The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Category “Movies”
What Lies Under the Skin?—Psi and the Physics of Indeterminacy
I have suggested in previous posts that psi may operate not directly on actual reality, but on the unactualized quantum potential of superposed states prior to physical observation, or what for convenience I call the “Not Yet.” I don’t know if this is a widely held interpretation, although quantum mechanics is felt by many theorists […]
Prophecies, Time Loops, and Bubble Realities: La Jetée and The Sacrifice
If precognition is real, then we have to take account of the range of sci-fi effects it would produce, effects that go beyond the strictly ‘prophetic.’ Because we fail to see how our consciousness is receptive to the future and how our actions contribute to, and only in a minority of cases confirm, that future, […]
Don’t Look Now: Witches, Weird Sisters, and the Eroticism of ESP
Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 paranormal thriller Don’t Look Now, based on a Daphne du Maurier short story (and now finally released on the Criterion Collection), is one of my desert-island top 10 (probably top 5) favorite films, and it is hands down the greatest Fortean film ever made. Short of UFOs, it has everything you could […]
The Solaris Mind: Hypnagogia, Meditation, and Insight
A classic motif in science fiction is that humanity ventures to the farthest reaches of space only to find, impossibly, something of our own that we had forgotten. Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris, about a planet covered by a viscous ocean that manufactures simulacra from its observers’ unconscious, is probably the purest expression of this […]
Consciousness Inside-Out: Wormhole UFOs, the Hill Abduction, and Interstellar
Jacques Vallee has been saying for years that our materialistic fetishism for the nuts-and-bolts secrets of UFO propulsion is a block on our imagination and a hindrance to scientific understanding of the phenomenon; there are countless other possibilities besides ‘alien spaceships propelled by antigravity.’ Thinking differently about how our visual system interprets anomalous phenomena can […]
To the Unified Field (via Twin Peaks): David Lynch’s Paintings
“We live in a world of opposites, of extreme evil and violence opposed to goodness and peace. It’s that way here for a reason but we have a hard time grasping what the reason is. In struggling to understand the reason, we learn about balance and there’s a mysterious door right at that balance point. […]
The Biggest Bullshit: David Lynch and the Cowboy
Well, there are many kinds of films. Most of them, nowadays, don’t demand much thinking. That makes me very, very upset. It makes me upset that they think the audiences have grown unused to thinking and that they only want things spelled out for them, in a platter. That’s bullshit, and a big one. People […]
The Orbit of Being (Thoughts on ‘Gravity’)
Back in the day, in English class, we all learned that stories can be broken down into a few basic conflicts: Man Versus Man, Man Versus Himself, etc. The one that always seemed the least interesting to me was Man Versus Nature. You don’t really see this conflict very often. It’s really the hardest kind […]
The Madness of White Bear — Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (pt. 3)
The various tricks artists and scientists through history have discovered for seemingly halting the motion of things—what Renaissance alchemists called “fixing the volatile”—and then reanimating the fixed under their own power have always seemed godlike; and the aspiration to exercise this power has always seemed arrogant or even blasphemous to some. We can only speculate, […]
Slaying the Minotaur — Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Part 2)
For shamanic religions and the cultures that adhere to them, mystery is higher than knowledge. The irrational higher than the rational. Unknowing higher than knowing. (Is there even a concept of “knowing”? Is “knowing” an idea that has only arisen in after writing??) Paleolithic people, such as those who left their mark in Chauvet Cave […]
