arranged events (the “Original Events” - OE), but that the showing of viewing of that movie is in itself an event as well (a “New Event” - NE). In economic terms, we might say that the more people who see this movie, the more “real” the New Event created by the movie becomes. It becomes a shared reference point for masses of people and is added to the cultural lexicon. But if no one watches the movie, it is considered a “flop.”
Might there be something more going on here than just simple economics when it comes to the transformation of “Original Events” into a “New Event” witnessed by other people?
My thoughts on this are partially informed by what is referred to as the “observer effect” in science:
In science, the observer effect refers to changes that the act of observing has on the phenomenon being observed. For example: observing an electron will change its path because the observing light or radiation contains enough energy to disturb it.
In quantum mechanics, if the outcome of an event has not been observed, it exists in a state of superposition, which is being in all possible states at once. The most famous example is the thought experiment Schrödinger’s cat, in which the cat is neither alive nor dead until observed — until that time, the cat is both alive and dead (technically half-alive and half-dead in probability terms).
Or, put more simply, the observation of an event changes the event. Or, that is, the observation of an “Original Event” (everything that goes into the production of a movie) which has been re-formatted to create an “New Event” (ie, a movie) changes the events involved.
The magical part comes in when you start factoring in how intent works in this scenario. The people who created the OE had the intent to create an NE. They worked together as a team, with usually significant financial backing over a sustained period of time so that the NE which they created would have a certain effect.
Conspiracy theorists tend to focus on unravelling what they perceive to be the original intent of those who create the movie, by determining what hidden “messages” the movie seems to be conveying. But what this approach overlooks is simply that one series of events (OE) has been fundamentally changed to create a completely New Event in the eyes, hearts and minds of those who witness it.
What happens, then, is each person who goes to a movie, watches it and bears witness to it works as co-creator to edge this NE more and more into manifested reality and the OE farther and farther away from manifested reality. Think of legal contracts, such as marriages - they tend to be considered less “valid” or legally-binding when they lack witnesses. And typically, the person or people who act as witness ought not to be party to the contract - such that a witness to a will wouldn’t be someone named in it as a beneficiary.
So when you watch a media event, whether it is a movie or otherwise, what you are doing is acting as an impartial witness to the reformulation of reality. Each person who bears witness to something lends a measure of their personal energy or intent to it. They validate it by observing it. In the case of Schrodinger’s cat, they remove the event from a state of indeterminacy into one where a definitive answer has been given. It doesn’t matter whether or not they liked or disliked the movie. It doesn’t matter whether or not they “got” the message from it. It only matters that they witnessed it and thereby helped to bring it closer and closer into manifestation.
To re-frame it and hopefully clarify again: Movies take real events and re-assemble them to create fake events which become more real the more people witness them.
You could certainly think of this principle as acting on a psychological level, where the events described by the movie become real psychologically for people. But with all the talk of alternate & parallel universes in the air lately, I’m tempted to push it even farther. What if the true “occult” purpose of movies is to literally change reality? Or put another way, when we modulate OE into NE and begin to accrue witnesses, we begin to shift orthogonally to parallel universes where the New Events are more real than the Old Events?
We can also apply this idea not just to obvious media events like movies, but also to less obvious areas as well. Think about things like covert or “black ops” or activities which governments undertake in secret: the assassination of a political figure, the incitement of rebellion in a region, purposeful economic devastation. The reason these things are kept secret is the same reason that the director and editors of a movie don’t appear in it: they are working to create a new reality for the viewer. To tip their hand as to their own existence and intervention is to ruin the illusory reality they are trying to push towards. (Conspiracy theorists in this sense would be little different from people who want to watch the “making of” and extras on a DVD package.)
Another way to think about how this works: imagine you were “framed” for a crime you didn’t commit. Let’s say it is a brutal rape and murder of a young girl. For the frame-up to work, there needs to be some kind of original real event: a real girl who was raped and murdered, and you being in the vicinity on the same night. The people responsible for the framing would be like the directors and editors of this bit of reality-modulation. They would select the real events and then re-arrange them so that their original relationships become distorted, and a new set of relationships are formed. Now, someone being framed for something like this would be utterly purposeless until you actually start telling people about it. That is, they need “witnesses” to bridge the original events into manifestation as a new event. They need people to start thinking that you are really the culprit. So a series of clues would be disclosed to police and media, who would then additionally select a sub-set of this information (itself probably re-formulated) to tell to the public in the hopes of catching you, the killer.
Now we can talk about parallel universes all we want, but it’s difficult to verify that they exist. But if you want a concrete example of a real parallel universe that you could easily fall into, imagine suddenly that ALL your friends and family and co-workers start suspecting that you are a brutal pedophiliac-rapist-murderer. Within the span of a few minutes, you would be plunged into a hellish alternate version of your regular life, where you would come to question absolutely everything about the world and probably about yourself as well. Given enough brutal reinforcement at the hands of the police, perhaps you would even begin to believe that you were actually responsible for this event. Your trauma might even create fleeting memories and images of the event in your mind. And then, as far as you yourself are concerned (along with everyone else who suspected you), reality has literally been changed.
That is obviously a rather extreme case, but hopefully it serves to drive the reality of my point home. Or maybe I too am actively creating this reality by selecting and arranging ideas, and you are co-creating it by witnessing it - whether or not you agree with it or think it’s all a crock of speculative shit.
In either case, I hope it makes you think twice about what movie you watch tonight after you get off work and turn the television on. What kind of reality do you want to lend your energy and intention towards creating?
Bonus: Worth 5 points each
- What are media companies trying to do to reality when they issue a re-make of a movie?
- What reality was intentionally created by the endless replaying of the images of 9/11?
- When surveillance technology becomes ubiquitous and our entire lives are recorded on camera, what happens to our identity when it can be edited and modulated just like a movie? (As I wrote that sentence, I looked up and saw the ID number of this post in my URL was “1984″ - go figure!)
November 15th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
The timing of your post couldn’t be better. I’ve been working on a project in which I blog a story and sometimes make little videos to go along with them. For various reasons I have mainly been using webcam footage, reframing short pieces of vacation footage, and cuts from old avant-guard and experimental films to create the actors and to move along the narrative. It isn’t very good, but it has been enjoyable for me.
One of the interesting things is I have totally reframed, recontextualized…whatever the correct word is, certain vacation events. People see them in a totally different light than they were originally made. They have a new significance.
Also, without going into details, a short time ago certain events took place as if this fiction was literally trying to intrude on my day to day reality. It is difficult to explain, and am hesitant to take this any further. It in part had to do with a stranger wanting to believe this was real, eventhough I made it clear it was a story. Things that I hadn’t posted were playing out in different context, but still oddly similar ways in real life. Kind of a hyperfiction event, but not one I willed. More than that, the process of reframing and combining various cuts of film have given me a chance to reflect on, evoke and process certain thoughts and emotions etc that have been lying underneath the surface. How I look at reality has been flipped.
This relates to question #3, except that the one editing and modulating the surveillnace footage is oneself. Unfortunately, I am out of steam and I have to get back to work, but I think there was a movie made recently by someone who retold and reframed his lifestory using video footage that he had collected since childhood. How healthy this is I won’t go into…lol
re #2, the more I saw the 9/11 footage the less real it became to me, while at the same time being drilled into my thick head, so that I will probably always recall it at will.
November 15th, 2006 at 2:42 pm
Very interesting. I’m thinking about this very subject in terms of live theatre right now. Thanks, Tim. Good food for thought here.
1) To reframe the way we remember the original? Perhaps in the same way textbooks (and preachers) revise the original story in order to gloss over details that conflict with current standards and tastes. Maybe it’s an attempt to “fix” the original version. (The question could also be asked, “why make movies about actual events?”)
2) I think the intent may have been to “make the event more real.” I think they flattened the effect it had by replaying it over and over. Subtle reminders, using the Zeignarik effect — that sort of thing would have been more effective than continually showing the twin towers. “Remember Pearl Harbor!” has more of an effect than seeing video taped reality over and over and over.
3) We all move into Kafkaville. If we have our own certainty of events and are surrounded by others who have a different certainty of events … well, we’ve just stumbled into a definition of insanity, haven’t we?
This blog reminded me of the remake of Miracle on 34th Street. In the original, Kris Kringle was proven to be Santa Claus because of agreement. Hundreds and hundreds of letters delivered to Kris.
In the remake, Kris Kringle was proven to be Santa Claus because the government acknowledges the existence of god on our currency.
Strange how the most significant deviation from the original was replacing group agreement with money.
(Great blog, Tim. I read it frequently but this is only my second comment. Keep up the good work!)
November 15th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
Incidently, you may have stumbled upon a workable way to create popular hits:
If a filmmaker (or songwriter, etc.) could answer this question for his or her audience, they’d be in clover.
November 15th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
Right, because that basically says: “See this movie and live this story if you want it to become your reality”
= $$$
November 15th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
In terms of movies, think about the fact that the old druidic wand, what we today would call a magick wand, was always made from the wood of the holly tree - Hollywood.
And as Jordan Maxwell would say, “They’re still weaving their magick on us today.”
November 15th, 2006 at 5:54 pm
The point is though, I think that it’s not *their* magick. We are the ones who are making it real with our intent and our witnessing. Their magick relies on our magick. We take that away and their magic wands wither away like so many flaccid, well, you get the idea…
THEY ONLY HAVE POWER BECAUSE WE KEEP LOOKING
November 15th, 2006 at 6:10 pm
It’s funny I think that remakes are made because they are popular stories that resonate with the majority, have a certain truth, but some people feel (rightly or wrongly) that they “didn’t quite get it right” and so they keep on doing it. We repeat what haunts us. It’s like the old joke that keeps on getting pass around. This made we wonder what the most remade movie is, yahoo (not the most illustrious source yes but) says the following:
But if you exclude adaptations of literary works, then many agree “The Most Dangerous Game” (1932), in which a big-game hunter targets human beings on his remote island, is the most borrowed-from film. (And even this was originally a short story.) Remakes and rip-offs (or “homages”) include “Run for the Sun,” “Bloodlust,” “Woman Hunt,” “Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity,” “Deadly Prey,” “Deadly Game,” “Final Rounds,” “Hard Target,” “Surviving the Game,” “Escape 2000,” “Star Hunter,” and “Predator.”
Kind of scary to think that The Most Dangerous Game needs to be constantly remade, and I imagine with each retelling it gets more and more grisly.
November 15th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
my answers to your questions (gotta get my extra credit!)
1) To re-edit the reality the original created. The Batman movies with George Cloony were horrible, so they made “Batman Begins” to undue the pollution of that reality. The same with the new James Bond; trying to undue the mistakes made in “Die Another Day”…. or to discredit the original… campy remakes can ruin a perfectly good reality.
2) Like Andrew said, to make it more real. How many Americans do you know who have no opinion on 9/11?
Zero.
Because everyone saw the horrific image of planes full of people being crashed into buildings full of even more people. Planes aren’t just vehicles anymore, planes are wepons; they’re missiles. They’ve changed what an image fundamentally is. But the wierd thing is, the news people aren’t thinking that, they’re thinking “Let’s show it over and over to get ratings up, this is the story of the decade” But that’s what they’re doing.
3) When 3D animation becomes quick, easy, and photo-realistic (which it will in the next 30 years) What if the government made totaly fake videos of you saying you were gonnah blow up the building that you walk by every day, and you planting the bomb. then they’d just blow up the building and hold you in gitmo untill you die, just cause you pissed them off, or voted wrong, or they needed a good terror attack to let them increase homeland security spending. what then?
November 15th, 2006 at 6:56 pm
What then exactly? Did you ever see the movie JFK, where they doctor the photo of Lee Harvey Oswald to be holding the gun and newspaper? We aren’t looking thirty years into the future with a crystal ball my friends…
November 15th, 2006 at 7:31 pm
[…] The news for today here in Seattle has everything to do with the subjects we’ve been discussing lately. Which is weird because we have been discussing some weird topics. It seems that professor John G. Cramer at the University of Washington is attempting to go somewhere where we’ve all been before: the past. I’ll let the Seattle PI fill you on some of the details: If his experiment with splitting photons actually works, says University of Washington physicist John Cramer, the next step will be to test for quantum “retrocausality.” […]
November 16th, 2006 at 4:00 am
Two quick thoughts (more on your next post!):
McLuhan says that the content of a medium (i.e., the plot!) is entirely irrelevant… what’s important is the medium. All films are peddling the same myth. A film on television or a DVD is telling a different story… they are appreciated differently by our senses. A film in 70mm Dolby digital at the cinema is a high-definition medium which requires little audience participation (brainwork) to appreciate… it slips in under the radar, as it were. A film on TV is a different matter.
And also, note that the word ‘intent’ can mean the same as ‘design’.
November 16th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
Except when you use the medium to point out your own fallibility and materiality. Juxtaposition of professionalism and dilettantism the medium of film employed by a personally responsible authorial subject and not as a virtual, self-perpetuating process.
Dogma-95 flicks as example…
In a sense, flipping a surveillance medium into a human medium.
Raoul Eshelman talks about this.
November 16th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
Haha. Yeah, we are, because in thirty years it won’t be Lee Harvey Oswald, it’ll be us.
o_0
And it will be done by our next door neibor with a program he downloaded for free because we crashed his barbecue.
November 17th, 2006 at 8:01 am
I’ve noticed a really bizarre effect lately. And it’s so bizarre that I think my mind is playing tricks on me.
But lately, whatever I’m thinking about, wondering about, shows up as a movie on my TV! My husband loves old movies and 9 out 10 times our TV is on TCM (Turner Classic Movies). I’ll be in the bedroom getting ready for work, tossing around some idea in my mind, let’s say reincarnation. And lo and behold I suddenly notice that a movie dealing with this exact subject is playing. Now was it that the background noise of the TV influenced me to think of reincarnation. Or crazy as it sounds is the TV/movie occurring because I’m thinking of reincarnation.
It has been happening over and over.
Then I got to wondering about why did all the old original TV stations pick as their logos - occultic, magical symbols. Never realized that or even crossed my mind until the internet. But is this just a coincidence?
ABC has always been “7″.
NBC has always been “Peacock”
CBS has always been “Eye of Horus” or “All Seeing Eye”.
I’m sure someone has discussed this before, but I find it hard to believe that this just happened my chance.
January 3rd, 2007 at 7:45 pm
[…] Keep those scissors lase-sharp everybody! Cause the sky is falling and she is going to open the gateway to the City of Pyramids. Time will finally grind to a halt when everything everywhere is recorded (Everything alive is registered). Mystery will vanish. Reality will finally be able to be edited on-the-fly instead of after-the-fact. I had listened to a whole fate as an element of my efforts. You are counting a history on how everything fits together. One of many possible histories. It is a recognition that explodes matters of the culture. Mediocrity of communication is dead. But hey - you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette… right? […]
February 8th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
[…] The same thing happens with all media events. Out of the cloud of infinite possibilities - of infinite possible meanings and combinations of people, places and events - a small subset is selected to become a reference point. People become glued to this reference point (power of witness), because something about our consciousness seeks out reference points to which we can not only anchor ourselves individually, but which we can use to act as collective anchor points as well in order to share experiences with one another. This is probably the true source of our mind’s incessant need to create anchor points: that we want to be able to share common experiences with one another. We call it “love” but it is merely the recognition that we have become separate and we don’t like that. This is why love is so tragic and sad. Love hurts. Ooooh, love hurts. Love is a rose but you better not pick it It only grows when it’s on the vine. A handful of thorns and you’ll know you’ve missed it You lose your love when you say the word “mine”. […]