The Pros From Dover

Washington Square Park, Greenwich Village, Manhattan, home and lab of Robert Neville (Will Smith) in I Am Legend [shown:Arch at center of Park]

Late last night I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow Taxi took away my old man

Don't it always seem to go
that you don't know what you got 'til it's gone?


Arrythmatic plagues devastate America and Great Britain, twin ventricles of the West, in the devo-apocalyptic trinity 28 Weeks Later, No Country for Old Men, and I Am Legend.


In No Country for Old Men from Dos Hermanos Kohanim, stark and traditional West Texas is overtaken inexorably by socio-spiritual rot, a plague that baffles and breaks the local lawmen. The Coen's title says it all.

Likewise, the London and environs of 28 Weeks Later and I am Legend's Manhattan Island suffer from zombie attack, literally vampiric. To casual viewers, the plagues appear "viral" in origin and character, conveniently ascribable to germ theory.

In both films, the outbreaks involve cures drawn from the infected's blood -- a kind of anti-vampirism reminiscent of Christian eschatology.

. . . for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.

And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.

(Rev. 12, 10-11)

"Loved not their lives" doesn't mean they hated living. Quite the opposite. It means they did what was necessary, even to death, without overriding concern for enjoyment of, or advancement in, life.

(For more background on these films see Fairhall's "The Butterfly Net" of Dec. 31, 2007, his "Greenwich Layer Cake" duet, his most recent post, and my "Mean Time" post. Do it now, airman!)













Capt. Peterson: [hostile tone of voice] What are you two HOODLUMS doing in this hospital?


Hawkeye Pierce: Ma'am, we are surgeons and we are here to operate. We're just waiting for a starting time, that's all.


Capt. Peterson: You can't even go near a patient until Col. Merrill says its ok and he's still out to lunch.


Trapper John: Look, mother, I want to go to work in one hour. We are the Pros from Dover and we figure to crack this kid's chest and get out to the golf course before dark.

The gambler tips his cap

and walks towards the door

It's the second half of the Cruise

and you know he hates to lose

"Cripple Creek Ferry"

All three films released in 2007 reveal, in different ways, the West's relational and spiritual disconnection, alienation, cannibalization, and zombification under cover of a Bad Virus deke.

BAD virus. Shamey shamey. Apparently The Kitty was unavailable for scapegoat duty.

BTW . . . that Big Yellow Taxi that Joni Mitchell wrote and sang about? . . . was a cop cruiser. Before 1986, the Toronto Police Service drove yellow cars.


Seems her Old Man had help in the leaving.

(Sometimes those Flying Monkeys come back to bite the mistress. And Toronto has been occult red-flagging for decades. Tor Onto. Cana Da.)

The County Sheriff protagonist of Old Men, disheartened and defeated by The Devolution's extent and malice, retires, with no replacements on the polluted horizon.


Aging and devastated that God hadn't fulfilled his expectations and "entered his life," his only connection to Spirit and masculinity, his only tether, are fleeting dreams of his distant and solitary personal father (removed Cosmic Father) aboard horseback, having "gone ahead" into the darkness with a foundational, primordial fire in conservation of fatherhood itself -- of humanity's future.

Hardly a vote o' confidence for America, or Earth. Very Noah-ish.

The analog in I Am Legend is the "God Still Loves Us" sign at Zombie Ground Zero.

They got mesmerized by alibis
and limbo-danced in pairs
(Please lock that door)
It don't make much sense
that common sense
don't make no sense no more

(J. Prine)


In the Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix, one of the first existential griefbombs Morpheus must drop on Neo is that The People are hypnotised, deceived, infected by Malevolent Memes: under or prone to possession by the Matrix, and thus, in a limited but immediate sense, potential enemies of Neo and of humanity -- like plague-carriers and zombies, enemies overcome from within. (See Rev. 12.)


As Fairhall documents, the Triune Goddess biohazard symbol projected onto Dover is intimately connected to 28 Weeks Later, as was the real-life torching of the Cutty Sark, a nautical representation of Nannie, the virginal, loonar Sickle Goddess (with standard attendant occult/masonic resonances.)

Stonehenge is aligned to 29 degrees Virgo -- the wisdom degree of that earth sign -- towards the Great Central Sun, where scientists say a black hole holds all the galaxies together. This is not to be confused with Galactic Center, located at 27 degrees Sagittarius which is the common nucleus around which rotate our own regional galaxies, including the Milky Way. [Quote source here. Such "sacred alignments" in stone, whether megaliths, temples, or cathedrals, exist across the planet, including wide dispersion in the New World.]

The Sark lit off on May 21, 2007, and 28 Weeks Later was first-run in theatres ten days earlier. The film included an epigrammatic "forgotten-postcard shot" from, probably, the boy's character -- scrawled "For Dad" -- and a fireball erupting from the Greenwich Foot Tunnel that engulfs the mockup Sark (via compugraphics.)


Synchromysticism?


Well, synchronous surely -- temporally proximate. But hardly mystical or mysterious, any more than the shootings and berserkings now staple and background in American culture. Predictable and inevitable, rather.

28 Weeks Later authentically translated the suppressed collective emotion of real people represented by the film's separated dad and kids, and the amasculine or antimasculine culture-at-large. In 28 Weeks Later, we get the Deadbeat Dad script: the father first abandons his wife to the zombies, then later is zombified himself with the Rage Virus. His children see him exposed as a coward and deserter.

In 28 Weeks Later masculinity proves untrustworthy, so females mostly save the day -- very modern.

Ridikillus. But popular and modern.

These, however, like the WTC towers and the very burnt Sark, are or were real.


In matriarchal cultures ruled by the "goddess," the alienation of masculinity and fatherhood is far more immediate, and far more apocalyptic, than any threat from superviruses, asteroids, Gamma Constellation Greys, chupacabras, bin Badboys, or suitcase nukes. Like mass-media, that's for show and dough: the Magician's "on" hand.


28 Weeks Later perhaps nods sarcastically to the new Diversity Elite with its black NATO Commander character. But the film's thematic power and conflict, like the plague itself, Eden's ouster, arises from "relational diseases." Women and children are disconnected from men. God and fatherhood are superfluous or dead. The European Union, Global Elders, UN, NSA, American Association of University Women, etc. etc. know -- and decide -- all that is knowable or decideable.

She said that livin' with me
was bringing her down
That she would never be free
when I was around

(Lennon, McCartney)


Empires have colonies. A hundred trillion slave-state gynogalaxies.

That's the "Great Work."

All will love me and despair!

-- Galadriel, under temporary control of the Ring of Power)

Constantine director Francis Lawrence wisely revised main location shooting for I Am Legend from Los Angeles to Greenwich Village, and carried over both the title and the "Robert Neville" moniker from Richard Matheson's 1954 science fiction/apocalyptic-zombie novel.

The Exorcist, like Constantine, opens in "pagan ruins." In the latter, a scavenger in northern Mexico uncovers the ultimate weapon, the Spear of Longinus/Destiny. Like the draco "reptile fossil" unearthed in the first scene of Ken Russell's The Lair of the White Worm (discussed in previous posts), re-discovery of the Spear in Constantine indicates re-arising of ancient evil, long buried and forgotten to most (but not to all.)

In 2006, a year after Constantine was released, one Chris Fountain of Greenwich, Connecticut, found a four-to-five thousand year old quartz spear point in his veggie garden. Yup, garden. Mebbe it was Destiny, eh?

The sonic and transductive qualities of quartz, especially in large deposit, are well-known. America's loaded with the stuff . . . it's the most abundant mineral in the continental crust. Quartz crystals are piezoelectric, developing electrical potential under physical stressors, a property used by certain ancient adepts and, of course, by industry today.

Quartz is the "stone of the sun" in Irish, and was used widely in burial contexts in European passage tombs (e.g., Newgrange.) Shamans employ quartz almost obsessively, in wide geodistribution. In Australian Aboriginal practice and myth, both quartz and shaman are denoted by the magical word maban.

Maban.

Ma is, well, Ma. Ban is discussed frequently within this site. It arose recently in association with the Dalai Lama, via UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.

For more on the Ban, see "Ragna Rok and Man Son Role" and "Of Midgard and Middle Earth." Both here, scroll down.

To sum, the Celtic triple goddess of war and fertility (i.e., blood sacrifice) is called Banba -- equivalent to Hellenism's uber-witch, Hecate. Both Norse mythology and Hittite iconography identify the "ban" as the Great Devouring Serpent.

Comparison is also made between the Ban and the Indonesian "hobbit folk" Homo florensiensis, recently unearthed and currently under hot debate among archeologists, paleontologists, bioevolutionists and such.

As for Connecticut, site of Mr. Fountain's find, the very word is Operational, occulting the basic coagula (connect) and solve (I cut) formula of alchemy and sorcery.

Rememer our Texas sheriff in No Country for Old Men, overwhelmed by evil and separation from god/father? The article on Mr. Fountain ends:

Fountain's life hasn't worked that way.

He suffered powerful feelings of guilt and remorse after his father's death by suicide 18 years ago, he said. Most of the time Fountain, an attorney who now works as a real estate agent, got by. At other times, he felt an emptiness that threatened to ruin his life. In early June, his mood turned after a chance reference to his father and Fountain sought help from a therapist.

"She told me to pray to God for a sign that I was not alone in the universe, that He was there," Fountain recalled. "She said it would be entirely personal to you and you'll know it when you get it."

Six days later, as he was turning over the soil in his vegetable garden, Fountain said, he received his sign.


He keeps the spear point in a plastic bag in his pocket. Fountain said he now realizes that the sign he was looking for was always there, waiting for him, buried on the banks of Longmeadow Creek.

Hm redux.

Further Fractured Fraternitas sync: the Neville Brothers are celebrated soul singers from New Orleans, the American home of gospel/rock, vampirism, voudoun zombees, and recent deluge. For depth, see Michael Ventura's "Hear That Long Snake Moan.")



I Am Legend's re-hash plot was profitable, and worked as high cimematic art, not merely through special effects or Will Smith's drawing power. The film dramatically captures our modern collective insolubilities, which truly are apocalyptic -- the same intractable, pandemic, communicable forces reconnointered but never made conscious in Old Men and 28 Weeks Later. Characters in those films weren't meant to sense, much less understand, the Larger Hand.


I Am Legend does confront those forces, root of the plague, though tangentially. Also, unlike 28 Weeks and Old Men, Francis Lawrence's film ends in a hope sprouting organically from both plot elements and his growing spiritual understanding, evidenced in Constantine.

As I Am Legend closes, the woman and boy saved by Neville approach the great, closed, guarded gates of the Vermont Colony, a plague h(e)aven. Bells chime, the gates roll back, and the large entry-avenue leads directly to a church, surrounded by a bustling and healthy community. It's nondenominational and sublte.

Progress for Francis. Been a long hike from producing Beyonce/Destiny's Child videos!

Like Paul on the Damascan Road? lol

Mebbe Francis misses his daddy, too?

Man, it's about time.

Before the first-run theatre audience had settled their bew-tocks and rattled their popcorn, before the production company logos had even run fergawdsakes, the skeleton keys to I Am Legend had already been proferred and rolled past, couched as a meaningless overdub of sports announcers discussing baseball.


Hard to imagine many public-theater patrons fully comprehended, much less heard, this crucial opening sequence. The first five minutes of the film, carefully reviewed, greatly expand the subtext and validate the conclusion.

That's next time on this station. Then you'll know too. Ooh we're all Special Together! Let's do Oprah!


hasta luego, this is Happy Trails for little dynamo and the whole gang, broadcasting up and down your AM dial. We hope you've enjoyed de program. Tune in again soon and remember, "It ain't the size of the dog in the fight, it's . . . whooa shit! I'm outta here