Occult Origins (Oliver Stone 1)
Added 2024-12-20 20:25:24 +0000 UTCThe first episode in an extended series about Oliver Stone. Despite Stone being known for political films that deal with recent American history, his first two directorial efforts are surprisingly strange horror movies. Our discussion of Seizure and The Hand takes us directly into analysis of Hollywood occult ideology about the power of the imagination. We also note how his screenplay for The Midnight Express provides a glimpse into the kind of social critique that characterizes much of his later work. While Stone displays insights and a sincerity that separate him from overtly manipulative directors like Nolan and Fincher, we note that his filmography contains several unsettling ambiguities and that his early career suggests some interactions with intelligence services.
Comments
Can you have the guys from Subliminal Jihad on?
Tom
2025-01-10 00:43:33 +0000 UTCStone reminds me of the Elsburg and the pentagon papers. He seems to be a vent to release steam from the system/ a way of siloing/ herding people. Like RFK, Trump and sadly someone like Chris Hedges. Or perhaps more charitably, one section of elite thought. The system seeds this to prevent mass formation and unification and fits well into a divide and conquer strategy. At someone like Tucker Carlson too for a different demographic. Stones later films are incredibly suspect: savages, interviews with Lula, Putin, film Snowden.. these are all coopted narrative formation, same team, different angle.
John
2024-12-29 22:29:42 +0000 UTCWhat's that large pachyderm in the room? It wouldn't be 'World Trade Center' (2006) would it? An unfortunate lapse - or in reality, what the Oliver Stone project was always leading up to? "See, even the great oppositionalist, the great conspiracy theorist, believes this was genuine!" Rinse and repeat with Chomsky in 2020. 'JFK' was not even close to the first Hollywood film to draw attention to the assassination not being what the Warren Commission said it was. 'Executive Action' (1973).... 'Winter Kills' (1979).... 'Blow-out' (1981).... and that's not including films that anticipated the event like 'Suddenly' (1954) and 'The Manchurian Candidate' (1962), low budget indies like 'The Shooting' (1966) and foreign films like 'The Price of Power' (1969) and 'I for Icarus' (1979). It's not as if these films led nowhere either - Congress formed the Stokes Commission which found the assassination was a conspiracy. Yes, it's often forgotten the most recent official verdict is that it was a conspiracy! Contrary to the idea that cinema was ignoring the assassination until Oliver Stone came along to somehow heroically make a multi-million dollar, all-star film about it, somebody very much wants the public to know about it. The most interesting question is who and why. And that's not even to mention Arnon Milchan.... The "old left" that Stone champions is better than the current "left" of turbo-charged woke-ism, scientism and war-is-bad-unless-Democrats-start-it-ism. That's true - but let's not romanticise the old left as a result. There's a mass of evidence, especially in the work of Anthony C. Sutton, that this was a bankster project all along. Monopoly capitalism and state communism are virtually indistinguishable. The Bolsheviks fought the Civil War with Remington rifles, drove trucks made in a Ford factory down the Ho Chi Minh trail, powered their MIG jets in Korea with Rolls-Royce engines and the ships carrying the missiles to Cuba were built in the West. What's the name of Goldstein's book in '1984'? Successful revolutions are expensive and few, if any at all, have got anywhere without backing from the wealthy, foreign powers and secret societies. They all somehow involve mass genocide of the peasantry, not the alleged class enemy (not that that would be okay). They all create a foundational myth that they were a popular uprising to mask their true origins. They all become the "enemy" in a managed dialectic that engorges the MIC, traumatises Western populations with fear porn and justifies further attacks on civil liberties. Wake me up when Stone starts tackling any of this... The most Stone did was revive interest in JFK for a new generation after it was sidelined in the 1980s and the Reagan era. 'JFK' helped seed conspiracy culture in the 1990s but this was an elite project as well (e.g. David Icke, the X-Files etc). Again, it's like a switch was flipped for a new decade. Again, the interesting question was who and why. At the very least, it appears an exercise in schismogenesis; at most, an exercise in possible mass initiation and/or prepping the West's downfall by undermining its core self-image.
Simon
2024-12-27 09:39:59 +0000 UTC
