Photo #9 (Plus Being There)

Here’s one more from yesterday. Thing about infrared photography that I like is that it works best when the sun is high, which is the opposite of ‘regular’ photography. It also gives interesting skies, which I’m very much into. Since the atmosphere does not absorb infrared, skies will usually come out black. (Notice how, towards the horizon, the sky gets lighter, indicating thicker air, which absorbs more infrared. I think this is how it works.)

Clouds are great too, as I hope you will eventually see. This and yesterday’s were just test shots but they turned out viewable.  

At the very end, Chance obliviously walks on water at the funeral of one of Elite.

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This keeps happening: Someone goes on and on about a narrative (usually a movie) and is not able to see what’s right in front of him/her. Recall this happened with Bug and with Derren Brown’s ‘Apocalypse’ (TV doesn’t get to be italicized in my world) and… I forget but there are others.

And yesterday I stumbled across a detailed analysis of one of my favorite films, Being There and it happened again. (See it free here.) This channel zeroed in on the ending, just the ending, and ran on for half an hour giving different theories on what the ending means and somehow managed to miss the most obvious point (sledgehammered through visual symbolism). You have to have seen the movie to really get what I’m saying, but I’ll add some grabs to make my point. Anyway, here’s the comment I left, which so far has gone unanswered. Yes, it’s early yet but I’d bet the guy is too steeped in denial (as with Bug) to deal with it.

Just before the walk on water scene, the Elite pallbearers decide that Chance would make a ‘good’ next president. Re this image: Gimme a break! How could a film analyst miss this?

On the surface level: Chance is unique in the history of (successful) fiction protagonists. How? Nothing bad ever happens to him (once the story is launched). You cannot get away with this in storytelling, yet JK/Ashby do just that. So: Given life is a state of mind, nothing bad is going to happen, like getting his feet wet.

At a political get-together, Ashby works in the usual checkerboard tile floor.

Plus: Chance’s ‘miracle’ happens immediately after the (elite) pallbearers decide Chance will be the next president. He is thusly anointed and can do no wrong: The secret society that rules the world has so decreed it. (I suspect that a close examination of the film would reveal more symbolism, the number ’33’, say, but I don’t have the time.)

I haven’t read the book — I did work as a H-wood screenwriter for many years — but I suspect the above message is a bit more from Ashby, rather than JK, since Ashby knows all too well who runs show biz… and the world. (I could be wrong on this; I may read the book.)

End credits roll over a blooper reel of Sellers cracking up over and over and over. Who/what is he really laughing at?

I’m not saying that the above is the meaning of the film (or the ending, same thing) but it certainly should be in a detailed analysis. I’ve mentioned a few times how often occult symbolism makes it into feature films, usually via checkerboard tiles; I would have been collecting them with grabs but most channels block you. But I do come across them in other ways. I’ll

‘The West Wing’ TV show was lousy with checkerboard floors (it was also lousy with democrats, which should not surprise us). (‘Veep’ was also like this.) The PTB just love this sort of ‘wink’.

add a couple here. (That Kubrick would do this is somehow both interesting and predictable.)

Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes is an anthology wherein Jarmusch somehow manages to work the checkerboard motif into every story. I suspect this was more ironic than ‘devotional’ (to the PTB). One can hope, anyway…