Once upon a time, a long time this blog was a movie blog.
One of my early childhood memories involves going to movies, perhaps the first time I recollect going to the movies at all. It was the summer of 1971. We lived in Ames in an old house near downtown. That was before the mall was built, so downtown was still the center of life, including having the grand old theater, which was called the Collegiate. It was one of type of old theaters the with just big auditorium and ornate old decor and velvet curtains.
It was the Collegiate that showed the summer movies for kids, once-a-week matinees where you would clip out the coupon from the local newspaper, and bring it to the box office, and you would be admitted for twenty-five cents. Inside you could buy Charms Blow Pops and orange soda that came in a small plastic orange with green plastic leaves on them and a thin straw for the stem. I thought that was the height of living, to have orange drink in a plastic orange like that.
I was six years old. My sister Kate was four. One Wednesday---they were always on Wednesday, we were given some pocket change by our parents and went to the week's show. Back then it was not abnormal in a small town in Iowa for a six-year-old and a four-year-old to simply walk around town by themselves, and go to a movie. At least we never thought of it as anything but normal.
The movie I remember going to see that particular week was called The Raven. It was made in 1963 loosely based on the Edward Allen Poe poem. Actually it had almost nothing to do with the poem, but only used the title, a few superficial aspects.
I have since seen the film again, on TCM years ago, so I know that the "horror" of the movie is mostly just spooky imagery, and a spooky theme, like a campfire story. At the time I never could have known that it was part of the low-budget campy, absurdist "horror" movies (tame by today's standards) made by the great Roger Corman, whose movies have since become cult classics. Many of them, like this one, starred Vincent Price. They are really just fun, and have nothing to do with the shock horror movies we think of today.
What I remember about the movie that stuck with me years later was that it involved a conflict between two magician-wizards. One wizard goes to visit another at his castle. They wind up having a big wizard battle at the end, with special effects as they hurl things at each other.
It was nothing really scary, but to my four-year-old sister, it was terrifying. So we actually left the movie towards the end, when the battle was in full swing, and magical objects were flying back and forth in the castle. Right before we walked out of the auditorium, I saw the wizards sitting in the heap of the castle, the fallen stones around them.
For many years I remembered this unsatisfying ending to the movie, and I wondered how the movie ended. In Austin, when I finally saw it on TCM, some time in the 1990s, I watched it all the way through, waiting for the very scene where left the theater. It turns out that we left in literally the last scene, with less than five seconds left in the entire movie. I still laugh about that.
I think about this movie in light of what is going on now. We are currently under assault of the greatest disinformation campaign in the history of the world, to make us think that Joe Biden was elected President of the United States. I can't open up with iPad without getting notifications from the News app. My Twitter feed is full of promoted posts about it.
This of course is wizard warfare. What is wizard warfare really? It is the power to use one's will, and one's words, to shape reality, mainly by making other people believe what you want them to believe. You make them believe something that isn't there at all, or you blind them to something that actually is there.
We make fun of primitive cultures and they way they obeyed shaman and magicians. Why would anything go along with such thing? We are seeing the reason right now before our eyes. Wizard warfare can be extremely powerful.
But like all wizard power, it depends utterly on the cooperation of the wizard's target. If you can keep your wits about you, can defeat a wizard. Sometimes that is more easily said than done. How are you holding up, right now, my fellow patriots?
I know that many on our side are falling victim to the wizard power. It is meant of demoralize us, to make us submit to the reality they want us to believe. Some on our side no doubt are in despair, and are moping about how they will somehow get by in the new administration.
The good news is that the battle against the wizards on their side does not need most our cooperation anymore. The wizards cannot really say who the next President is, unless we all submit to this. For most of us, our job is done. We voted. We are like the colonial militia in 1776, the citizen-farmers, who were instructed to fire just a single musket round at the advancing British, and then to flee, as if it rout. Then the British would advance in victory, only to run into the stone wall of the colonial regulars in formation.
The only people who matter in this really are Donald Trump and those around him. He obviously knows he has the goods, and he is moving about life with the surety that he will be re-elected President on December 14 (the real date of the election), or sometimes after that, say on January 3, if it goes to the House (which it probably won't). He is immune to the wizard power.
But it will seem scary for the next couple weeks, as they wizards do everything in their power to make you submit to their reality. My best advice is ignore the news, but that can be hard. Better advice, I think, is to sit back and enjoy the spectacle of the phony three-week "Biden-Harris Administration" before it all comes falling apart. In the future, this small chapter of history will be remembered with great humor, and expressed in the quotation marks I just used. Enjoy it, as you would a comedy-horror movie by Roger Corman, knowing how it will end. Don't get angry or insulted. Don't argue with people on social media. Let them enjoy the fantasy while it lasts. Think of it as a Netflix series that will have a short run. That's how I'm going to approach it.
This truly is the climactic wizard battle we have been building up to, over the entire course of the second half of the Twentieth Century and the first two decades of the new millennium. Wizard warfare is the essence of Postmodernity, in which reality is defined by words alone, spoken by the right people, in the media. This is the ultimate battle. After it, they will be in ruins. Enjoy!
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| Say it after me...He's been declared the winner...DECLARED I tell you! |
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