Mary Jane…? (The Rebirth)

This gag would have worked so much better
if it was with the Return of Optimus Prime.

Well… shit.

So, when I was planning this project, I obviously needed to find some works that came out during the time period I allotted for myself (October-November, 1987). One such example was this post on the last episodes of the Transformers. These works would have to fit in with the themes and ideas I wanted to explore so that there could be something to actually talk about related to the actual comic (or flail about doing some weird and [hopefully] interesting things involving creative fiction). So for the thematic connection, I was hoping to tie it in with themes of resurrection and thematically contrast how Optimus Prime came back from the dead and what it meant with the source text.

One problem: turns out “The Rebirth” isn’t the episode where Optimus comes back from the dead. That, apparently, came out in February of 1987. “The Rebirth” is the one with the sodding Headmasters. Now, obviously, what I should do is cut this entry entirely like I did with Gödel and move on to the next one. Except, I can’t do that because there isn’t a connective tissue between Joseph Campbell’s death and the next entry such that they would transition into each other well.

And to top it all off, the episodes are terrible. The acting is stilted, the animation is crap, and the script is all over the place. One moment that jumps out is in the first part, wherein the Autobots land on a world at war between robots and organics (I don’t remember what they’re called, I don’t care) where robots are the masters of the world and people as opposed to how it should be (remember: all stories about robots stem from a tale about a slave revolt). (Except not, because the robots are controlled by an evil counsel because why have thematic implications when you can have evil aliens.) As such, the presence of the Autobots is met with distrust and the token humans as species traitors. The natives are able to easily defeat the Autobots, saying they will never be reactivated.

And then the Decepticons come and attack. Now, one would assume given what they know, that the natives would assume these new robots are reinforcements out to finish the extermination of these rebels. However one of the token humans claims the Decepticons are their enemy. A sensible person should see this as a flimsy ruse at best by a person desperate to not be put against the wall with the rest of the quislings. Instead, the leader of the rebels (for some reason) trusts the human and frees the Autobots. This sequence takes place over the course of five minutes.

And that’s not even getting into the whole “romantic subplot between a robot and a minor” thing the episode has going for it. So I guess this is my way of admitting that I’m in a bit of a bind with no way out, because I am an idiot who doesn’t know when things come out and who has no idea how I’m going to approach this beyond “This is shit and I don’t like it.” I have no history with the Transformers (they, along with Power Rangers, were the show that was always on whenever something I liked was on. Like, maybe I caught a clip of them, maybe), I have no thematic lens to look at it that connects to the themes of the blog. At best, I have a contrast between this series’ failed attempts at being a new series for the Transformers (the ending even has a “you haven’t seen the last of us” with Galvetron having a new Starscream [which is a terrible idea because there was nothing wrong with Starscream]) that instead marked the end of the original run with the successful end Kraven’s Last Hunt provides while also acting as a new beginning for Spider-Man as we know him. But honestly, I don’t think that concept has enough legs to get us through the length of a typical entry.

In short, this is probably something that should be cut, but can’t due to the structure. I’m tempted to just say “fuck it, let’s just write the post I wanted to write and give nary a damn for the timescale of this project” and talk about how the return of Optimus Prime, though framed as heroic, is the cause of a literal hate plague that nearly kills everyone in the entire universe. I would probably make a cruel joke about how Optimus is a dark savior, bringing death and destruction in his wake. Then, I’d go in depth on how this also fucks over Rodimus Prime, as it effectively steals his status as main character and throws it back to Optimus Prime (maybe make a reference to Dragon Ball Z). Then, having actually sat through The Rebirth, note how nothing actually comes of this, as the series became a story about a splinter group of symbiotic cyborgs resisting against slavery. Afterwards, I’d go back to the subject of Optimus Prime’s resurrection and note a lack of interiority in the matter before making a contrast of the typical mystical approach most resurrection stories take to this one’s more scientific explanation (this isn’t the first time Optimus has died). Somehow get into why this makes this resurrection less appealing. I’d probably find a way to whinge about never having read the IDW comics, aside from a few scans here and there before moving on to lamenting my lack of nostalgia for the franchise before finally transitioning into the next entry by talking about that next generation of Autobots that got screwed over by the past over taking them. Then, again since I’ve already seen what they would have done next, cringe in horror at Headmasters and lament the need for Transformers to be put down. Or something along those lines, I don’t know. Point is, I feel guilty doing the bare bones version of that entry that never was. It’s not that good, but then I suppose that’s fitting for The Rebirth: A view of what could have been and a gratitude that it wasn’t.

(Next Time: Empathy and the Sacred Feminine)

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[Photo: Robocop Directed by Paul Verhoeven Script by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner]

The Strands of Fate That Bind Us: (The Death of Joseph Campbell)

“But now I find myself in need of something new which, for lack of a better word, we shall call… MAGIC!”
-Mark Frost, Harley Peyton, and Robert Engels

A crank at work.

So Joseph Campbell died in the literal middle of the comic. As in “literally at the half-way mark of the comic.” Spider-Man comes back from the dead, hand climbing out of the grave, and then Joseph Campbell dies. Kraven’s Last Hunt, a comic indebted to the work of William Blake, in terms of its’ original title being “Fearful Symmetry,” quoting The Tyger, and an ambiguity in regards to the nature of spiritual visions (be they ghosts or hallucinations), was released at a time where Joseph Campbell died.

Ok, this is going to require some explanation. Let’s start with the two players: William Blake was a romantic era poet and painter, though not himself a romantic on account of him being, among other things, working class. His visionary poetry (both in terms of the imagery within each poem and the fact that Blake was inspired by, for lack of a better term, visions of Angels, Fae, and Undead Fleas) ran the gambit of themes from “EVEN THOUGH YOU WON THE WAR, THE REVOLUTION STILL FAILED UTTERLY ON ACCOUNT OF YOUR FAILURE TO END SLAVERY, AMERICA” to “HOLY FUCK, THERE’S A FUCKING TIGER IN THE WOODS! AND IT’S ON FIRE! WHAT KIND OF FUCKED UP GOD WOULD LET SUCH A THING HAPPEN?” to “Fuck you Milton. Fuck you.”

But at the core of his themes was the rejection of the fixed nature of the universe, represented by two forces. First was that of noted Mason Sir Isaac Newton, for whom Blake notably said “May God us keep/ From Single vision & Newtons Sleep.” As Alan Moore once wrote, “For Blake, the boundaries of Newton’s thought were the cold, stone parameters of an internal dungeon to which all humanity had been condemned without its comprehension or its knowledge.” However, Newton himself is not the focal point of Blake’s horror at a fixed nature for reality, merely a major force pushing such a defined view onto the world. No, the villain (if such a singular term could be used) of Blake’s mythology would be Urizen.

Named after a pun, Urizen is the dream that comes from Newtons sleep: a bearded old man who needs everything defined, all the mysteries solved, and all things bend to his will. However, even defining Urizen by these terms was far too singular a vision for Blake, and so he spent a large portion of his career attempting to “redeem” Urizen while not going the route of many a redemption arc (the baddie falls in love with the female goodie and all is forgiven). Rather, he invents a new character called Ahania to represent the pleasurable aspects of discovery and understanding while accepting that there is so much going on in the depths of the unknown that it can never be fully quantified. Blake being Blake, Ahania is a tragic figure, never quite being the hero of her own story (which perhaps brings up a flaw in Kraven’s Last Hunt, though we’ll get to that in two entries).

The second player, and more famous of the two, is Joseph Campbell. Known throughout the humanities circles as a hack (at best), Campbell was a scholar most notable for The Hero With A Thousand Faces, a text that argues that all myths, and indeed all stories, can be boiled down into a monomyth:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Putting aside the Blakean implications of this, the theory is far too simplistic, even in a more detailed form. It views storytelling as a mere formula of actions that can be replicated en masse to replicate a good story. Indeed, it’s so generic that there is essentially no meaning to the structure itself to the point where one can apply it to both Star Wars and (500) Days of Summer. One could argue that’s the point of the monomyth, but that just seems like it’s twisting the nature of fiction to fit a worldview rather than have what you see before you shaping the worldview. Furthermore, the “monomyth” that supposedly sums the story humanity has been telling itself over and over again is extremely Eurocentric, ignoring the stories of Asia, Africa, and other non-white cultures (for more on why this is terrible, watch Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The danger of a single story). It even ignores European stories such as The Pilgrim’s Progress and Frankenstein, which blatantly don’t fit the narrative. And, of course, this is an extremely masculine vision of how fiction ought to work (Campbell’s defense amounts to “Men go to war, women wait”).

So it should come as no surprise that Campbell’s work has been embraced by the wider culture and used as a cudgel against anyone interested in the humanities. Because, why study the art of fiction and how it impacts the world when it all boils down to one story about the awesomeness of straight white men? Who cares about “intersectionality” or “queer theory” when we have a formula? Can’t you just get a real job like studying how the universe isn’t actually a thing?

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, how does all of this relate to Kraven’s Last Hunt? Well consider the narrative: aside from being heavily indebted to Blake (both in terms of its visionary lead, quoting one of his more famous works, and rejecting the fixed interpretation of the lead made by the villain in favor of something more fluid), the comic rejects the principles held by the monomyth. When Peter Parker ventures forth from the common day, he gets shot in the face, stone dead. Kraven, the baddie, takes over the plot. There’s no decisive victory over Kraven as a physical threat (thematically, the text sides with Peter and gives him a decisive victory, but the monomyth cares not for mere theme). And the boon Peter “bestows” upon Kraven is essentially the same thing as going to the basement to fight the monster of your childhood, only to discover it was a rubbish mask all along. And that’s not even getting into the more detailed aspects of the “Hero’s Journey” that the text doesn’t neatly fit within.

So given all of this, and the major influence on the blog, I am reaching the conclusion that Kraven’s Last Hunt was a magical ritual to kill Joseph Campbell. Now, this isn’t to suggest that J.M. DeMatteis is yet another comic book writer who is also a magician (I refuse to make such judgments until I’ve read Moonshadow and Seekers into the Mystery and actually asked him [though, accounts show the answer is probably no]). Actual Comic Book Writing Magicians like Grant Morrison and Alan Moore tend to lean toward the concept of magic being akin to the act of creation in such a way as to make magicians out of every single artist who ever lived (Crowley, meanwhile, went even further via his suggestion that existence itself is a magical act [Do What Thou Wilt and all]). Nor is this to suggest intentionality on the parts of anyone involved in the comic (if you could intentionally kill someone with a magical ritual, then every single magician would be dead). Rather, to invoke Kieron Gillen’s magical ritual to kill David Bowie, the relationship between Kraven’s Last Hunt and the Death of Joseph Campbell is synchronicity and coincidence and poetry.

It’s not so much that one caused the other, but instead that the events work thematically together. Much in the same way Mary Whitehouse taking Doctor Who a peg down at a time where the writing staff was interested in telling stories of monstrous fools in power whose monstrosity comes from their foolishness, so to is this fitting: a story about human frailty, the failures of the heroic ideal, and other themes that I want to save talking about for when I actually get to the comic is the perfect tale to encapsulate the death of the man who popularized that ideal in the first place.

(Given this, you might suspect that I’m trying to cite an author for our existence, penning each coincidence into a coherent novel. Well, no. The question “Is there a god and do they dictate our will” is not one I think has an answer that can be found or, for that matter, one that would be satisfactory enough for us to accept. We’d keep trying to dig deeper and deeper for the answer. It’s our Ahaniatic nature that pushes us to discover the implications of our actions. For all our reason, the best of us tend to find more questions than answers. Those like Dawkins and Campbell and Phelps who claim to have found the answer to all our questions, end up feeling flat and off. There’s some aspect of their response that’s wrong, and not just because two of the ones mentioned are definitely reactionary figures [Campbell, I’m not sure about as him being a hack ended up not putting him within my field of study, though given which cultures he focused on in his Hero’s Journey theory…].

One of the points of existence isn’t the answer to the mystery, but rather the act of trying to understand that mystery from the perspective of one of the threads. Our deductions are through our interactions with the rest of humanity and solutions can only be found in messy, stupid emotions that don’t fit within the singular vision of Your Reason.

[Then again, this could all be out of spite. A lot of this talk of God was probably going to be in an entry on Gödell’s Ontological Proof I spiked due to both lacking a copy of the proof and lacking any actual connection to Kraven’s Last Hunt. At most, all that post had going for it was essentially rehashing ideas from 30-year-old Grant Morrison comics [which is only slightly better than rehashing ideas from 30-year-old Alan Moore comics]. I freely admit to not being a Mathematician, so the language of Gödel’s work was going over my head, making my case essentially “It’s the job of the humanities to explore the nature of God, not the mathematician’s”. Again, spite.])

At the same time though, it seems a bit of a cruel thing to put around the neck of a comic about the necessity of empathy. Surely there’s more the story did other than kill a scholar. Well, in truth, I don’t know. It’s easier to discover a magical ritual to kill a person than one to create a person, as the former is at the end whereas the latter is the context (From Hell, for example, argues close to 100 years after the fact that the Jack the Ripper killings were a magical ritual to bring about Adolf Hitler and sustain the patriarchy [the latter, due to the intentionality of that aspect, was a mixed bag at best]).

In the end, we cannot know for certain the effects such a work will have on the future, be they inspirations for newer works of art, fond memories that help one push forward through the dark, cruel night we call the 21^st century, or merely a blog about the world that created such tales they wove. We cannot know for certain, nor do I think we’ll ever find out the full consequences of any of our answers. To do that would require ignoring stories that can no longer be told; the stories people refuse to find because they’re from sources we’d rather ignore than listen to; the stories that have yet to be told. Who knows what the future may hold for those of us invested in writing about the past. Who knows what stories we’ll find, and how many of them will be like nothing we’ve ever read before.

(Next Time: I Died For Your Sins.)

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[Photo: The Ancient of Days by William Blake]

Heal a Heart Crushed (Weaveworld)

"What is now proved was once only imagined."

{Cassette tape marked: Gwen 7. Tape label: Sycamore Trees. Found at the Parker residence.}

>click<

>WHRR<

>WHRR<

Hello Gwen. We haven’t talked in a while. Life’s been… life’s been busy. We used to talk all the time when… before you died. Well, I’d talk and talk like I was running out of time and you’d just listen. You’d look at me with those soft blue eyes and that knowing smile… I don’t think I was a good person back in those days. I don’t think I was a bad person either I didn’t try to hurt people or anything, but I didn’t do anything to help, you know? I just didn’t care. But being with you… oh, being with you made me care. I still wasn’t good, but I was better when I was with you. You were so good; your heart was like a lone star in a dark sky at the end of time, just waiting to supernova a universe into creation. Looking at you made me babble about things that had nothing to do with anything, just so I could be with you. Even thinking of you makes me ramble… I wanted to talk to you about a dream I had last night. You were there, we all were. Even Harry. It was twilight on winter’s eve. All my best memories of you are from winter, while my worst are from spring. The sky was cloudless, the night before there was a snowstorm that drowned the streets. Only the rooftops were spared. We were dressed in clothes we always dreamed about wearing, all blue and red. You were in this stunning blue dress that was sparkling in the amber light of the sleeping sun. Your hair was, for once, in a ponytail. I always told you you’d look amazing in a ponytail, and I was right. I was dressed in a zoot suit that I barely pulled off. We held each other for a moment, our eyes kissing with their gaze. And then the sky began to sing. It was an old tune, but for the life of me I couldn’t name it. It started out as a simple a cappella of “AaH” and “oOh” before the strings birthed themselves. It was a soft song, a simple song. Not one played at weddings or for religious celebrations, just a small song you’d hear at a dingy bar with no name pushed into new heights by making it an orchestral piece. It was a wordless song, but one I always loved. And so, we danced to it. It wasn’t one of those sad attempts at dancing I’d do to distract myself from my memories; it was true dancing, real dancing. It was the feel of the dancing you that night Harry got kidnapped by Kraven the Hunter. And we were doing it together. We would leap from rooftop to rooftop, like they were tiles on a dance floor. You never danced on rooftops, and for that I’m sorry. Soon we switched partners, and dancing the same dance with Harry. He was wearing his stupid bowtie. Everyone knew it was stupid even he knew it was stupid. No one could pull off that bowtie, not even Doctor Who. The music changed once we switched partners, suddenly the tune was more electronic and I recognized beat, though the lyrics were not there. I sang them to myself, “So won’t you say you love me?” and Harry replied, “I love you.” He was never one for the classics, but he always meant well. Even now, I think fondly of him. Once more we changed partners, and once more the song changed. The only instrument used was a ukulele. I didn’t recognize it; I didn’t know it and I probably never would. It was Peter, this time, who sang to me. He was dressed in his work clothes, but with a top hat and a monocle. It was quite funny in a way he typically isn’t. He can make me smile, sure, but his humor was more Blackadder than Chaplin. He sang, in a voice that was not his own but of a woman, “I remember the days of just keeping time… of hanging around in sleepy towns, forever. Back roads empty for miles.” And then we danced together, and the sky sang an alien song from an alien world. But it was our song nonetheless. I was holding Gwen’s hand and Peter’s hand, and Harry’s hand. It was then that I noticed that we weren’t on the ground anymore, maybe we never were. We were in the infinite canvas called space. We were a spaceship made flesh into perfection. We loved each other as we loved ourselves, for we were ourselves. And we sang with the chorus of stars. And then, I woke up. I was crying like I never cried before, even at the funeral. Peter didn’t hear my tears… at least I didn’t think he did. He seemed to be sleeping soundly for once. I went into the other room to be alone for a while, when I saw the old tape recorder. We took it from Aunt May’s house shortly after she moved in with us. I think Peter got it from a birthday party from Flash. The word “Puny” is etched into the back of it. Peter would use it every so often to talk to people who aren’t here anymore. His way of coping, I suppose. He talked to you a few weeks ago on Valentine’s Day. It’s our wedding anniversary today. Thirty years, can you believe it? I’m old while you’re young forever. Heh… I keep thinking of that last night together. Peter in… Vancouver, I think it was, covering something with Wolverine or one of those “The only solution to the problem it to group up and hit it till it dies” superheroes. They’re not family like the Richards are. They’re just people he works with. Anyways, Harry had dropped by, or more accurately collapsed into our apartment. He took a lot of LSD and was going through a bad trip. We carried him into a Taxi and took him home. He wasn’t there, thank God, so we put Harry into his bed and called a Doctor. I wanted to take him to a hospital, but he kept screaming “NO DOCTOR! NO DOCTOR!” You called Peter and told him to get home as soon as possible. And then you started to cry. At first, I thought it was about Harry burning up in the other room. We could hear his screams, though I was sure the rest of New York could as well. Maybe even parts of Connecticut could, though that might be a tad hyperbolic. But then you whispered “oh, Peter.” I turned and looked into your eyes, and they weren’t looking at me. They were looking past me. Not at something behind me, but at something that wasn’t there. I asked about it, and you gave me your typical silence. I wanted you, not your presence, I was adamant about that. I kept badgering you about it until you finally shouted the one thing I always knew about Peter. The thing he tried to keep to himself. The mask he’d wear when he didn’t want to be Peter. I was shocked; by the way you looked at me, maybe you thought I didn’t know. I did, I just didn’t think you did. You told me you found out a short time after Peter left for Canada; some fabric of his work clothes got mixed up with your laundry. You could tell from the name sewn to the inside of the mask. At first, you thought it was just a costume for Halloween, but then you started thinking about all those times he’d “flake” on us for a scoop. You never believed his terrible excuses, but you thought he was like Harry, except he could manage it better. Harry’s screams punctuated the point. You didn’t think he’d ever be Spider-Man. At first, you were angry. “The man who killed my father is my true love!” you said in a howl that seemed to silence Harry’s. Then you said the cognitive dissonance kept you from shouting what you knew to everyone who would listen. You wanted to watch him burn, but you also wanted to burn with him if it meant you would be with him forever. But instead, you kept quiet about it until that night. You turned to me and asked, “What should I do.” I couldn’t say anything. There were so many answers I could’ve given. I could have told you to keep that feeling repressed, as I had since I learned his secret. As I had for everything I felt strongly about. But looking into your eyes… It wasn’t like you were drowning, far from it. You were lost in space, hurtling through the cosmos in the hopes that a planet would rise up behind you so that you may finally stop falling. Looking into those hopeless eyes, I remembered eyes I saw in a mirror once. And it was at that moment, that I decided to try to be a good person. I didn’t say anything, what could I have said that would have made things better. I just sat down next to you, and held your hand. And you looked at me, and there was something on your face. I didn’t recognize it at first; it seemed too small to see. Then I saw it. It was like the smile in O Lucky Man… I just realized: you probably don’t get all these references I’m making. They all came out after you died. Hell, that film came out the weekend after you died. I’ll describe it for you: It wasn’t quite a smile, but rather it was the first movement of a smile. And I keep thinking of that smile, and of how you made me feel, and I realize that was the last moment I ever saw you happy. The next night, you died. I wasn’t there for you… I was with Harry when we heard. At least, when I heard. Harry was in Wonderland, crashing down into tragedy. I ran to the morgue, not even noticing Peter stalk into Harry’s apartment. So many things could have been avoided if I had. Harry would still be alive, for one. I don’t know what I could have done to make things work out in the end. I tried so hard with Harry and Peter, but it doesn’t always go the way you want it to… When I got to the morgue, your eyes were already closed. I wept into your corpse, hoping that maybe there’s some magic in this mad world we live in. Alas, they did nothing. Someone offered me a ride home, I don’t remember who. I sat in our apartment for several hours, hoping someone would come over to talk. I was startled when Peter opened the door. I tried to tell him about what happened. How I felt, and what that meant to me. He just snapped, viciously calling me out for my mask rather than myself. The mask told me to just get out of there. But I wanted to be a good person. So I stayed. We got married, after we both tried to not fall in love. I haven’t talked to him in a while. I still live with him, but we haven’t been talking lately. He’s been talking at me, but not with me. I keep thinking about us, and I realized something: I never believed in Eden. Not the way the Bible tells it. Original sin and all that crap. But maybe the story’s got an echo somewhere in it. An echo of the way things really were. A place of miracles where magic was made. And I think, whatever that story was, was what our relationship was like. And I want to have that back. I want to be with you and Harry and Peter in that endless winter. I miss you. I love you. Goodbye.

Hello? Is anyone in here? I thought I heard a noise… Oh, it’s this old thing. What are you doing o-

>click<

(Next time: Newtons Wake)

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[Photo: Doot Doot by JohannesVIII]

Bad Dream. (Prince of Darkness)

CW: Racism

THIS IS NOT A DREAM.

This has happened before. I remember it from my youth. The president of the United States is rarely a good man; I don’t think there’s ever been a good man as president in my lifetime. I don’t think people who become presidents are ever good, let alone the ones who want to be president.

From my lifetime, the president has been defined by his desire to kill and torture. I don’t remember Clinton, but I sure do remember Bush. I grew up on his dreams: of 24 and NCIS and other shows about the necessity of Bush’s world. I remember Katrina and his inability to react. I remember the parodies that played him like a clown, a fool, harmless. I remember being taken out of class at the age of six for reasons that would haunt the world forever. I don’t remember the exact details of that day, but I still feel the implications of that day rippling forwards and backwards through time. I remember one of those ripples; years after Bush became a painter. I was riding in my grandmother’s car to go to the dentist when I saw a man walk down the streets. I remember, for the briefest of moments, being afraid. I was afraid of him. I knew, even a few moments later, that I didn’t have to be afraid of him, and yet in that moment I was. I thought he was going to kill me. I was afraid he was going to kill us all. I know why I was afraid, I know how I was afraid, and I know my fear was unjustified, piercing through me like the ghost of a long dead devil. And yet, I still feared that man solely because he was a Muslim.

Hello Darkness,
my old friend.

Well, it’s not the worst John Carpenter film. It’s certainly the weakest of his “Apocalypse Trilogy” and it’s probably on the lower end of quality for Carpenter’s filmography, but Prince of Darkness is by no means terrible. The characters are a bit flat, the scares, while mostly effective, don’t quite work as well as other Carpenter scares (there’s a moment in the climax where we cut away solely to show the deaths of a minor character and then cut back as if nothing happened), and, given the Lovecraftian overtones of the trilogy, the nature of the evil is explained to us completely in a way that feels satisfactory rather than in a way that puts a hole in the heart of the audience that can never be filled like all good Lovecraft stories do.

But perhaps the biggest problem with the film is where it lies structurally within the trilogy. Where this the first part of the “Apocalypse Trilogy,” then one could see this as setting up the themes and ideas the other two films would push further and further until we end with the audience going completely mental in a relatively low budget film. Indeed, the flatness of the characters could act as another thematic concern of the films as the characters become more and more dimensioned until, at long last, they become self aware of their existence and watch the movie with us. Except this is the second film of the trilogy.

THIS IS NOT A DREAM. NOT A DREAM. WE ARE USING YOUR BRAIN’S ELETRICAL SYSTEM AS A RECIEVER. WE ARE UNABLE TO TRANSMIT THROUGH CONCIOUS NEURAL INTERFERRENCE. YOU ARE RECEVING THIS BROADCAST AS A DREAM. WE ARE TRANSMITTING FROM THE YEAR 2. O.

I remember Obama. The narrative we told at the end, when our dreams of a democratic savior turned out not to be shaped like him, was that of a broken man who couldn’t help but be broken by the job of being the president, no matter how hard he tried to be a good man, he could only succeed at being decent. I remember walking down to the library, seeing nice old ladies, and sometimes their sons, handing out pamphlets that said Obama was a Muslim Nazi, bent on destroying all that we hold dear. They were part of my daily walk from school, always there when the weather was nice and capable of containing such fear of the unknown. I never talked to them about their politics or anything for that matter. I was trying to be apolitical at the time and thus not even look into any sort of politics. I believed that made me enlightened, or at least allowed myself not to get into shouting matches like the ones I saw on TV. There were some politics I did hold, though I called them common sense. Fox News, despite the claims of my least favorite teacher, is not fair and balance, Clint Eastwood talking to a chair is frankly ridiculous, and gay people in general deserve to be treated like people. After I felt afraid about the Muslim man, I never saw those ladies, or indeed any people at a table by the library, again.

I remember reading about Chelsea Manning. At first, it was just about her Wikipedia page and how the system of Wikipedia allowed for members of the military to edit her page to refuse her even her own name. I remember my childhood bullies refusing to give me my name, though on a lesser scale than she was refused hers (they called me “Seen” because bullies are rarely, if ever, clever). I remember reading the article because it was about how shit Wikipedia is, with little care for who Chelsea even was. I remember reading articles about Chelsea years later and feeling guilty about my younger self’s desire for apoliticality. I remember feeling happy when it was announced she would be freed. I remember childhood friends refusing Chelsea her own name.

           And yet, the film itself is an engaging watch. There was never a moment when I felt bored or uninterested in the events unfolding in the film. Carpenter is, after all, a competent technician, even when making a left-handed film. There are some genuinely amazing shots scattered around this middling film (one that caught my eye was a moment where we inexplicably focus upon a leaf, but then the focus shifts and we now see the moon behind it, but it looks as if there’s no leaf blocking it at all, the VHS camera used for the dreams adds to the unnatural nature of those scenes, and the final shot is brilliant). The actors do a thoroughly good job with what little they have, though none of them really stand out. The effects are obviously a highlight of the production, even though they’re sparsely used-- when Sophie (ironically the only character whose name I remember) looks in horror at the celling filling up with the ooze the antichrist uses to possess people, it almost looks as if it’s actually dripping onto the celling as opposed to the camera just being upside down; the mercury used to keep drowned Satan (Carpenter has said it’s not Satan, but come on) is mesmerizing, especially given the chilling fate of the love interest; and Alice Cooper looks even more like a zombie than his stage persona.

THIS IS NOT A DREAM. NOT A DREAM. WE ARE USING YOUR BRAIN’S ELETRICAL SYSTEM AS A RECIEVER. WE ARE UNABLE TO TRANSMIT THROUGH CONCIOUS NEURAL INTERFERRENCE. YOU ARE RECEVING THIS BROADCAST AS A DREAM. WE ARE TRANSMITTING FROM THE YEAR 2.

I know TRUMP. I was there when the votes were tallied and it became increasingly clear that HE would win, I became afraid. This was not the terror of a ripple nor the terror of that those who thought Obama was going to somehow lose in 2008 felt. Sure, I voted for Clinton, but that was because Stein wanted me dead and the Libertarians were never going to be a good choice, despite what the South Park guys say. But I didn’t feel afraid because Clinton lost. I was reading books about the cause HE was courting. I knew what evil they wanted. What their end goal was. They haven’t touched me, not yet. Maybe they never will. I’m being naïve; they’ll get to me eventually. I felt numb and broken when HE won. My brother told me I was overreacting and that this was just how the Republicans reacted when Obama won. Because being afraid because a Black Man is elected president because the last president made it so no Republican could be elected as the next president is the same as being afraid of an open racist, sexist, homophobic monster is elected president because HE was a racist, sexist, homophobic. I screamed at people around me because I needed to futilely scream at something. I apologized to my roommates who were trying to sleep, but I didn’t feel like anyone else felt afraid. Months later, my brother would make a joke about knowing what it’s like to be a Clinton voter on election night. How I hated his willingness to brush aside the implications of HIM being president for the sake of mocking the left.

I remember the marches. I never attended any of them, mostly because I was nowhere near any of the big ones and I only learned about the small ones after they occurred. I wish I could go to one of them, just one. I feel like I’m not doing anything to help. I can help, but instead I’m going to movies, reading books, and writing a blog about the 1980’s. I feel like I’m too much of an introvert to do anything. I keep thinking about the nuclear bomb that’s going to drop on New York City the moment I enter because HE wrote a tweet that pissed off someone. I feel like I’m lying just to get brownie points for being a good liberal who supports punching Nazis, yet would never actually do anything about the injustices of the world.

I remember the other marches. The ones that killed people. The ones that HE was fine with. The ones HE only complained about under duress. I remember nothing changing when HE said literal, actual Nazis were just some good working boys. I remember nothing changing when HE bragged about grabbing women by their pussies. I remember nothing changing when HE let Puerto Rico drown. I remember being told HE was a dove by my brother on Election Night in comparison to Clinton’s hawk. I remember HIM declaring a willingness to drop nuclear bombs on North Korea.

I remember reading about the Fourth Dimension; I read about it during the Obama administration, and around the time HE won, but it keeps popping up in my head when I don’t want it to. It claimed events have ripples that recur again and again in new and different shapes, each getting worse and worse than the last. The song remains the same, but the tune changes slightly, until at last a new song kills us all in our endless state of wartime. I remember the fear that crept up on me as I read that bit of science, of how its implications disregarded the nature of any sort of free will. If the future is fixed, if these events that will occur are known to occur, is there anything we can do to change them? To stop the ripples in time in the first place? Or is history doomed to be as it always will be, in its singular vision?

In short Prince of Darkness, a movie about a group of scientists studying a religious artifact said to house the antichrist and what follows in the wake of his escape and attempt to bring his father (THE ANTI-GOD) out of the Darkseid, doesn’t really hold a candle to stories within the genre like Nameless or Carpenter’s later Mouth of Madness and it probably would have been improved if there was another half-hour added to the film. In many ways, the explorations of the themes of identity and the supernatural that the film toys with were done much better in The Ward. Still, it’s an enjoyable watch that’s worth at least seeing once. Though, if I’m being blunt, it’s not worth writing 2,000 words in any context outside of a project exploring the interests of John Carpenter.

THIS IS NOT A DREAM. NOT A DREAM. WE ARE USING YOUR BRAIN’S ELETRICAL SYSTEM AS A RECIEVER. WE ARE UNABLE TO TRANSMIT THROUGH CONCIOUS NEURAL INTERFERRENCE. YOU ARE RECEVING THIS BROADCAST AS A DREAM. WE ARE TRANSMITTING FROM THE YEAR 2. O. 1. 7.  YOU ARE RECEVING THIS BROADCAST IN ORDER TO ALTER THE EVENTS YOU ARE SEEING. OUR TECHNOLOGY HAS NOT DEVELOPED A TRANSMITTER STRONG ENOUGH TO REACH YOUR CONCIOUS STATE OF AWARENES. BUT THIS IS NOT A DREAM. YOU ARE SEEING WHAT IS AN ACTUAL OCCURRING PHENOMENON FOR THE PURPOSE OF CAUSALITY VIOLATION.

I don’t remember Regan. I wasn’t there for that. But he was always there for me.

(Next Time: We Have Such Sights To Show You…)

Special thanks to Scout Tafoya. 

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[Photo: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson]