Chapter 22 -
Film as oracles
Dream
projections
of the subconscious
(exert) ..Ancient mythology was an attempt to make a complex cosmos intelligible – a kind of fantasy applied to interwoven dimensions in consciousness – what science now ultimately have broken down and mapped. In pre-Roman cultures oracles were widely consulted – take e.g. Delphi. Something that is barely comprehensible today – though of course we know it in its kitsch version: fortune tellers, Tarok card readings etc. Now just to summarise what "future seeing" is about - one can start with the portrait of the Oracle as a woman in The Matrix (1999) - hinting at the future in vague paradoxes. Never too precise, but enough to prove mystical guidance. This "future creation" is indeed a direct link the present and the mystical seer of the divine evolution unfolding. It has also been called prophetic wisdom or vision. Today films make the pre-mentioned fictionalised mythology more real than our supposed real time reality – what do we mean by this? It is the illusion of lack of awareness of mental subconscious "programming". That is of course the reason why it can be interesting to decipher movies. We can learn a lot about collective human action by looking at modern fiction as blockbusters program subconsciousness. In the abyss of subjectivity with a divided "real" as fictive entities of past and future, the movies antagonistically functions as a kind of obscure roadmap to a moving labyrinth. Movies are all puzzles in a dramatic escape attempt out of the abyss of subjectivity. But we are never sure if they are cheating us, driving us in effect even deeper into the abyss.
In
the post-modern subjectivity, the experience of the fictive reality
in pragmatic daily life is by definition mediated through “masks”:
the silent consensus of the need of an experience of “acting”.
Ironically most people aren’t aware of this as they have never
faced the alternative – they don’t know they’re acting, but are
drawn towards the actor icons, worship their illusive screen
characters, the glamour etc. That is of course why it is so
attractive for companies to have a Hollywood star endorse a product.
With reality defined through behavioural character typifications,
drives, looks and so on, the movies becomes, unlike the play, not
entertainment, but a guide to the factious reality. Movies in their
subconscious appeal controls how the subject relates to a matrix of
superficial clues of subjectivity. We come out of the movies having
experienced a subconscious or even conscious aha: Our way of
perceiving and acting in the world transforms through subtle clues.
We accept the movie star for what they are on the screen, in their
ability to play somebody else, because the illusive acting resonates
our daily life in the modern, technological society where man is the
fake image with a disintegrating conception of the real: You never
act out the real "Self" behind the mask, but always learn
to adapt to ego’s expectations, to the part or the lie that is
expected of you. Aware of this invisible manuscript we unlearn,
typically for post-modernism, the fact that this is taking place. We
live then only in mediated experiences which never feel quite "real".
These are informal rules of behaviour: we all know that there is a
multitude of unspoken rules to be obeyed in the so called "free"
modern society. Subjectivity is abstraction that drives reality into
the sense of an illusionary fiction. Reality becomes a play where the
roles even no longer feel real. The great subconscious is driven into
a sea of fiction which, instead of being orally transferred like in
the ancient societies, is played out like a virtual reality of
illusionism on the silver screen.