Pay No Attention to That Curtain Behind the Man: the Hyperreality of Barack Obama on Between Two Ferns

The Disneyland imaginary is neither true or false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It's meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusion of their real childishness.
-Jean Baudrillard

But once the "total fake" is admitted, in order to be enjoyed it must seem totally real. . . . if in the wax museums wax is not flesh, in Disneyland, when rocks are involved, they are rock, and water is water, and a baobab a baobab. When there is a fake--hippopotamus, dinosaur, sea serpent--it is not so much because it wouldn't be possible to have the real equivalent but because the public is meant to admire the perfection of the fake and its obedience to the program. In this sense Disneyland not only produces illusion, but--in confessing it--stimulates the desire for it . . .
-Umberto Eco



There are three stages of media propaganda. In the first, the message is in the foreground. Ads tell you explicitly what they want you to think or do. People quickly become too critical and sophisticated for this approach. It insults our intellectual pride and becomes to easy to mock, as on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The clever people "see through it." In the second stage, the message recedes into the background and becomes embedded in a seemingly unrelated cultural product. The propaganda is no longer in the commercials but in the television program itself. Celebrities don't directly hawk corporate wares in a commercial, but their characters consistently use the same products in a believable fictional world. People eventually get hip to this game, too. In the third stage, propaganda is foregrounded again, but this time ironically. Miraculously, by admitting the propaganda it ceases to be perceived as propaganda. At this point we have reached hyperreality, where people not only do not know what the real is, but do not want to know. As Orwell pointed out in 1984, doublethink actually demands a relatively high level of intelligence and sophistication: simple and naive people can't do it well. The same is true for hyperreal propaganda.

Government propaganda generally lags well behind its "private" corporate counterpart. Most political ads are direct come-ons in the phase one mode. In the Bush era the government progressed to phase two, as reporters were "embedded" with the military and the conservative agenda masqueraded as news. But Barack Obama is the hyperreal president par excellence.

Of course the President of the United States has always been a kind of simulacrum. These are people who act every waking minute of their lives, and if they can't fool all of the people all of the time, they must come as close as possible. If the Emperors and Kings of old were Gods on earth, then the president of a mass democracy (300 plus million people is not a polis nor can it be) must be the ordinary man apotheosized. The POTUS is a myth in Barthes' sense, one which mediates the desires of the Public and the demands of the Ruling Elite. Lincoln is our greatest mythic president. The Democratic myth is FDR, the Republican myth is Ronald Reagan, but Lincoln is admired by both parties. Conveniently, Lincoln signifies all the noble ideals of America for the Public, our "better angels," while for the Ruling Elite his tenure was characterized by a realpolitik which violated principles of Constitutional Republicanism or "Democracy" as it saw fit. The Obama era has accordingly seen a revival of Lincoln which has become associated with the current POTUS in precisely the mythic way Barthes describes. Lincoln was already a quite resonant signifier, around which numerous myths are agglomerated, now become a new signified to which Obama is the sign.

In the post-Freudian era, any good PR man must know that the desires mediated by the POTUS myth are only partially conscious, and have as much to do with hate as love (thanatos and eros, if you insist on Freud's formulation). J.G. Ballard keenly sussed this out when he wrote his piece of Swiftian hyperbole, "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan." Uncannily, this was in 1967, long before Reagan's apotheosis as the POTUS myth/simulacrum. Written as a report on an experiment where test-subjects are asked to fantasize about and masturbate to the president in different types of scenarios, revealing that "Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic surrounded the image of the Presidential contender." The results are summarized thus:

The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the nonfunctional character of Reagan. Reagan’s success therefore indicates society’s periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which reformulate the roles of aggression and anality. Reagan’s personality. The profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the United States in the coming years. By contrast the late JFK remained the prototype of the oral subject, usually conceived in pre-pubertal terms. In further studies sadistic psychopaths were given the task of devising sex fantasies involving Reagan. Results confirm the probability of Presidential figures being perceived primarily in genital terms; the face of LB Johnson is clearly genital in significant appearance–the nasal prepuce, scrotal jaw, etc. Faces were seen as either circumcised (JFK, Khrushchev) or uncircumcised (LBJ, Adenauer). In assembly-kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.

Ballard not only predicts Reagan as the POTUS Simulacrum but as potential assassination victim. He was extrapolating from Kennedy of course. Weirdly, John Hinckley Jr, the realization of Travis Bickle, the assassin who unites eros and thanatos by killing for love, bought his gun on Elm Sreet (A Nightmare on Elm Street) in Dallas, where the Texas School Book Depository building is also located.

J.G. Ballard gave the following description of his inspiration for the story:

"In his commercials Reagan used the smooth, teleprompter-perfect tones of the TV auto-salesman to project a political message that was absolutely the reverse of bland and reassuring. A complete discontinuity existed between Reagan's manner and body language, on the one hand, and his scarily simplistic far-right message on the other. Above all, it struck me that Reagan was the first politician to exploit the fact that his TV audience would not be listening too closely, if at all, to what he was saying, and indeed might well assume from his manner and presentation that he was saying the exact opposite of the words actually emerging from his mouth."

in propaganda's progression from Real to Fake to Hyperreal, Reagan's act is classic Stage Two, where the message is embedded and masked by the reassuring body-language of a trained actor. For an example of a president as pure hyperreality, we have to go to the postmodern prophet, Philip K Dick. In his short story "The Mold of Yancy," (1955) the titular character is the president of an Earth colony on Callisto, a moon of Jupiter. Yancy constantly appears on TV and has opinions on everything, and is eagerly followed and imitated by the public. (With his homespun Americana, he also eerily recalls Ronald Reagan.) In fact Yancy not exist, except as an image, created by experts known as "Yance-men." He is hyperreal because he is a copy without an original. PKD sensed the poetic truth that for the mass public the President is nothing but a collection of images anyway.

Instead of embedded messages, people are directly told what to think and how to act by Yancy. A good description from the Wikipedia article on the story is that the public is "de-politicized and homogonized by the messages of Yancy." The interesting thing about the story is that instead of going the gnostic route we expect of revealing Yancy as a simulacrum, an experiment is tried in which Yancy's propagandistic image becomes more sophisticated.

"All of Yancy's beliefs are insipid. The key is thinness. Every part of his ideology is diluted: nothing excessive. We've come as close as possible to no beliefs . . . All aspects of personality have to be controlled; we want the total person. So a specific attitude has to exist for each concrete question. In every respect, our rule is: Yancy believes the least troublesome possibility. The most shallow. The simple, effortless view, the view that fails to go deep enough to stir any real thought. . . . [But] What if Yancy sat down in the evening with his wife and grandson, and played a nice lively six-hour game of Kriegspiel? Suppose his favorite piece of music was Bach's Art of the Fugue, not My Old Kentucky Home?"

In the end they have Yancy extolling the virtues of Hieronymous Bosch. Coming out of the bland, homogeneous, white-bread consumerism of the 1950's, Dick indulges in the common liberal fantasy of an "intellectual" president, deep and cultured and yet still a man of the people. Dick can't yet imagine our own multicultural postmodern consumerism, in which one can express extreme or at least idiosyncratic opinions and behaviors. None of it matters anyway, because none of it strikes the root of the global corporate state. Sophistication and diversity can co-exist with a depoliticized populace. The Frankfurt School got this wrong, too. At one time it was thought that liberation was possible by making people less "one-dimensional."

What if the president was cool? What if his name wan't Joe Smith or Edward Johnson but something totally foreign seeming to the average Anglo-Saxon. What if he could appear on a hip comedy show and fit right in? What if he were promoted by street artists? He'd have to be black, because the (imagined, fantasized) black male is the fountainhead of American cool.

Hyperreality is not easy to explain or understand. All of the definitions given by the Wikipedia article employ a paradox:
1. "A real without origin or reality." -Jean Baudrillard
2. "The authentic fake." -Umberto Eco
3. "The virtual irreality." -Pater Sparrow

Suffice it to say that the hyperreal calls the real/fake dichotomy into question by being a simulacrum which seems more real than the real thing. It's the uncanny feeling expressed by A Clockwork Orange's Alex when he says, "It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen."  At this point it's pretty safe to say that pornography is hypperreal sex. The fictions of movies and television are an integral part of the reality of modern life, which would cease to be "real" without them.

These descriptors don't precisely apply to political or ideological statements, almost all of which fall under the category of doxa ("to seem") anyway. The more relevant categories are seriousness or meaning (in the sense of "to mean what you say"). The layering of irony has a hyperreal effect because it calls those binaries of serious/joking and meaningful/nonsensical into question.

Hyperreal propaganda therefore employs irony and camp, and is most at home amid the lying truths and truthful lies of the comedy genre, the best vehicle for The Revelation of the Method (itself a hyperreal phrase, since it was made up by a conspiracy researcher and supposed to be an actual occult doctrine, though it does in fact describe a form communication between hegemonic elites and their subalterns), and can be clearly seen on the Barack Obama edition of Zach Galifianakis' Between Two Ferns. (I had to put a link because, being Stage Three and not Stage Two propaganda, the video could not be embedded.)

All of the messages are direct here. Barack Obama is playing "Barack Obama," and the quotation marks allow the messages to be processed both as serious and not serious. The POTUS is here to plug the ACA and Healthcare.gov, a message that is framed ironically by the host: "Okay, let's get this out of the way. What'd you come here to plug?" The most controversial issue of Obama's presidency, summary execution via flying robot, is made into a punchline ("Is this what they mean by 'drones'?"), which is a familiar Obama routine. The issue of his birth certificate is raised and avoided. I'm not a "birther," but I do find it interesting that the question of the POTUS' origin and its documentation has become a hot topic, given the nature of the hyperreal as a copy without an original. The more naive and simpleminded conservatives have latched on to this question as the crux of Obama's presidency, while the sophisticated liberals find it laughable, less because those who raise the issue are wrong than because it's an irrelevant question. The conservatives are responding to a feeling that there's something fake about the president. The liberals do not care because he fits their fantasies too precisely. Finally, have the piece de resistance, or the coup de grace if you prefer, of the POTUS pressing a button which drops a curtain revealing that the show is being broadcast directly from the White House. (It has always been broadcasted from the White House, a continuity with the Bush Administration.) Not really, though. Not "really." Really, though? Really? Seriously? Srsly guise?

Man, I don't even know anymore.

Lego My Logos

All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.
-Yeats, "Lapis Lazuli"

The exoteric Lego Movie is clever, entertaining, and full of pop culture references. The esoteric Lego movie is a Gnostic myth informed by Freemasonry and Kabbalah. Spoiler alert for both.

The hero/fool Emmet Brickowski is the perfect citizen of a happyface dystopia, where Everything is Awesome (abandon all hope ye who click that link), everyone works together, and everyone follows the "instructions." Everything in its right place and a right place for everything. Headed by President Business, the Octan Corporation (reference to "octane" and thus the petrodollars that run our own dystopian world, also no coincidence that Business is voiced by Will Ferrell, who had the best and most notorious George W. Bush impression) makes and monopolizes everything, from buildings to television shows to history books. One day after hours at his construction site Emmet follows a woman he sees snooping around, whereupon like Alice following the white rabbit, he falls down a hole and his world is changed forever. He discovers a strange block, which gives him visions when he touches it. This turns out to be the "Piece of Resistance," the one thing which can stop President Business (known in his archonic aspect as Lord Business) from destroying the world by freezing it in place with a superweapon called the "Kragle" (Krazy Glue). Emmet, it seems, is the "Special," a savior prophesied by the wizard Vitruvius, who leads a kind of rebel alliance known as the "Master Builders."

Weapon of Mass Construction

But this drama itself is only the playing out of a drama which exists on another level of reality, in accordance with the hermetic maxim "As above, so below." It exists in the imagination of a young boy named Finn who is playing with the massive Lego city built by his order-obsessed father. For Finn, the blocks are instruments of creativity, meant to be played with freely, endlessly taken apart and reassembled. For the Father, the lego set is a meant only to build a great imposing edifice, based on its instructions. It is a massive accomplishment of "hierarchitecture," a monism in which change, freedom, and individuality are evil.

William Blake, The Ancient of Days (1794)

The Father/Lord Business is clearly the Demiurge, which many Christian Gnostics identified with the fierce father-god Yaweh of the Torah. He is referred to by the Master Builders as "The Man Upstairs," i.e. God. Often Gnosticism sees the Demiurge as a creator god, creator that is of a prison world meant to trap sparks of the true divinity in matter, ruled over by a determinism gnostics call "heimarmene." (Greek for "fate," heimarmene in Gnosticism is both material causality and man-made law. I identify The Lego Movie's "instructions" with heimarmene. The visionary Gnostic poet William Blake wrote that "Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not rules.") Both the world created by the Demiurge and the Demiurge's claim to being the One True God are false, and seeing through the illusion is gnosis. In Emmet's gnostic initiation by the secret society of Master Builders (Free-masons), it is revealed that beyond Bricksberg there exist a plurality of worlds. The most Gnostic of the canonical gospels is John (this is controversial), in which it is declared "In my father's house are many mansions." The various worlds are elaborated to an often dizzying degree in Gnostic cosmology. The "many mansions" doctrine is also an extremely important doctrine for Mormon cosmology, (which syncs and yet diverges from Gnosticism in interesting ways, more on which in a forthcoming post) in which the God of our world has created other worlds as well.

Emmet's story most strongly recalls that of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, and Neo in The Matrix. The former is the Hero With a Thousand Faces, the latter a Gnostic Christ. Wyldstyle is the Sophia avatar responsible for the initiation of the hero's journey (and more importantly his gnosis of who he is really is, where he has come from, and where he is going), just like Princess Leia in Star Wars and Trinity in The Matrix. The wizard-prophet Vitruvius (voiced by Morgan Freeman, "so" close to Freemason, named after an architect who theorized ideal human proportions, the Vitruvian Man we met in my previous post, which is related to the occult problem of squaring the circle) is also Obi-Wan Kenobi and Morpheus, and all three are incarnations of John the Baptist, an extremely important figure in the esoteric tradition. The Knights Templar, among other sins like sodomy and desecrating crosses, were accused of worshiping John the Baptist as the true savior. Vitruvius, like John the Baptist, is beheaded.

"Master Builder" is the actual name given to the people who build sets for the Lego company, so why do I say they are Freemasons? One giveaway is where the Master Builders hold court: in Cloud Cuckoo Land, inside a dog's head, next to a giant eye. (You can see both briefly near the end of the video below.)

While "Cloud Cuckoo Land" is not especially Masonic, it does relate to the Utopian projects attributed to Masonry and other secret societies (especially that ubiquitous yet ever-elusive Illuminati). It originated in Aristophanes' comedy The Birds, circa 414 BC. A perfect city built in the clouds (talk about some master building!), it has entered our lexicon as the name of any kind of idealism or unrealistic notion. It's the dog that's really key. The "dog star," or Sirius, is part of the Canis Major constellation, and an occult object of worship from the Dogon tribe to Freemasons, Theosophists, and other "societies with secrets." An article from The Vigilant Citizen identifies the Dogstar with the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio:

In Disney's Pinocchio, based on a story by Freemason Carlo Collodi, Gepetto prays to the brightest star in the sky to have a "real boy." The Blue Fairy (her color is a reference to Sirius' light-blue glow) then descends from the heavens to give life to Pinocchio. Throughout the marionette's quest to become a boy (an allegory for esoteric initiation), the Blue Fairy guides Pinocchio towards the "right path." Sirius is therefore represented as a source of life, a guide, and a teacher.

Pinocchio's personality and journey is similar to that of Emmet, and they both recall another occult myth we will encounter momentarily.

Piece de Resistance

Given that the heroes of this movie are Freemasons, my first thought was that the Piece of Resistance (in "reality" the cap to a bottle of Krazy Glue) was the Masonic Cornerstone or Stone of Foundation (since I'm not an adept at Masonic symbolism, it's not yet clear to me whether they are the same thing). But the Cornerstone is supposed to be a perfect cube, while the Piece of Resistance is oblong. What it resembles most is the monolith from Kubrick's 2001. Both are catalysts for initiation and producers of visionary experience (gnosis). According to one article:

When the Lego figurines slowly begin to rebel against Lord Business, building new things brick by brick, their enlightenment is a reference to that of the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, according to Lord and Miller’s screenplay.

A stone is somewhat overdetermined as a symbol (there is also the alchemical philosopher's stone, among many other magical stones which abound in the occult), and this is also true, as we shall see, of Emmet himself. If there is a Cornerstone in the movie, it's Emmet, since he is the stone that the Master Builders refuse at first, only to become the foundation of their salvific project. As a personality, Emmet is a perfect "square," someone who conforms all too well to his social environment.

Not only does Emmet's profession (construction worker) and surname (Brickowski) make him almost literally a mason (though not a free one), but his clothing is also reminiscent of masonic vestments. He has a V-shaped blue collar, with the double-meaning that he is a worker (blue as opposed to white-collar) and that he is of the "Blue Lodge," the North American term for the first three Masonic degrees (known elsewhere as Craft or Ancient Craft Lodges). Emmet's journey may therefore track that of Masonry itself from its origin as a guild of craftsmen to a more "illuminated" type of order.

Mackey's Encyclopedia of Freemasonry explains the significance of the color blue:

This is emphatically the color of Freemasonry. It is the appropriate tincture of the Ancient Craft Degrees. It is to the Freemason a symbol of universal friendship and benevolence, because, as it is the color of the vault of heaven, which embraces and covers the whole globe, we are thus reminded that in the breast of every brother these virtues should be equally as extensive. It is therefore the only color, except white, which should be used in a Master's Lodge for decorations. Among the religious institutions of the Jews, blue was an important color.

Among the Druids, blue was the symbol of truth, and the candidate, in the initiation into the sacred rites of Druidism, was invested with a robe composed of the three colors, white, blue, and green.

(Blue as symbolic of the "vault of heaven" also recalls the blue-eyed Luke Skywalker with his blue lightsabre.)

At the start of the film, Emmet believes he has "universal friendship and benevolence," but it is only after he undergoes a severe trial that he actually attains it. This is the same process undergone by Pinocchio to become a "real boy."

As "animated" toys, Emmet and Pinocchio both recall the golem of Jewish occult lore, but Emmet does so explicitly due to his name. The word "Emet" (or "emeth") was written on the golem's forehead. It means "truth" in Hebrew. A golem could be killed by erasing the first letter, the aleph, leaving "met" (or "meth"), which means "death." While it's not on his forehead, Emmet does have his name-tag on at all times. Usually a golem is speechless, which is decidedly not true of Emmet, though he does share some (at first) of the dim and uncreative aspects of the golem. The Wikipedia entry on the golem states that "The Mishnah uses the term for an uncultivated person," and "In Modern Hebrew, golem is used to mean 'dumb' or 'helpless.'" Just as Emmet's initial difficulty is that he can only build from instructions, golems "are not intelligent, and if commanded to perform a task, they will perform the instructions literally."

Remember that Emmet is not simply an animated toy, but a toy that has been given life by the imagination of a real (or "real") boy, Finn, playing with his father's things. Using the Father's (Yahweh's) tools of creation is what has always given the golem myth its cautionary-tale aspect (the tale was adapted for the gentile world as the "Frankenstein" story, though Shelley's novel also draws upon the analogous myths of Faust and the homunculus). The anti-gnostic philosopher Eric Voegelin relates the golem legend to the modern "Murder of God," drawing upon one version of the story told by Gershom Scholem:

Philippe Semeria, Golem

The prophet Jeremiah busied himself alone with the Book Yetsirah [kabbalistic "Book of Creation"]. Then a heavenly voice went forth and said: Take a companion. He went to his son Sira, and they studied the book for three years. . . . and a man was created to them, on whose forehead stood the letters YHWH Elohim Emeth ["God is Truth"]. But this newly created man had a knife in his hand, with which he erased the aleph from the emeth; and there remained: meth. Then Jeremiah rent his garments and said: Why have you erased the aleph from the emeth? He replied: I will tell you a parable. An architect built many houses, cities, and squares, but no one could copy his art and compete with him in knowledge  and skill until two men persuaded him. Then he taught them the secret of his art, and they know how to do everything in the right way. When they had learned his secret and his abilities, they began to anger him with words. Finally, they broke with him and became architects like him . . . So God has made you in His image and in His shape and form. But now that you have created a man like Him, people will say: There is no God in the world beside these two! 

God's divinity in this view is derived from his being the only when who can build. Hence Commandment ("instruction") Number One, "you shall have no other gods before me." From the first, Gnostics pointed out the contradiction between the proclamations that Yaweh was the only God and that his children should not follow other gods. The issue as it plays out in the Lego Movie is not so much that someone other than the Father builds as it is how he builds (though Finn is clearly in forbidden territory): that is, with the free play of the imagination, from impulse and not rules, as Blake said. But the two are really the same. Once there are two architects, then Pandora's box is open, people will cease to worship the Demiurge Lord Business and everyone will be constructing their realities as they see fit. Once the Father decides it's okay that Finn plays with his toys, Finn discovers to his horror that this means his sister can also play with them.

In The Lego Movie's twist on the golem legend, the golem becomes a savior of his people, and helps Finn to overthrow the tyrannical rule of the Father. Emet never becomes met. Which brings us to the true hero of The Lego Movie, who is not Emmet but Finn (or rather, Emmet is Finn at another level of reality). Who is Finn?

 . . . the poor old sod who’d built the world and carried the hod.-Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger “Seven Days of the Week”

Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen’s maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable . . . and during mighty odd years this man of hod, cement and edifices in Toper’s Thorp piled buildung supra buildung pon the banks for the livers by the Soangso. . . . Oftwhile balbulous, mithre ahead, with goodly trowel in grasp and ivoroiled overalls which he habitacularly fondseed, like Haroun Childeric Eggeberth he would caligulate by multiplicables the altitude and malltitude until he seesaw by neatlight of the liquor wheretwin ‘twas born, his roundhead staple of other days to rise in undress maisonry upstanded (joygrantit!), a wallworth of a scyerscape of most eyeful hoyth entowerly, erigenating from next to nothing and celescalating the himals and all, hierarchitectitiptitoploftical, with a burning bush abob off its baubletop and with larrons o’toolers clittering up and tombles a’buckets clottering down.

-James Joyce, Finnegans Wake 

Adam Kadmon as Androgyne

Joyce's massive novel is about the long sleep and final waking or redemption of humanity itself. It begins with the bricklayer Finnegan, drawn from Irish folklore. The song "Finnegan's Wake," from which Joyce took his title, is about a man named Tim Finnegan who falls from a ladder and apparently dies, only to be revived during his raucous wake. Joyce's Finnegan is described as a "primordial giant" by Donald Phillip Verene, whose corpse is laid out as a meal for his mourners, though it soon disappears. (Verene says that Finnegan "awakes as the modern family man and pub owner H.C.E." H.C.E is the "protagonist" of Finnegans Wake, most frequently called "Humphrey Chimpden Earkwicker," though the name comes in dozens of variations, the most important of which I would argue is "Here Comes Everybody." Finnegan's body is thus the body of the everyman & every man.) The composite Finnegan recalls Jesus here, but he is more specifically the Adam Kadmon of the Kabbalah, the "original man," whose body is representative of the whole of creation, or rather is creation in microcosm. Finnegan's fall is into a sleep which is at the same time all of human history. (Blake's prophetic books have an analogous character called Albion, a common poetic name for England: "Albion, our Ancestor, patriarch of the Atlantic Continent, whose History Preceded that of the Hebrews & in whose Sleep, or Chaos, Creation began.") In Joyce's previous novel, Ulysses, Stephan Dedalus (whose name recalls another demiurgic creator or craftsman, inventor of the labyrinth and fashioner of Icarus' wax wings) declares that "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Finnegans Wake represents that nightmare and the waking. Its title, without the expected apostrophe, could be read as a command: all of us Finnegans or Adams must awake from the dream that is human history under the rule of the demiurge. Fall from the ladder into sleep, descent into the basement of dreams. The Lego Movie's Finn also creates a world populated with characters through his "dream" or imagination, one of which, Emmet, actually wakes out of this dreamworld.   

I also found another odd Finnegans Wake connection in this article:

 Fun fact: The Master Builder is also a play by Henrik Ibsen. Both he and the Lego corporation have Scandinavian roots; Ibsen was Norwegian, while Lego is a Danish company.

Finnegans Wake also incorporates a great deal of Scandanavian culture and language, in tribute to Ibsen, who was one of Joyce's heroes and an early literary model, but also as a kind of elaborate pun on its own title.

Just as its golem is ultimately benign, in contradistinction from most traditional stories, the end of The Lego Movie resolves the conflict with the Demiurge in a different way than much of Gnostic myth. Indeed it is quite the opposite than Voegelin's garment-rending over the "Murder of God." The Father is born by becomine reconciled with the Son. By showing the Father an image of himself in miniature, as the great totalitarian prick Lord Business, Finn becomes responsible for the Father's own self-understanding. According to the speculations of the medieval Catholic mystic and heretic Joachim of Fiore, history has three stages: the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son, and the Age of the Holy Spirit. (Ages like to come in threes, and the third is always immanent.) The first was an age of rule-following, while in the second man develops a more personal relationship to the divinity, and in the final there is a kind of antinomian realm of pure freedom (realization of Cloud Cuckoo Land). In the Lego Movie, the second age passes very quickly into the third. That this comes about through the Father's self-realization thanks to the Son is an idea that straight out of the Hermetic tradition, as developed by Protestant mystics such as Jakob Boehme. Glenn Alexander Magee describes these ideas as influential on Hegel's theory of history (which of course becomes secularized in Marx's theory of history) in Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition:

"The crucial shift is from the idea of all reality as moving toward God to the idea of God himself as part of the movement of reality as well." (Magee, p.38)

--History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
     From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal.
What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
--The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
    Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
--That is God. 
(Joyce, Ulysses, p.28)

In short, the "other" is necessary for God's self-consciousness. Without self-consciousness God would not be God, for His knowledge would be incomplete. The other "limits" God; by "othering," God limits Himself, giving Himself discernable "boundaries." (Magee, p.38)

Standing as an intermediary between God and creation is Wisdom (Sophia). It is referred to by Bohme as the "mirror" of God (recall Eckhart's mirror, and Hildegard's many mirrors). The mirror reflects God back to Himself, but in sensual, imagistic form, as the created world. (Magee, p.43)

The line changes into a circle: paradoxically, in the philosophy of Jakob Bohme, the Son gives Birth to the Father. (Magee, p.43)

Robert Fludd, Let There Be Light (1617-21)

Esoteric Christianity conceives the relationship between God and creation as dynamically interactive. God needs humanity as much as humanity needs God, whereas the orthodox conception is that creation is a gift which contingent beings such as we are, rotten misbehaving little kids, hardly deserve. The Lego construction of Bricksberg in the basement is the "sensual, imagistic" mirror of the city in which the businesslike Father probably works as some kind of builder for a soulless corporation (an out-of-control golem if there ever was one). He comes home and recreates as his own freedomless life as a mirror-image in the way he governs his children. His own image as a tyrant created by his Son initiates the Father's understanding of himself. The Son also tells him that it doesn't have to be this way. What a shockingly pathetic (in the true sense of pathos) image: the blind idiot god, unaware of his own freedom.

Cosmopolis: The Creative Destruction of the Bourgeois Body

and if the City falls but a single man escapes
he will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile
he will be the City
-Zbigniew Herbert, "Report from the Besieged City"

So how does capitalism end? Whimper, or bang? Both, if it's from a gun to the fucking head.

Or maybe something stranger happens.

In David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis (released in 2012, the year of the fauxpocalaypse, and adapted from Don DeLillo's 2003 novel), the Occupy Wall Street movement has progressed well beyond Zuccotti park, into the kind of crisis territory feared by an ignorant many and hoped by an insane few. The President of the United States is in town and there are strong rumors of an assassination attempt. An odd pause in a finance minister's speech on the state of the economy causes panic in the stock market. Protesters fling rats and pies. They spraypaint limousines stuck in the infinitesimally-moving traffic that persists all day due to flooding and the funeral of a rap star. So far, so much stochastic misfortune. But there are more signs and wonders, portents of a more violent telos, of rough beasts and the blood-dimmed tide. In this slow-moving and stagey film, these moments fairly shocking, though those who should be reading the writing on the wall are unmoved:  a protester immolates himself, and the head of the IMF is stabbed in the eye on national television. The whole thing has the air of France in the 1790's, when some aristocrats lost their heads and the world was forever changed, or that strange period in the late 19th and early 20th-century when there were some sporadic assassinations of heads of states by anarchists and "anarchists," which changed nothing.

Through this brewing chaos creeps along a sleek, hi-tech limo, carrying currency trader Eric Packer, a 28-year old wolf of Wall Street. New money but married to old, he is a would-be master of the universe, owner of priceless art, two private elevators, and a decommissioned bomber. In the shadow of his monumental acts we eke out our puny existences. He is played by Robert Pattinson, whose association with the vampire in the mass mind is completely apropos, as this sucker of economic life rolls around in his black car/coffin that protects him (though not for long) from the illumination of the revolution. The limousine is really the star of the show, though. A product of Cronenberg's longtime erotic obsession with automobiles (Fast Company, Crash) and computers (Scanners, eXistenZ), the thing looks like the Batmobile fucked an iPod. Here, en route to get a haircut, Packer conducts business, has a string of sexual and quasi-sexual encounters, and watches the world, his world, fall apart just like it was on t.v. He is also thoroughly examined by a doctor in the car, the same check-up he gets every day. Although Packer is young and healthy, he dreads death with an unusual intensity that seems to afflict those who have amassed an obscene amount of filthy lucre. Packer is neurotically obsessed with his body being infected by outside forces. His car is cork-lined (not entirely effectively) to wall out noise. In his car, he comments, he is "safe from penetration." Ironically, though, his neurotic need to see the doctor (in lieu of eating an apple, I suppose) ever day combined with his tight business schedule leads to him getting a rectal exam in the car front of one of his employees.

The doctor visit yields two results which are central to the meaning of the film. One, he is informed that he has an "asymmetrical prostate." An awful augury, it would seem. Two, he asks the doctor about a strange mark on his back, which the doctor shrugs off as benign. "Let it express itself," the doctor says. This Packer cannot do, and this is what destroys him.

Packer is the City, the Cosmopolis. The city is New York, which is also the world. Packer says he's "a world citizen with a New York pair of balls." There is an analogy between Packer's body and the body politic, the meaning of which will become clearer after a couple of quotations:

Communist workers appear to the bourgeois to be as ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts; sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off.
-Georges Bataille, "The Solar Anus"

The very highness of high culture is structured through the obsessive banishment of the low, and through the labor of suppressing the grotesque body (which is, in fact, the material body, gross as that can be) in favor of what Bakhtin refers to as the "classical body." This classical body- a refined, orifice-less, laminated surface- is homologous to the forms of official high culture which legitimate their authority by reference to the values inherent in this classical body. 
-Laura Kipnis, "(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler"

Hierarchization begins with the body, and is extended out into class culture. Microcosmos and macrocosmos. There are "higher" organs like the brain and "lower" ones like the genitals. There are "higher" senses like sight and "lower" ones like smell. Cronenberg's "body horror" is all about the grotesque body overpowering the classical one. I don't have the space here to examine this theme throughout Cronenberg's ouvre, but suffice to say that where Bataille gleefully looks forward to the eruptions, infections, and penetrations which constitute the social revolution, Cronenberg is more ambivalent. I think he presents two visions in his work: one negative in which there is simply dissolution of the body, and one positive in which there is a transformation. The latter is called (in Videodrome) "The New Flesh." The issue is more complex in Cronenberg, where it is often presented as an eruption of Nature into technological civilization, while it is seen in purely social terms in Bataille and Bakhtin. Both ideas are intertwined in Cosmopolis. Kipnis describes the classical body as a "refined, orifice-less, laminated surface," which is an apt description of Packer's limo. (I also think of Cronenberg's penchant for putting orifices in surprising places, both on human bodies and technological objects.)

Though fearful of infection and death, Packer is not exactly Bataille's "asexual noble head." He conforms in some ways to the classical hierarchy of the senses and the body. Throughout the film he is associated with the noble sense of sight. He is called a "visionary," and at one point asks himself "Why am I seeing things that haven't happened yet?" Smell, on the other hand, is a sense he suppresses. His wife asserts on multiple occasions that he smells of sex, which he denies. At the end of the film he confronts his assassin, Benno Levin/Richard Sheets (played by Paul Giamatti, who usually plays schlubby, average-guy comic characters, in other words men of the working class), who is a personification of the grotesque body. He can't get a job because he "smells." He has a fungus on his feet which he says speaks to him. His grotesque body granting him prophetic powers. In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia utilizes Nietzsche's distinction between the Apollonian and Dionysian ("Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus a vandal."), which roughly conforms to the classical and grotesque body. She assigns the sense of sight to Apollo, god of order, quoting the great Shakespearean scholar G. Wilson Knight: "The Apollonian is the created ideal, forms of visionary beauty that can be seen, sight rather than sound, intellectually clear to us." By sight one can act from an aristocratic distance. One "looks down upon." Sound, a lateral phenomenon, belongs to Dionysus, god of the democratic mob. In one scene, Packer looks down on a bunch of kids at a rave in which he is not participating, as they use drugs and sound to dissolve themselves into a Dionysian mass. Paglia criticizes the Left for reducing the Dionysian to this kind of event, a harmless party. "The Dionysian," she says, "is no picnic." It is sparagmos, the complete destruction of the individual and social body, with their respective ethical conscience and legal code. Dionysus is "the god of theater, masked balls and free love--but also anarchy, gang rape, and mass murder." Cronenberg is not so naive, which is what makes his films so interesting.

Yet Packer is not a classical aristocrat, but a modern capitalist, simultaneously drawn to build and to tear down. He has the classical urge to find order in nature, even if this means breaking units of time ("femtoseconds, yoctoseconds") and space down to the infinitesimally small. But in his business, wealth "creation" demands taking risks that threaten to tear down every known law of nature: "An assault on the borders of reality always seems rash." He is also drawn to the grotesque body. He's as promiscuous as we would expect from someone with his age, looks. What he denies about his own body seems to hold an attraction for him in the bodies of others. In the bizarrely sexualized scene where he gets the rectal exam in front of front of one of his female employees, he criticizes her "Judeo-Christian jogging," as not being in her character. "You're sloppy-bodied, smelly, and wet," he says, with evident lust. The bodyguard he fucks later confesses to slacking and the gym, and not keeping the low body fat maintained by Packer. This scene also gives us the first major sign that he's courting his own bodily destruction. He asks her to shoot him with the powerful stun-gun she's been given, evidently because he's bored with sex ("You find this interesting?" he keeps asking her) and needs a new thrill. Thus the torture imposed upon the powerless is consumed by the rich as a leisure activity (as with his flying the bomber). Alas, she doesn't do it. But Packer continues with this urge to destroy himself until it leads him to the final confrontation with the grotesque body of the worker, Sheets/Levin. In this final scene they spend most of the time talking, and to various degrees of coherence this worker (a bourgeois one, but let's bracket that for the time being), this blemish, gets to express himself.

Why does Packer self-destruct? We are given two answers to this question. The first is Marxist. Sheets/Levin tells Packer that his "whole waking life is a contradiction," and we recall that according to Marx, capitalism is not destroyed by something outside it, but dies out of its own internal contradictions. The novel has a line of dialogue (I haven't read the book, I got the line from here) that makes this more explicit:

"You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels."
"Its own grave-diggers."

There is, however, a more troubling answer, suggesting that revolution is a movement within the body of capitalism, a part of its own developmental dialectic. This may be why we don't see Packer get shot, and therefore cannot be sure he's dead. (Sheets/Levin also tells Packer he's been dead, for over a hundred years, leading us back to the vampire motif.) In the middle of what has now become a full-blown riot, Packer meets with his "theorist" in his car. She asks him, "What have the anarchists always said?" He answers immediately with the well-known Bakunin quote, "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge." She responds that this is also the dynamic of capitalism. The dynamic is known as "creative destruction," and was popularized by the (Austrian though not quite "Austrian") economist Joseph Schumpeter. Marx had already recognized that capitalism has its own sparagmos, indeed exists only insofar as it destroys all established order:

 The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

(Manifesto of the Communist Party)

This constant revolutionizing of the instruments of production is the subject-matter of Packer's theorist's musings, though in fact we should probably say "means of communication." In hi-tech late-capitalism, production has been replaced by information, and so has everything else. She says, "people will be absorbed in streams of information." Computers, which were the catalyst for this information apocalypse, will not survive it. They "are dying in their present form, dead as distinct units, melting into the texture of everyday life." Even the word "computer," she notes, "sounds backward."

The most important thing she says, though, is that "money has lost its narrative quality," and she compares this to the move away from representation in painting. I couldn't help but think about a couple blog posts I had written a few years ago (here and here) in which, drawing on diverse sources, I found an analogy between postmodern theory and finance capitalism, that the split between finance and the "real economy" mirrored the split between literature and "real life." (Oddly, Don DeLillo shows up in the second post as well.) Actually here it was a split literary theory and literature, but literature and life is what I meant, since there is no distinction between literature and theory in deconstructive criticism. Every text is a free play of signifiers with no connection to anything outside the text. The root of the problem, I was hinting at the time, was move from the gold standard to fiat currency. What has happened to money has happened to words, and thus to all meaning and value. I referred to an essay by the libertarian critic Paul Cantor, who used Austrian economics to analyze a short story by Thomas Mann set in Germany during the hyperinflation. As Cantor put it, "Everything threatens to become unreal once money loses its reality." I've moved leftward in the years since I wrote those posts, both less friendly to Austrian economics and less hostile to postmodern theory (though I remain both an anarchist and allergic to the prose style of Lacan and Derrida). But I still find this parallel compelling. And so does Cosmopolis. "All that is solid melts into air" indeed!

Cosmopolis is obsessed with the way both words and numbers fail to accurately represent reality at the same time they create it by becoming laws unto themselves. Packer says a man's reputation "rises on a word, falls on a syllable." The economy does the same. A finance minister can create a panic with a an ill-timed pause in a speech. Unmoored from its "narrative quality," that is, its role as representation of an underlying reality of wealth, of actual supply and demand, of utilitarian facilitator of exchange and indicator of value, money  becomes an independent, almost magical (almost?) force which creates its own reality. At 28 minutes into the film, the female security guard who later sleeps with Packer steps in front of the car window. She's in front of a sign for a check-cashing store called "Money Mart," and for a moment her head blocks the second "M" so that it reads "Money art." The speculator as artist, as magus, as shaman assaulting the borders of reality. Cosmopolis is strange and sly in this way. (To be honest, on one level the film is just mediocre, and its reviews are accurate on this level, but on another level it's stuffed with mysteries, nuts I'm barely beginning to crack. Criticism almost never understands this, because it doesn't understand that film and television even at their most base and moronic levels are forms of magic. Conspiracy theorists are interesting to me because they do understand this, but they usually lack a theoretical vocabulary and/or a refined aesthetic sense.) At one point, Sheets/Levin appears outside the car window in front of an ATM. On first viewing, we don't see him, but by the end of the film we know that Packer, the visionary, did. At any rate, once money becomes art, strange things start to happen to reality. Packer's theorist explains to us that time is speeding up, the future and the present become one ("Everything has become too contemporary, another character says cryptically). "Time," she muses, "is a corporate asset now." Packer has no response to most of these cogitations, but I would say that this is all just corporate propaganda ("money art"): every commercial for a new gadget tries to make us feel like we're living in tomorrow today. The Future as the Present is a utopian spectacle in Debord's sense of "capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images" and "a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." The Soviet Union and the U.S. both used to use Outer Space in this way. Cosmopolis is set amid a kind of Burroughsian image-war. The problem with the protesters/rioters is that their counter-spectacle infected by the postmodern condition. Packer and his theorist watch a man set himself on fire outside the car. Packer is somewhat impressed by the bravery of this, but the theorist sniffs, "It's not original." The reference here is to Thich Quang Duc, or quite possibly for the average Occupy-type, that Rage Against the Machine album cover, which is exactly the problem for revolutionary acts in postmodern society. In a postscript to his novel The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco famously described the condition thus:

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.

Now I've always thought Eco overstated the case. In the first place, who the fuck is Barbara Cartland and what gives her the monopoly on "I love you madly?" (Most people don't say "madly" because it's a dated word, not because of Barbara Cartland or any single work of fiction.) Nevertheless, the problem does exist in modern life generally, and to the protest movements and the "Left" especially. Propaganda of the deed under the anxiety of influence. Always acting out somebody else's revolution. Somebody else's failed revolution. If this isn't a recipe for bad faith, I don't know what is. The thought of applying Eco's solution here is amusing: "As John Wilkes Booth said, 'Sic Semper Tyrannus!'"- Blammo! Or they could blast "Killing in the Name," while the dude torches himself. Still, it's pretty weak beer compared the esoteric arsenal of the Money Artists. The image adopted by the revolutionary artists is the Rat, the exact meaning of which in the film frankly escapes me (Cronenberg introduces his film with a quote from Polish anticommunist poet, economist, and lawyer Zbigniew Herbert, from the same poem I quoted at the beginning for my own reasons, "a rat became the unit of currency," which is later quoted by Packer), but I'll tell ya this: it aint original. Are they saying capitalists are rats? Didn't the Nazis say that about the Jews? (One imagines the editorials in neoconservative rags in response.) Since Cosmopolis presents the protests as a matter of guerilla art (there's a pie-in-the-face guy who's rather self-satisfied in his genius work, who boasts about how he got the drop on Michael Jordan once) I also think of Banksy's rats, and interestingly enough, Banksy has been accused of copying a graffiti artist named Blek le Rat. But his rats are fairly lovable figures, avatars of the street artists themselves, roaming around underground and at the margins of the capitalism's polis, not just surviving but making a party out of it. The rats in Cosmopolis are figures of decay, black dead things held up as a sign of immanent doom.

But whose doom, and what is the nature of this doom? Tarot diviners insist that the death card merely means a transformation, rebirth, or end of a cycle.

There is no Cartesian dualism for Cronenberg, the mind and body being one thing, itself not extended from anything coming into contact with it. Infection, whether viral or technological, results in evolution, not death. Decay is procreative. 
-The Niles Files, "Dangerous Minds, Dangerous Flesh: David Cronenberg's 'A Dangerous Method'"

The ancients believed that the theory of man’s being made in the image of God was to be understood literally. They maintained that the universe was a great organism not unlike the human body, and that every phase and function of the Universal Body had a correspondence in man. The most precious Key to Wisdom that the priests communicated to the new initiates was what they termed the law of analogy. Therefore, to the ancients, the study of the stars was a sacred science, for they saw in the movements of the celestial bodies the ever-present activity of the Infinite Father.
-Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages

The creative destruction of the bourgeois body can be best be symbolized by Andre Masson's illustration of the first issue of Georges Bataille's Acephale. Acephale was both a magazine and a secret society. With the magazine, Bataille tried to rescue Nietzche's philosophy from the fascists (this was France in the 1930's). The purpose of the secret society, which met in the woods at night like real occultists, is a bit more nebulous, but can be inferred from the name, which means "headless." They celebrated the beheading of Louis XVI during the French Revolution. Presumably they had no leader, no "head." They refused to shake hands with anti-semites. They read "Nietzsche, Freud, Sade, and Mauss." They wanted a human sacrifice, in which someone in the group would lose their head, but everybody wanted to be the victim and nobody the executioner! Masson's illustration deforms the greatest symbol of the classical body, Da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man." Vitruvian Man demonstrates not only the Roman architect Vitruvius' beliefs about ideal human proportions, but esoteric teachings about the unity of macrocosm and microcosm. Da Vinci "believed the workings of the human body to be an analogy for the workings of the universe." This universe is essentially symmetrical.

Sheets/Levin tells Packer, who has lost a fortune in a day by betting against the Yuan, that his error was his assumption that nature is everywhere symmetrical. Sheets/Levin was an analyst for Packer, working on a project called "The Bot," which looked for "cross-harmonies of nature and data" and then used this information to get rich in speculating. Sheets/Levin loved the work, until it drove him mad. He couldn't keep up with the precision of Packer's system. He has since come to the conclusion that the project was faulty. Nature is not perfectly pattered everywhere. There are anomalies, things that stick out. For instance, Paker and Sheets/Levin both have asymmetrical prostates. What does this mean? Nothing. It's harmless. Some things are just asymmetrical. If Packer had listened to his body (Packer doesn't listen, he only watches), he wouldn't have failed.

Here is where Cosmopolis links up in an interesting way with the movie Pi by Darren Aronofsky (whose films frequently feature esoteric themes). Sheets/Levin mentions that the patterns he utilized came from the arms of spiral galaxies and sunflowers, among others. These are also mentioned in the movie Pi as illustrating the golden ratio, a pattern found in all kinds of places in nature such as nautilus shells, and indeed in Vitruvian Man. The protagonist of Pi, mathematician Max Cohen, is working on a math problem that will crack the stock market. He works with three assumptions:

1. "Mathematics is the language of nature."
2. "Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers."
3. "If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge, therefore there are patterns everywhere in nature."

Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but the argument seems circular to me. The "therefore" is already contained in the first axiom.

En route to cracking the stock market, his computer spits out a number that just may represent the True Name of God. Max is therefore pursued both by a Wall Street firm who want him to make them a fortune and a group of Hasidic Jews who want him to help usher in the Messianic Age. (There's a "God and Mammon" metaphor here, but Max apparently rejects both.) The Kabbalist Lenny Meyer tells Max that "Hebrew is all math, " and "Torah is just numbers." It's "a code sent from God." Interestingly, the protagonists are compared to Icarus. Both are decidedly hubristic. They want to square the circle, to have nature yield all its secrets. Max is undergoing a breakdown due to cluster headaches. His friend Sol had a stroke which he believed was caused by his obsessive work on the number pi (which is of course related to the problem of squaring the circle). The abject body avenging itself on the head, acephale, revolution, heads roll.

I don't particularly look forward to being absorbed into the stream of information. We are already being spied on and catalogued by global brain, and as Proudhon said, "watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighted, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue." I'd rather see the head, the governments and money powers of the world, lopped off and absorbed into the body politic. The dualisms of Apollo and Dionysus, mind and body, tyrant and mob, need to be overcome.