The Americans also has a great intro montage; it puts you right back in the cold war.
I’m a bit discouraged at the lack of reaction to my Open Letter to Sam Harris, considering his high profile and degree of hypocrisy (a book about lying?!). As far as I can see, only a couple of you took a few seconds to inject a comment in any of Harris’s podcast videos. Maybe my obsession with exposing disinfo agents of the state is a low-interest issue.
If I’m going to keep this blog going, I should maybe go back to my ‘wake up’ thoughts — a short burst of whatever occurs to me upon returning from dreamland… okay, here we go…
I was about to write an email to a couple friends to whom I had recommended a TV series titled The Americans. I don’t normally recommend TV shows, for reasons related to ‘mind control’ issues, if not just plain awful story-telling, but this show is an exception. Like Deadwood, The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, plus a handful of others (even The West Wing), The Americans transcends its genre and even its harmful subtext, via creative panache.
The screen grab of the door image was too dark, but you get the idea from this frame from another episode. ’33’ and black & white tile floors are two big tells that a show is ‘approved.’
Very briefly, it’s a long form story (six-seasons) of a KGB couple planted in America as spies and ‘agents of harm’ (a.k.a. ‘illegals’). They have a couple kids from whom they must hide their activities. (The couple is super-trained in spy craft plus speak flawless English.) What in the end makes the show work so well is that it’s set in the Reagan Administration, the height of the cold war. (It certainly would have been a different show set now, with the fall of the Soviet empire and… Trump in office. Truly a different world.)
This is the sort of premise that is loaded with potential for crises, conflict, and ‘moral decision-making’ by the characters. I wish I’d have thought of it, was my reaction to Episode 1, and the show just keeps getting better. If you like long form TV, watch this one.
The Matrix is loaded with occult references (of course). B & W tiles all over the place. Do a search for ‘The Matrix + Neo’s passport’ for a real doozy re 9/11.
But my email (to my friends) was going to point out something I noticed early on, and which kept me thinking throughout the show (I recently marathon-viewed it again over three or four days). I often wonder which shows/movies (if not all) are actively ‘sponsored’ by the PTB, and to what extent ‘they’ meddle with storylines and so forth. The Americans aroused my curiosity not only for its obviously ‘political’ potential (any spy premise is loaded with this sort of potential), but because the creator, Joe Weisberg, was formerly a full-blown CIA agent.
Digging out ‘deep subtext’ (what they are really saying) is tough in a well-wrought tale, especially so with The Americans, and one can’t help but wonder about ‘deep motives’ in how they turn their stories (plot points and character arcs). I’ll not say any more on this – this would be the worst sort of spoiler – but I can tell you that based on just one ‘tell’, the show is ‘sponsored.’
The Big Lebowski has a bunch of Masonic tells.
If you’re going to have a show’s total arc depend on a coincidence, fine, but it has to come early, right away, so it more or less becomes the premise of the show. In The Americans, in episode 1, an FBI counter-intel agent moves into the house right across the street from the KGB couple. This is a monumental coincidence that would never work if it came later, near the end, say (in ‘Act 3’).
Point being, though, a few episodes later there is a ‘needless’ bit of business about the FBI guy (who has a wife and kid) painting his front door red, and then a shot wherein we see the number ‘33’ (his street address) in big letters next to the door. I always perk up when ‘33’ pops up in a film, for obvious reasons (it’s Freemasonry’s ‘favorite’ number, with various occult reverberations). But this could be a coincidence, right?
In the very next scene, the FBI guy’s young son is going on and on about the movie National Lampoon’s Animal House, how funny it was that the John Belushi character says getting expelled would mean ‘seven years of college wasted’; then the kid says that (presumably referring to Belushi’s character in the film) ‘the guy’s like 33 years old.’
As with The West Wing, the various White House decors in Veep are telling us who really runs the country.
Whoa, I’m thinking, ‘33’ gets thrown in our faces in unnecessary dialog after we just saw it in the doorway? (The doorway shot was unnecessary to begin with. We didn’t have to see the FBI guy enter the house to know it’s his house and who cares about painting the door?) A couple of quick googles (one to a pdf of the screenplay) told me that there was no reference to age in that scene from Animal House, let alone ‘33’. I then verified what I’d remembered: John Belushi died at age 33, of an overdose of heroin and cocaine administered by a shadowy female. I also recalled the rumors that Belushi had been ‘put down’ by the PTB for some no-no or other (probably too much blabbing).
So the writers of The Americans (in this case, Joe Weisberg, an ex-CIA agent) add extraneous dialog that is factually incorrect (and refers to a possible murder by the PTB) and that re-enforces what we just saw seconds before (the number ‘33’).
Watch this scene from Back to the Future 2 (1989): The WTC actually looks like it’s collapsing in the back ground – especially if you look at it upside down, like the character hanging from his feet. Predictive programming at its most blatant.
In a sort of twisted way, it’s fun noticing this sort of stuff. Leaving out blatant predictive programming or ‘revelation of the method’ moments (9/11 and The Simpsons comes to mind) – you could write a book on this subject – for me the most obvious ‘tell’ is the good old Freemason black & white tile flooring, which is used at virtually all Freemason occult ceremonies. (Do your own research on this.) Black & white tile floors seems to pop up way more than it ‘should’ in filmed narratives, especially those with potentially important (to the PTB subtext).
What I’m sure this is – and it’s all over the place in film and TV – is a ‘wink and nod’ to those who are not involved in showbiz but are ‘in the know.’ In the case of The Americans it (the reference to Freemasonry via ‘33’) may have been so in our faces as an assurance that the show has been well thought out and is in line with the PTB agenda – it would be easy to ‘misunderstand’ a storyline as complex as this one, considering the many grey areas it dances around, politically and morally.
Allan
The real West Wing does not have b & w tiled floors, so why is it shown this way on so many TV shows?
I just finished an audiobook of Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at A.I. and holy shit was it aggravating. I’ll have more to say on this – and A.I. in general – as soon as I’m in the mood, and if I wake up thinking about it.
Also, I’m open to suggestions re possible subject matters. I’m still losing subscribers with each post. What am I doing wrong? (Please: I am done writing about surfing. Stick to HTWRW-related subjects.)
Believe it or not, I like Allan, too. Don’t always agree… but I mean no harm. So much. Joy he has brought to me.
Now that I’ve posted another one, we’ll probably move on from this thread, so maybe don’t comment here any more. Also, I get so much spam from comment moderation that I don’t open the ones from old posts, so if you haven’t posted, you should try posting on the most recent one so I will moderate it, then you can come back and comment in old posts. (If you don’t understand this, neither do I, really.)
But I wanted to thank you for your encouraging comments, or even if you just thought positive thoughts. Hey, it helped.