Take a second look at "Seconds" on CineVerse!

With a million things taking up so much of every day, putting up new posts has fallen by the wayside again. But I did want to share the link to a great episode of the CineVerse film discussion where we take a look at Seconds, an excellent, if lesser known, thriller from suspense master John Frankenheimer. As Erik Markin, hosts of our discussion writes: Released at the height of the Cold War in 1966, Seconds is a unique psychological thriller directed by John Frankenheimer that can still resonate with modern audiences in a world where innovative technologies can offer exciting—and frightening—new possibilities. Notable for its unsettling take on themes of identity, existential crisis, and the pressures of modern life, the film follows Arthur Hamilton, a dissatisfied middle-aged man, who is approached by an enigmatic group that offers him a chance to erase his old existence and begin anew by undergoing a complete physical transformation. After assuming the identity of the younger, more successful Tony Wilson, played by Rock Hudson, Hamilton initially enjoys his new life. However, he soon discovers that this fresh start comes with a heavy and frightening price.

To listen to a recording of our CineVerse group discussion of Seconds, click here.

Seconds is overwhelmingly dark and pessimistic, even for the Cold War era, with an especially downbeat conclusion. There is no tacked-on happy ending here. This is a film that attempts to expose the myths and lies behind the pursuit of the American dream and the search for physical perfectionism—at a time when advertising and popular culture emphasized physical beauty, materialism, and sex appeal.

The visuals are creative, memorable, and unsettling, particularly the distorted shots achieved by master cinematographer James Wong Howe, who uses fish eye lenses, distorted and wide angles, giant close-ups of blank, soulless faces, POV shots, tracking shots following heads and feet, jump cuts and other techniques to achieve a disturbing visual tapestry.

Frankenheimer's direction builds on his earlier work with themes of conspiracy, dread, and control, evident in films like The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May. Though Seconds was not a commercial hit upon release, it has since garnered a devoted following and is now considered a significant piece of existential and dystopian cinema.

 

Hollywood doesn’t understand that the Magic Bullet theory doesn’t work.

When I teach various courses on media theory, media history, or media business, we discuss one of the first theories of the relationship between media messages and audiences. The Magic Bullet Theory, originating in the early 20^th century, expounded upon in Harold Laswell’s book, “Propaganda Technique in the War,” argues that a skilled communicator can craft a persuasive message that will have direct and uniform effects on all members of his audience. Today any textbook on mass communication theory also explains that the Magic Bullet Theory is overly simplistic, unrealistic, and stands as a discredited relic of the dawn of media studies. 

 

To discuss in detail why the Magic Bullet Theory is an unrealistic explanation of the communication process would take too much space here, so for an abridged version, consider the following: Suppose you had one shot to convince a room full of people to accept your position on some controversial issue. Suppose you want to convince them one way or another about the proper policy on gun control or abortion. Do you think you could come up with a perfect message—even suppose you have the most eloquent speaker in the world doing the talking for you or that you present them a video with your persuasive message directed by Steven Spielberg himself—do you think you will be able to sway every single person in that room to agree with your position? Of course not. It would be foolish to think otherwise. People’s belief systems, tastes, opinions, and preferences are shaped by a combination of factors like life experiences, upbringing, education, socialization among friends, and a whole lot of our personal, innate, psychological hard wiring. A single message, no matter how well constructed, will not immediately cut through and neutralize all of those other factors. As advertising professionals will always say, the most common type of ad is the one that people ignore. 

 

Therefore, it is unfortunate that people making films and TV shows today don’t seem to understand this. Or, perhaps they are so arrogant as to believe they will be the ones to come up with that perfect magic bullet message that will have direct, immediate, and powerful uniform effects on every single audience member.

 

I bring this up in light of realizing that the most compelling and entertaining aspect of observing the film industry these days is to witness some of its  most spectacular failures in both theatrical releases and streaming series. And some of these megaton bombs are coming from franchises that have decades-long track records of success and global name recognition. These are intellectual properties that have absolutely no excuse to fail. These are films like the recent “Joker,” based on the most iconic villain in the Batman universe and the sequel to the 2019 blockbuster that made over a billion dollars. Or films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that have been barely breaking even—as in most of the films in their Phase 4—or turned out to be a spectacular, embarrassing failure like 2023’s “The Marvels.” 

 

And any mention of Marvel films brings the focus to the owner of Marvel studios: Walt Disney Studios. Disney, which also owns Lucasfilm, has made an art form out of trashing the franchises they bought and antagonizing their core fan base. Since acquiring Lucasfilm in 2012, Disney still has not turned a profit from the deal, despite the fact that there is probably no human being on the face of the Earth who hasn’t heard of Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Han Solo, Princess Leia, or the rebels’ fight against the Galactic Empire. You would also be hard pressed to find anyone who has never heard of Indiana Jones. One almost needs to try really, really hard to not be successful if handed such properties to continue exploiting. Disney, however, has managed to turn pure gold into absolute trash. “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” was an insult to fans, turning the iconic hero into a bumbling old fool who is repeatedly insulted, tricked, and proven wrong in the entire film by the most annoying character in all Lucasfilm history since Jar Jar Binx. The “Star Wars” films made by Disney made significantly less and less money with each outing at the box office. Their stand-alone film “Solo” was the first “Star Wars” film to ever lose money and their slew of “Star Wars” shows made for Disney+ have completely lost their luster since the strong debut of “The Mandalorian” in 2019. Then the latest “Star Wars” Disney+ series, “The Acolyte,” was a ratings disaster, enraging fans with its assaults on logic, basic story-telling craft, and the entire lore of the series. Curious to see what the controversy was about, I watched the entire first, and thankfully last, season of “The Acolyte” and I concur with all of the angry fans. The show was an abysmal pile of garbage, a waste of the electricity it takes to run your TV or power your computer while you’re streaming it. 

 

Part of the problem with all of these franchises that are suddenly failing is that they appear to be made by people who are either ignorant of their properties’ history or they outright hate them. Disney has made no secret of the fact that it now prefers writers on Marvel and “Star Wars” properties to be unfamiliar with the past of these films and TV shows. “The Acolyte” creator and showrunner Leslye Headland repeatedly said that she hired her staff based on how little they knew of George Lucas’ original film. The show then proceeded to turn the Jedi in both a collection of bungling idiots and fanatical child-kidnappers. Moreover, the entire series subverted the entire moral philosophy of “Star Wars” by declaring that good and evil didn’t exist and right and wrong are merely points of view. If Headland and her crew would have actually seen and paid attention to the original “Star Wars” films, they would have known that such moral relativism was the complete antithesis of the franchise. The very point of the Force in “Star Wars” was to function as a metaphor for the idea that there were such things as an objective universal good and an objective evil, or the light side and the dark side. Furthermore, “Star Wars” was about the need to have the strength of character to choose good over evil, no matter how hard it might sometimes be or how much needs to be sacrificed.

 

Which brings me back the Magic Bullet theory. How can Hollywood studios keep turning out films that betray their own core cannon or make films that mock and deride their fans? They think they can get away with this if they spend enough money on massive ad campaigns—the Magic Bullet. Make the TV ads, trailers, and various promotional materials slick enough and loud enough, Hollywood’s thinking seems to say, and audiences will turn off all their reasoning faculties immediately and obediently sit and consume product that insults them, made by people who hate them. Except that is not working and Hollywood studios are deservedly losing billions of dollars as a result.

The mystery monoliths are back! And I cannot tell a lie! I'm behind them!!

 Psych!

Okay, I’m just kidding here. I’m only behind the mystery granite globes that appeared around the world in my first novel, CONFIRMATION: INVESTIGATIONS OF THE UNEXPLAINED. You can click on the link on the right and a buy a copy of the book.

 

In the book, I examine the way people react to an unexplainable phenomenon by seeing it strictly through their own filters, through their preconceived biases and dogma. Once all the different interpretations of the origin of the globes start to clash, very bad things also start to happen around the world. What those bad thing are...you’ll need to read the book!

 

In real life, I’m fascinated, of course, by these monoliths and I wonder when we’ll find out who erected them. This is a link to one of the latest articles about the reappearance of the strange objects. I don’t believe they’re from any sort of an otherworldly source. But, then again, we can never be sure… 

Listen to our discussion of "Chinatown" on the private eye classic's anniversary!

This year is the 50^th anniversary of the neo noir classic, Chinatown, so we discussed it it in a recent episode of Cineverse. As host Erik Martin describes, “’Forget it Jake—it’s Chinatown,’ we famously hear an associate of private eye Jake Gittes say to his boss. But while Gittes may be able to put it behind him, Chinatown can’t be so easily forgotten by its audience—even five decades years later.”

“Set in 1937 Los Angeles, Chinatown explores themes of corruption, power, and moral ambiguity. The story follows Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, who is hired by a woman claiming to be Evelyn Mulwray to investigate her husband, Hollis Mulwray, the chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, whom she suspects of infidelity. As Gittes delves deeper, he uncovers a complex web of deceit, corruption, and murder related to the city's water supply. The real Evelyn Mulwray, played by Faye Dunaway, reveals herself, and Gittes becomes entangled in a larger conspiracy involving land and water rights in Los Angeles, leading to a tragic and shocking conclusion.

To listen to a recording of our CineVerse group discussion of Chinatown, conducted last week, click here. To hear the June episode of the Cineversary podcast, which celebrates Chinatown’s 50th anniversary, click here.

 

That was then, this is noir

“After watching Roman Polanski’s brooding psychological mystery, originally released 50 years ago this month, one cannot overlook the overt resemblance it bears in both style and structure to classic film noir—a term invented by French critics to classify a particular genre of post-war American cinema. Noir represents a pessimistic, highly stylized brand of films that incorporate themes such as inescapable fates and femme fatales, and employs shadowy compositions and urbanized settings to frame its often bleak narratives. It personified the hard-boiled detective story, the murder mystery, the psychological crime drama, and the thriller. The era began, arguably, in 1941 with The Maltese Falcon and continued with a plethora of similar fare, including Double Indemnity, To Have and Have Not, Out of the Past, and The Big Heat, and supposedly reached its golden age denouement in 1958 with Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil.

“Over a decade passed before Hollywood seemed to return to the thematic and formalistic characteristics quintessential of the discarded noir tradition, at least evident in a few prominent films. “Neo-noir” pictures like Klute, Dirty Harry, (both 1971), and The Godfather (1972) brought back the look and feel of old-school noir. Neo-noir movies like these adopt the themes, archetypes, and visual template of classic noir but often occur in modern settings and employ contemporary situations and/or sensibilities as well as present more graphic and adult content.

“Among all the neo-noirs released over the past 60-plus years, Chinatown may be the greatest. It certainly mimics, for the most part, the look, vibe, and attitude of classic noir in its set design, costumes, cars, urban environment, duplicitous characters, and crime. “However, this film deviates in that it’s shot in color and often in the bright light of day, there are no canted angles or expressionistic visual traits, a shadowy black chiaroscuro lighting scheme isn’t predominant, and Evelyn Mulwray isn’t an archetypal spider woman—she leads men into danger and is deceitful, but she doesn’t have evil intentions.” 

 

Be sure and check it out!

What is "The Ninth Configuration?"

Working on finishing a novel while moving from a spring semester of classes to summer classes had me swamped enough to neglect updating the blog. I will start disciplining myself again to update content, including links to some excellent recent episodes of the CineVerse podcast. 

 

One of our recent shows was a discussion of “The Ninth Configuration,” a sadly forgotten film from Willam Peter Blatty, author of “The Exorcist” novel, in his directorial debut. This film caught my eye when I heard that Blatty considered it the true sequel to “The Exorcist.” 

 

As Erik Martin writes on the CineVerse overview, Forty-plus-year-old films don’t come much weirder or strangely stimulating than The Ninth Configuration, a 1980 American psychological drama written, produced, and directed by William Peter Blatty. Adapted from Blatty's 1978 novel Twinkle, Twinkle, 'Killer' Kane, the film is distinguished by its exploration of faith, insanity, and redemption. It is frequently classified as a psychological thriller and horror film, although it could also be regarded as a campy comedy by its detractors.

The narrative unfolds in a remote castle in the Pacific Northwest, repurposed as a mental asylum for U.S. military officers who have experienced psychological breakdowns. The protagonist, Colonel Vincent Kane (played by Stacy Keach), is a Marine psychiatrist assigned to oversee the patients' treatment. Through his interactions with the patients, especially Captain Billy Cutshaw (played by Scott Wilson), a former astronaut who abandoned a space mission due to an existential crisis, Kane grapples with his troubled past and wrestles with profound questions of faith and human suffering.

Click here to listen to a recording of our CineVerse discussion of The Ninth Configuration, conducted last week.

Blatty, renowned for writing The Exorcist, created The Ninth Configuration to delve into his own philosophical and religious inquiries. Although it bombed upon its release, the film has since garnered a cult following and is valued by many for its distinctive approach to its profound themes.

The Ninth Configuration’s central question posed to the viewer is an obvious one: Is there a God and an afterlife? If so, what proof do we have? The key scenes of the film are when Cutshaw and Kane debate the existence of a higher power. Cutshaw, when asked why he wouldn’t fly to the moon, says: “Because I’m afraid…See the stars…So cold. So far. And so very lonely. Oh, so lonely. All that space. Just, empty space. And so far from home. I’ve circled around and around this house. Orbit after orbit. And sometimes I’d wonder what it would be like never to stop. And circle alone up there forever. And what if I got there, got to the moon…and couldn’t get back? Sure, everyone dies. But I’m afraid to die alone so far from home. And if there’s no God, then that’s really, really alone.”

Kane argues that a higher power is far more plausible than humanity arising by random chance, and claims that acts of pure self-sacrifice demonstrate human goodness, which he believes can only be explained by a divine purpose. Cutshaw challenges him to cite a specific instance of pure self-sacrifice from his own life, but Kane cannot. Kane agrees to try sending Cutshaw a sign of the afterlife if he dies first. Kane apparently fulfills this promise in the form of a religious medallion that Cutshaw—now cured—suddenly discovers after the death of Kane, to whom Cutshaw earlier gave the medallion.

Blatty’s film also thematically explores illusion versus reality, making a selfless sacrifice for the greater good, and how war is hell, with some battle wounds unable to be cured. Looking closer, it’s easy to deduce how The Ninth Configuration is subtextually commenting on the horrors and fallout of the Vietnam War and the PTSD suffered by its soldiers. Critic Richard Scheib wrote: “The Ninth Configuration is a film about finding delivery from the mass insanity the Vietnam War induced on every level of American society and William Peter Blatty’s belief that the solution to the sense of social loss can be found in faith.”

Full disclosure: The Ninth Configuration left many of us at CineVerse baffled with gaping plot holes and inexplicable directorial choices. Among the questions our group pondered were (spoilers ahead):

1. Besides Cutshaw, were the other patients at the asylum legitimate psychotic patients, or were they faking it as part of the charade to make Kane believe he was the head of the asylum?
2. This film has been described by some critics as humorous, comical, and “uproariously funny,” especially the first half. Did any of the scenes involving the psychotic patients and their peculiarities actually make you laugh?
3. If Fell is actually in charge, although secretly, why does he let the “inmates run the asylum” and act violently by damaging the castle and throwing things around?
4. Why is Cutshaw, an ex-astronaut, mixed in with military patients?
5. Why would the military and Kane’s brother Fell allow this charade to go on? Wouldn’t it be dangerous and result in legal liabilities if Kane’s actions led to the harm or death of any of the other patients? How is this charade supposed to benefit Kane?
6. If Fell is actually in charge, although secretly, why does he let the “inmates run the asylum” and act violently by damaging the castle and throwing things around?
7. What’s the significance of Kane taking Cutshaw to a Catholic mass, where Cutshaw rudely interrupts the service and Kane briefly hallucinates?
8. Isn’t it kind of abrupt that Cutshaw suddenly escapes from the asylum? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to suggest earlier and consistently throughout the film that he wanted to escape? It seems as though the only reason for the odd scene at the biker bar is to provide a means for Kane to sacrifice himself for Cutshaw’s benefit, but why write and direct a non-sequitur scene like this one to accomplish that goal?
9. The suggestion at the end is that Cutshaw learns that Kane has sacrificed his own life to offer a concrete example of human goodness that Cutshaw asked for. How would Kane sacrificing his own life, or for that matter, Kane killing most of the biker gang, help Cutshaw—isn’t it a stretch to believe that Kane would commit suicide or let himself die just to cure Cutshaw? And what if the sacrifice didn’t accomplish its mission?
10. Did Kane commit suicide? If not, why is he holding a bloody knife? If it is suicide, and he’s killed himself to instill spiritual faith in Cutshaw, wouldn’t suicide be frowned upon in the Christian theology Kane seems to be espousing?
11. Are we to believe that the reappearance of the St. Christopher’s medal on Cutshaw’s person at the conclusion is a religious miracle? Doesn’t that seem a bit too on the nose and over the top as proof of God or an afterlife?
12. What’s with the freeze-frame ending?
13. For that matter, what’s with the early scene where we observe the bikers who’ve kidnapped a tied-up old man? Foreshadowing?
14. The film’s title echoes what one of the characters says: “In order for life to have appeared spontaneously on earth, there first had to be hundreds of millions of protein molecules of the ninth configuration.” Isn’t this a pretty obscure reference to base your title on? Couldn’t they have titled it something else?
15. This film can quickly oscillate tonally between funny/silly to super serious to horrific to feel-good morality play. Were you okay with these dramatic shifts in tone, or is this a film where the vibe is hard to navigate?

Absurd Baltimore bridge-collapse conspiracy theories are here…and censoring them is still a bad idea.

When I gave the lecture described in the previous post, one of the challenges I left the students with was to always keep their eyes on the headlines and whether or not any time a major story breaks a conspiracy theory comes sprouting up around it. I didn’t want to make it a bet that a conspiracy theory would follow any such a headline because anyone betting against me would have had no chance of winning. 

Well, here we are and I am, if I must brag, right again. The accident that caused the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on March 26 almost immediately birthed a whole slew of conspiracy theories. This article and this one right here give a good overview of some of the big ones. They range from a controlled demolition of the bridge all the way to theories about the ship that struck the bridge having been hacked, the incident orchestrated by Ukrainians, and a predictive programming conspiracy based on a Netflix film produced by the Obamas. None of these theories have an iota of evidence to suggest they are true, and some of them are so ridiculous as to not be worth anyone’s time trying to debunk them. For example, arguing against a predictive programming conspiracy theory is a lot like arguing with flat Earth believers: no matter the amount of testable, empirical evidence they are presented will change their minds. If anything, it will lead them down that deranged logical canard that says the fact that anyone attempting to counter their foolishness is a proof of its truth because no one would argue against if it was false…or something like that. For another apt comparison, trying to persuade the adherents of the flat Earth theory or a predictive programming theory is akin to trying to teach a pig to sing. All the exercise accomplishes wasting your time and annoying the pig.

 

Moreover, if the collapse of the bridge was some kind of a conspiracy, the people masterminding it would be some of the dumbest conspirators on the Illuminati New World Order roster. I mean why would they want to wreck the bridge in the middle of the night? If I would be planning to destroy the bridge, I would do it in the middle of rush hour to make sure I can notch as high a body count as possible.

 

The impact of this kind of a conspiracy culture on greater society is a malignant destruction of all consensus reality for too many people. In the past, Americans might have disagreed and debated—often heatedly—about how best to run the country, how best to respond to events and crises, but at least we all lived in the same world. We all saw reality the same way, although we might have disagreed about the best way to live in it and deal with it. That, unfortunately, is no longer the case. Conspiracism has encouraged all people to make up their own facts, their own reality. It has encouraged them to write their own definition of what a “fact” is and what “evidence” is required to prove facts. Such a world is highly unstable and dangerous.

 

And another major problem is that this unstable, post-fact world is prompting many to support drastic measures like the censorship of public communication and the silencing of debate and dissent. They react to the anarchic chaos of conspiracy world by supporting the proposal of government-led misinformation directorates. They have been proposed almost from the moment Joe Biden was elected president. Moreover, the administration’s efforts to pressure social media platforms to restrict debates on issues like the origins of Covid, the effectiveness of vaccines, and the destructive economic, mental health, and social effects of the lockdown is met by a shrug by the general population. But, of course, why should anyone pay attention to warnings of government overreach, the erosion of privacy and the rise of an authoritarian surveillance state when the people who issue those warnings have also been propagating conspiracy theories about the New World Order blowing up bridges, putting microchips into vaccines, and spraying mindcontrol chemicals into the atmosphere through chemtrails released from airliners?

On skepticism, questioning authority and conspiracy theories

Last week one of my colleagues at Saint Peter’s University invited me to give a guest lecture in a class aboutmedia literacy, discussing conspiracy theories, how to define them, how they manifest in our culture, how they are both reflected by and shared by popular entertainment, and how they are amplified and spread by social media. I'm pictured about to start the lecture. It was a great opportunity to discuss this with students since I had written a book about the topic and teach a course on it. And it was great hearing that this same professor also uses the critical examination of conspiracy theories as a tool for various exercises in several of his classes, as do I. 

Discussions like this should always start with a precise definition of what we mean by “conspiracy theory,” what the term “conspiracy” means in a strict legal sense, and how it differs from those outlandish, rococo speculations of grand cabals and shadow organizations of blood-drinking cultists and Satanists. As far as the law is concerned, a “conspiracy” is any instance of two or more people colluding to commit a crime. Gangs and organized crime cartels are conspiracies in the legal sense of the word. Films like the “Godfather” trilogy and “Goodfellas,” or TV shows like “The Sopranos” are crime films, not conspiracy theory films. Films like “The DaVinci Code” and its sequels, TV shows like “The X-Files” or the plethora of Roswell crash and UFO cover-up entertainment, however, fall into the “conspiracy” theory category.

 

Conspiracy theories, as a whole, are claims about secret organizations of such immense power and control as to be able to create a false consciousness in an entire global population, organizations of such reach and influence as to be able to start wars at will, manipulate economies, and construct fictions like mass shootings in the mainstream media every day. Conspiracy theories, in short, refer to grand plots to run everything according to some unified grand scheme…and plots that have absolutely zero tangible proof of their existence. For example, we had a little thought exercise pretending to be the New World Order plotting the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and concluded how the major conspiracy theories contradicting the U.S. government’s explanations for the events of that day are as absurd as the Moon Landing Hoax conspiracy theories or the chemtrail conspiracy theories.

 

But all this is not to say that an outright denialism of conspiracy theories is all desirable either. As so much of history has proven the old adage, absolute power does corrupt and it corrupts absolutely. The opposite side of a knee-jerk non-belief is when we turn “conspiracy theory” into a thought-stopping cliché, the shutting down of all dissent, debate, and discussion. We saw this with the knee-jerk reactions to the claims that the COVID virus might have escaped from a lab in China. Just a few years ago, if you said something to that effect on social media, you could have been deplatformed and branded a hateful, racist conspiracy theorist. I had written about that issue right here in previous blog posts.

 

So what is the solution to the problem, my colleague and I finally asked. The best that we can do in a free society is to educate in logical, critical thinking, and media literacy. To try and turn out students who will be able to cast a skeptical eye at organizations of authority and power, whether those organizations of power are governments, corporations, or collections of charlatans spreading malicious lies about fake mass shootings, Satanic cults hiding under pizza parlors, COVID being spread by chemtrails and activated by 5G towers run by the cabal that assassinated JFK from the grassy knoll and fluoridated the drinking water.

With our focus on such pedagogy, we can only hope that no Saint Peter's student will every walk away from our school listening to Alex Jones, thinking that Oliver Stone's film "JFK" was an accurate dramatization of the assassination, for fall for any the nonsensical fantasies spread on conspiracist webpages and social media.