Brett's Under the Silver Lake Notes

Under the Silver Lake

Title

The comic begins, “I will reveal all…under the silver lake.” Which I interpret to mean that all the secrets of Hollywood are encoded in (under) the movies (the silver lake). Which is one of the premises of our show.

The silver lake also represents the psyche. There’s a long shot of Sam and the daughter of Jefferson Sevence (the billionaire who supposedly dies in a fiery car crash) when they’re climbing the fence to swim in the Silver Lake. We see the moon on the left, the Hollywood sign on the right, and the Silver Lake below; the (silver) moon and the Hollywood sign are illuminated (Hollywood illuminated by the moon), and the lake reflects the light from them…Hollywood as the artificial light projected onto the (mass) psyche.

Big Ideas

This movie is about codes and the kabbalistic-occult idea that reality is a code, a formula (more below under “Codes and numbers”)…although to normies the film functions as a satire on pop culture conspiracy theory.

Normalizing what Christopher Partridge called “the occulture” and P.K. Dick’s related notion that the great gnostic truths are buried in the trash strata of culture, an idea that, in turn, partly emerges out of the esoteric-perennialist-alchemical idea that truth and enlightenment is ever present but hidden from the vulgar, which is correlated with the Jungian/neo-alchemical principle that “the gold is hidden in the shadow,” i.e., that our highest qualities and faculties are mixed up in the lowest and darkest parts of ourselves..

This occult-trash complex, already built into the plot of the film (a pop act using subversive religious imagery that has coded messages in some of its music), is indicated symbolically in several ways. First, the coyotes that dig through the trash are psychopomp animals, guides between worlds and as such revealer of occult secrets (cf. Mercury/Hermes). Late in the movie, Sam follows one of these trash coyotes to the party where he meets the daughter of Jefferson Sevence, the billionaire who reportedly burns to death in his car toward the beginning of the film.

And remember that there are codes seemingly revealed in a toilet (scene where he confronts lead singer in the bathroom) and in a bathroom stall (at the secret party). Deep occult secrets supposedly revealed in literal shit.

The truly esoteric message behind this is that culture is synthetic, that it’s “fake” (see under “Laurel Canyon/cultural engineering”).

Movie implicitly equates the underworlds of the movie and music industries and both to sex trafficking (the “Shooting Stars” call girl agency that all the club/scene girls work for, with producers and studios involved in the trafficking); cf. The Lost Highway, which links the underworld of Hollywood to the porn industry. Note the presence of the VHS for White Trash, a 1992 underground film by Fred Baker, a former Jazz musician and friend of Lenny Bruce and occasional producer/director of sleaze films. The movie is about hustlers and prostitutes on the fringes of the Hollywood scene, and the people in the movie are probably not unlike the fringe/underground “scene” people depicted in Under the Silver Lake.

The remedial blue pill psyop is indicated at the end, after Sam discovers the secret of the Hollywood pyramid cult and is disillusioned with life. There’s a billboard he sees earlier, with a woman who turns out to be his ex-girlfriend in an ad with the words “I can see clearly now”—which of course he invests with synchro-occultic significance. At the end, the billboard is being painted over, and half of it now has a Ronald McDonald like clown and the words “Hamburgers are love.” Very much a clash of consciousness: red-pilled/conspiracy woke vs. mind slave to the image industry in its most crass form (remember that the other reference to hamburgers is by the comic guy vis-à-vis the use of subliminal, sexual imagery in advertising). In the next scene, he’s watching the Janet Gaynor movie his mother recommended, Seventh Heaven, innocently enjoying it, as if he’s learned nothing about Hollywood. Then he’s with the Boomer bird lady, who is implicitly identified with his mother (he’s ogling her when his mother calls at the beginning) and who also, in this context, may represent the Boomer/Laurel Canyon/60s New Hollywood matrix of so much of the music and cinematic culture Sam worshipped…regressing further, that is, forgetting his troubles, learning to stop worrying and love the psyop…because, if you don’t, you’ll have no more joy in life.

Sam (Andrew Garfield)

Very pointedly set in 2011, although made in 2018…apparently to capture the lead, a 90s slacker refugee, at a particular moment in his life, a moment of disillusionment/realization re: his slacker ideals. His hero, Kurt Cobain, himself embodied a kind of postmodern moment vis-à-vis the pure aesthetics/self-expression-over-commercialism that is at the heart of 90s slackerism.

Mitchell confirms that he set it in 2011 to capture a cultural moment of sorts, when there was still a trace of something “genuine” in the scene, implying (a) that it was all fake by 2018 and (b) that it was less fake in the 90s. So, denials notwithstanding, Mitchell does seem to share the 90s slacker nostalgia outlook of the lead.

The infantilizationimplicit in the slacker ideal is underscored in the film by Sam’s post-juvenile attachment to the video games and movies and music that captured his teenage years, and by the childish joy he experiences through cereal box treasure maps and the Nintendo Power magazines that cracked the mysteries of his favorite Nintendo games.

The “dogs” are low, unworthy people who achieve success, particularly the bimbettes who are mysteriously integral to “the scene” but who are valued largely as sex objects (they’re call girls). Having failed to make his mark on the culture as the culture had promised him he would if he fulfilled the slacker ideal (as he did), Sam is deeply resentful, on a not-altogether-conscious-level, of this brainless but indispensable class that helps link Hollywood and the music industry through a mutual underground that also intersects with prostitute and, if you watch The Lost Highway, with the porn industry. Sam, child of the 90s,[1]rightly views what passed for pop culture circa 2011 as base, as unworthy of his musical and cinematic heroes from the post-WWII to the millennium golden age of American trash culture (see intro on trash and occulture).

Laurel Canyon/Cultural Engineering

REM’s “What the Frequency, Kenneth?” features in a sequence, in the basement of the secret party, where Sam, dancing, is overcome by the drug in the cookie he ate. The title of the song is a reference to a 1986 incident in which CBS news anchor Dan Rather was attacked by two assailants, one of whom kept saying, “Kenneth, what’s the frequency?” This man, William Tager, was not identified until 1997, three years after the release of the song and three years after Tager was convicted for killing an NBC stagehand outside the Today’s Show studio, an attack which occurred about a month before the release of REM’s Monster(!994). Tager claimed that he attacked Rather—and killed the stagehand—because he believed television networks were beaming signals into his brain and wanted to find out the source. He also believed that he was a time traveler whose controllers in the future had implanted a chip in his brain (this is right out of 12 Monkeys). He said he attacked Rather because Rather looked like the vice-president in his future, whose name was “Kenneth Burrows.”

The Rather incident was already a sort of underground pop culture trope by the time of REM’s Monster album. Game Theory’s 1987 album opens with :46 experimental piece called “Kenneth, What’s the Frequency,” and Daniel Clowes’s [pronounced like “cow”] 1993 comic Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron features it as part of a conspiracy subplot. (The comic guy maybe partly inspired by Clowes? His illustration style is.)

The Wikipedia for the music video mentions:

"Prominent in the guitar solo, Peter Buck uses Kurt Cobain's Jag-Stang that he received as a gift from Courtney Love after Cobain died; he plays it upside-down as Cobain was left-handed. Singer Stipe's newly shaven head and bassist Mike Mills's new look (long-hair and the use of Nudie suits) prominent on the 1995 Monster world tour, were given wide exposure in this video. The suit seen in the music video was owned by musician Gram Parsons [of Laurel Canyon fame]." So no accident this song is used so prominently in the film!

More Laurel Canyon connections:

The girl cleaning “Beware the Dog Killer” off the coffee shop in the opening shot is wearing a Jim Morrison shirt.

The “Hollywood king”/pyramid guy at the end declares, rather gnostically, that the world is a hollow charade that only a halfwit would take seriously. Being in on the cultural engineering ops himself (a “Hollywood king”), he’s all too aware that culture is an empty fabrication, that all the psyops, including his own, are spiritual dry canals. Weirdly, ironically, this makes him very credulous when it comes to his pseudo-Egypto-Hollywood occult religion that is “real,” he earnestly but anxiously insists. I guess when you know how fake culture is, and you think culture is even more powerful than the major religions, you have a tendency to end up drinking your own Kool-Aid like this.

The Dave McGowan Moment/”Songwriter” scene

“There is no revolution.” The revelation here is that what passes for culture in the post-rock and roll era is synthetic, though it poses as organic to suck people in; it is, as he says, a “fabrication…the shell of other men’s ambitions, ambitions beyond what you will ever understand.” That is, culture consists largely in a bunch of (sometimes competing) psyops devised by powerful men, which is the thesis of our show.

This scene definitely seems inspired by Dave McGowan’s Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon.

The “Dave McGowan” of the main character kind of mirrored my own experience reading Weird Scenes. Like McGowan, I was a rock fan, loved 60s music and ate up all the rock and roll legends promulgated in the pages of rock magazines, was emotionally invested in 90s Alternative and “grunge” music, etc. It hits you as you’re reading McGowan, all that stuff that was said over and over and never contradicted, all of that stuff seemed far-fetched because it was—in fact, much of it was almost certainly made up (like the origin story of the Buffalo Springfield). Simultaneously, you understand why the vast majority of people, at least people raised in the rock and roll era (1950s-90s), will never bring themselves to accept this: they would rather foster these powerful cultural illusions that they’ve invested so much of their spiritual-emotional energy in than face the disillusionment of realizing that “your art, your writing, your culture” is a cynical fabrication serving purposes they’d rather not believe exist.

Monarch/Illuminati/occult

Butterflyon the wall of the disappearing blond girl’s apartment.

Eye patch guy (one-eye motif) who shows up there and throughout the film.

There’s a bronze ballerina statuette in the blond girl’s shoebox. As I discuss in my Monarch episode on No Place to Hide, ballerinas are a recurrent Monarch trope because 19th century Parisian ballerinas were a kind of prototype for the modern Hollywood Monarch mind slave. They received highly regimented training while having very little personal independence, and they were trafficked to the richest men in society, who controlled the opera and used it as their personal brothel.

The pixie-haired call girl is in a cat print swimsuit at the “chess party.”

Sex magic (mental breakthroughs while masturbating).

Sam is blindfoldedby the hobo king, like a typical initiate (part of the reason is deliberate disorientation).

The dolls (see below).

Codes and numbers

Sam lives in Apartment 23, which is both the number of chaos and of pseudo (manufactured)-synchronicity.

“Jefferson Sevence,” bigwig reported dead. Sevence=Seven, as in 7th Heaven, the Janet Gaynor movie.

Dollsnext to TV when he’s watching How to Marry a Millionaire with the blond girl who disappears have last names in code, as if providing the key to a cipher in the movie (Internet forum). (More under Religious Subversion.)

The comic author impresses Sam with secrets of subliminal advertising revealed in Subliminal Sex, a book that inspired Fincher.

Religious inversion through subversion

A big part of the reveal here is how Process Church-style “union” of Christianity and Satanism (e.g., “Jesus and the Brides of Dracula”), and generally the cultural psyop involving appropriating Christian themes and images in order to pervert them and thereby subvert Christianity, is the stock and trade of the music industry and Hollywood (which are implicitly linked in this film).

A partygoer at the first party, when he first encounters the band, is heard commenting on how trite the whole vampirism in pop culture thing is. So what is the meaning of vampirism in pop culture, which was very prominent in the 90s and has more recently made a comeback (it seems to compete with the zombie obsession)?

The goofy female “poet” at the beginning of this scene is also heard spouting something about a “trinity” of the “divine feminine.” Remember that there are three dolls next to the TV (representing Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall, and Marilyn Monroe, in How to Marry a Millionaire); and in the photo of the three women being ritually buried with the “Hollywood king” from the end of the film, the same blond girl he watched the movie with is holding the three dolls, representing their “divine feminine trinity” being sacrificed, Sumerian style, with the king.[2]

More Questions

What’s the meaning of the animal symbols in circles (a unicorn, a tiger, a snake, and a lion) that flash at the beginning of the film?[3]

What is the bird saying?

Why does the animated “Silver Lake” sign before the end credits say “since 1928”?

Did you notice the coded end title? [Answer: It says, “A David Robert Mitchell Film: Under the Silver Lake.”]

Etc.

According to the bio on cast member Lola Blanc, her father was in the CIA and her mother “was targeted by a religious impostor posing as a true LDS prophet who played on her beliefs and lured her into his web. Blanc found their letters and believed in him, too; she was temporarily separated from her mother, who was coerced into human trafficking until an accomplice who had a change of heart saved her.”

As in Inherent Vice, lead’s increasing marijuana smoking throughout movie correlates with diegetic breakdown of reality or ordinary rules of reality.

[1]Natural tendency to overestimate importance of cultural factors during one’s formative years seemingly amplified by post-Boomer (or Boomer to Gen Y) generations, owing to the importance of pop culture in their self-identity, as family, national, and even ideological structures break down under pressure of cultural psyops.

[2] IMDB: “There's a recurring theme of groups of three girls: Sarah and her two roommates. There's three daughters in the Sevence family. Troy, Fannie and Mae. The three brides from the band. Balloon Girl and the two Shooting Stars are roommates. There are three girls who bark at Sam in the ladies room. There's three girls in mini skirts who discuss the dog killer in the street with Sam. Sarah and Sam watch How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), which has three female leads.”

[3] IMDB: “As the camera pans in the coffee shop, a man wearing a green t-shirt with several animals, and glasses, can be seen. The animals are: A Bear, a Walrus, a Dinosaur, a Raccoon, a Dog, an Ostrich, (some unidentified animal), a Koala, a Crow, a Lion and a Raccoon (again). This same man is seen later in the movie [at the first party, on the roof] wearing the same T-shirt.”