The virtual topographies of our millennial world are rife with angels and aliens, with digital avatars and mystic Gaian minds, with utopian longings and gnostic science fictions, and with dark forebodings of apocalypse and demonic enchantment.

A good example of the spirituality of “digital avatars and mystic Gaian minds” surfacing in pop culture comes in the form of James Cameron’s blockbuster film Avatar. In the past I have included commentary on this film from a variety of perspectives (see the links at the conclusion of this post), but with this article I want to address Avatar’s inclusion of psychedelics and shamanism.

My thinking on this topic was stimulated by an article by Ido Hartogsohn at Reality Sandwich titled “Avatar: The Psychedelic Worldview and the 3D Experience.” In this article Hartogsohn reminds us of the significance of the coming together of technology and media as a means of enhancing psychedelics, and that this has been part of the psychedelic movement since counterculture of the 1960s. In his view 3D films serve as a metaphor for a new filer through which perceptions of reality are altered.

Hartogsohn also reminds us that film has provided us with alternative visions of reality, which he considers forms of “psychedelic storytelling:”

Hollywood cinema has been flirting with our culture’s subconscious for some time now. Blockbuster fantasy and sci-fi films, ever-more popular in recent years, have acted as a Jungian shadow to our culture’s proclaimed rational and materialist view of reality. Films such as Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Golden Compass have presented us with a re-enchanted world. These movies posit an unseen and outlandish reality existing alongside the “normal” world, and this serves to support a growing sense of paranoia about the deceptive qualifies of consensus reality and the existence of hidden and enchanted dimensions to our world. Cinema thus functioned as our culture’s collective dream, bringing to view its most repressed archaic realms.

In Hartogsohn’s view Avatar should be included in this list of examples of psychedelic storytelling, to which its 3D features add “a new level of psychedelic visual richness.” Hartogsohn also points to the “indigenous and shamanic world view” found in the film, making it “a mythic specimen of our culture.” In shamanic cultures the shaman moves between the “natural” world and another realm accessed by altered states of consciousness. This is depicted in Avatar as the Na’vi seek communication with Eywa through a female shaman. Hartogsohn provides additional examples of parallels between the Na’vi and shamanic cultures so that there can be no doubt that Avatar depicts a shamanistic worldview.

Hartogsohn develops his thoughts on the connection between Avatar and psychedelics further by noting that it is “not only psychedelic in form but also in message.” He points toward John Lilly’s work with isolation tank experiments in the 1950s as a means of exploring and altering human consciousness. Curiously, Hartogsohn does not reference science fiction cinema’s explicit depiction of Lilly’s isolation tank and consciousness experiments as depicted in the neglected (and underrated) but interesting science fiction film Altered States (1980) starring William Hurt. Hartogsohn does, however, connect the significance of the isolation tank or pod to more recent science fiction:

A decade before Avatar, The Matrix featured a person lying in a pod, isolated from reality, and communicating with another reality. What does it mean for us that the two most influential mythic films that our culture has produced since Star Wars both feature a person lying in a pod communicating with a different reality, a being split into to parts, one of them artificial. Could this mean something? Could they mean that we are the ones inside the pod, disconnected from our true body?

This interesting article concludes with a consideration of whether we are experiencing “a new wave of psychedelic cinema.” For Hartogsohn this may be the case not only because of the continued prevalence of films in 3D, and the production of science fiction and fantasy films that open us to new conceptions of reality, but also because of films like Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland “jammed with weird acting mushrooms and even weirder realities” which surely must be construed as an expression of psychedelics. As Hartogsohn writes, “it seems that we might be facing a new psychedelic renaissance brought on by 3D cinema.” Perhaps, but regardless of whether 3D fades again as but the latest attempt at an interesting cinema novelty, the shamanic and psychedelic elements of one of the highest grossing films of all time gives us pause for reflection on a number of significant levels.

Related posts

“Avatar: Probing Beyond Visuals to Culture and Identity”

“Avatar’s Pandora Depresses Some Viewers: Utopia, Escape, and the Realized Ideal”

“Avatar’s Success: Romantic Narratives and Dark Green Religion”

“Na’vi Religion and the Damanhurians”

TheoFantastique: Paul, thanks for another visit, and with it an opportunity to explore another of your books. How did you develop a personal interest in “tech-noir,” and how is this hybrid defined with its key elements?

Paul Meehan: The starting point for me was an obsession that I have had for many years with Blade Runner, a film that has always haunted me because I believe it represents a true vision of the future.  That is, I think that Ridley Scott actually saw the real future via some kind of psychic remote viewing and rendered it into cinema.  Blade Runner led me into an appreciation of the film’s roots in the film noir genre and to the realization that sci-fi and noir had more in common than anyone ever suspected.  The term tech-noir, which was invented by James Cameron in The Terminator, denotes science fiction works that exist in a recognizably noir milieu of crime, murder, mystery, suspense, obsession, political paranoia, perversity, predestination, femmes (and hommes) fatales and identity transference.  In addition to thematics, some sci-fi noirs also appropriate the visual hallmarks of film noir such as high-contrast lighting, unusual camera angles, extreme close-ups, etc.  Another key element is an intensely urban setting common to both genres.  In tech-noir the oppressive city of night that provides the setting for most films noir is ramped up into the dark mega-urban spaces of Metropolis, Blade Runner, Batman, Total Recall, Dark City, and The Matrix.

TheoFantastique: In what cultural influences and films does tech-noir find its origins?

Paul Meehan: The film noir and science fiction genres both have a common origin in the German expressionist films of the silent and early sound period.  Works like Homunculus, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Hands of Orlac, Metropolis, Alraune and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse all combined futuristic technology with the dark shadows of the German “shudder films” such as Nosferatu, The Golem, The Student of Prague and Waxworks.  A number of sci-fi/horror thrillers made in Hollywood during the 1930s such as The Walking Dead, Black Friday and The Return of Dr. X combined the dark shadows of the horror film with science fiction in an urban setting that seems to anticipate the inception of film noir in the 1940s.  Later, during the waning years of American film noir in the late 50s-early 60s, a number of science fiction films deliberately appropriated thematic and stylistic elements from noir in low-budget programmers like Indestructible Man, She Devil, The Astounding She Monster, The Day the World Ended and The Wasp Woman.  Beginning in the 1980s the ascendancy of cyberpunk science fiction provided inspiration for tech-noirs such as The Terminator, Virtuosity, Johnny Mnemonic, The Ghost in the Machine, The Thirteenth Floor, Existenz and Vanilla Sky.

TheoFantastique: What is the relationship of tech-noir science fiction to horror?

Paul Meehan: Of course, many science fiction films are also horror films as well, and the dark expressionist shadows of film noir ultimately derive from the stylistics of the horror genre.  Thus, fear is often a big part of tech-noir filmic ambiance.  A list of horror oriented tech-noirs would include The Vampire Bat, Island of Lost Souls, Mad Love, The Devil Commands, The Corpse Vanishes, Donovan’s Brain, Not of This Earth, Atom Age Vampire, The Stepford Wives, The Medusa Touch, Scanners, Coma, They Live, The Hidden and Species, among many others.  My next book, Horror Noir, due out later this year from McFarland, will examine the relationship between horror and film noir more extensively.

TheoFantastique: What are the best and most influential tech-noir movies in your view?

Paul Meehan: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse are important seminal works of tech-noir.  During the 1930s Micheal Curtiz’s Doctor X and The Walking Dead were contemporary urban thrillers that melded crime and mystery with science fiction.  The first film to deliberately combine film noir with sci-fi was Jack Pollexfen’s much-maligned 50s thriller Indestructible Man.  The first film to feature a film noir private eye plying their trade in a futuristic city was Jean-Luc Godard’s satiric Alphaville in 1965.  Some of my personal favorites (besides Blade Runner) include Nick Grinde’s Before I Hang, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate and Seconds, Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green, Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind, Alex Proyas’ Dark City and Michael Bey’s The Island.

TheoFantastique: I was greatly surprised by your quotation of an interview with Paul Verhoeven, director of Robocop, where he states that the story incorporated his “philosophical concerns about life and death, fear of dying, resurrection, and Paradise lost.” Do any of these concerns ever surface in other tech-noir films or is this an aberration given Verhoeven’s personal interests?

Paul Meehan: Although Verhoeven tends to wax philosophical about his work (he quotes Plato, for instance, while discussing Hollow Man), these themes also appear in a number of tech-noirs, including Six Hours to Live, The Walking Dead, Seconds, Immortal, and Vanilla Sky. These films feature protagonists who walk on the knife edge between life and death and are reborn in order to perform an important task.  Certainly the suffering, reborn hero of Robocop represents a kind of Christ-figure who dies and is resurrected and becomes a heroic figure who restores order to a chaotic world.

TheoFantastique: You refer to film noir and science fiction films as “inverse mirror images of each other”. In what ways is this the case?

Paul Meehan: Film noir internalizes the same dark psychic forces that science fiction  externalizes.  In noir, societal angst is re-channeled into psychological aberration while in sci-fi these forces are represented by prehistoric monsters, giant insects, invading flying saucer fleets and nuclear disasters.  Jimmy Cagney’s psychotic gangster Cody in White Heat is just as much a monster as Godzilla or the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

TheoFantastique: Given the cycles of science fiction and tech-noir, care to speculate on the future possibilities for tech-noir?

Paul Meehan: Tech-noir films peaked around the turn of the millennium but the cyberpunk concept seemed to lose steam when the dreaded “Y2K bug” failed to materialize.  Since then humankind has become a lot more tech friendly as computers have become an indispensable part of our lifestyle and have lost much of their dark mystique.  Hollywood also seems to have exhausted its fascination with the works of sci-fi luminary Philip K. Dick in the wake of  Impostor, Minority Report, Paycheck and A Scanner Darkly, and nothing much has come down the pike since then except for 2009′s Surrogates.  What I’d love to see is a film version of William Gibson’s haunting cyber-thriller Neuromancer, a work that can’t seem to find its way out of development hell.  I’d also like to see an adaptation of George Alec Effinger’s novel When Gravity Fails, in which private eye Marid Audran solves crimes in a futuristic Muslim society.  Tech-noir is a resilient variety of science fiction that will no doubt mutate into new and vibrant forms as the 21st century progresses.

TheoFantastique: Thanks, Paul. I look forward to your forthcoming book on horror and noir.

The first is the vampire film Daybreakers. It tells the story of a a plague that spreads across the earth in 2019. This transforms “the majority of the world’s population into vampires. Humans are now an endangered, second-class species forced into hiding as they are hunted and farmed for vampire consumption to the brink of extinction.

It’s all up to Edward Dalton, a vampire researcher who refuses to feed on human blood to perfect a blood substitute that might sustain vampires and spare the few remaining humans. But time and hope are running out  – until Ed meets Audrey, a human survivor who leads him to a startling medical breakthrough. Armed with knowledge that both humans and vampires will kill for, Ed must battle his own kind in a deadly struggle that will decide the fate of the human race.

The film includes Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, and Sam Neill, and is directed by Peter Spierig and Michael Spierig.See the film’s official website for more information, and for the interesting related website Capture Humans. Daybreakers premiers in theaters January 8.

The second movie I am looking forward to is The Book of Eli, a post-apocalyptic story.

In the not-too-distant future, some 30 years after the final war, a solitary man walks across the wasteland that was once America. Empty cities, broken highways, seared earth – all around him the marks of catastrophic destruction. There is no civilization here, no law. The roads belong to gangs that would murder a man for his shoes, an ounce of water…or for nothing at all.

But they’re not match for this traveler.

A warrior not by choice but by necessity, Eli seeks only peace, but, if challenged, will cut his attackers down before they realize their fatal mistake. It’s not his life he guards so fiercely but his hope for the future; a hope he has carried and protected for 30 years and is determined to realize. Driven by his commitment and guided by his belief in something greater than himself, Eli does what he must to survive – and continue.

Only one other man in this ruined world understands the power Eli holds, and is determined to make it his own. Carnegie, the self-appointed despot of a makeshift town of thieves and gunman. Meanwhile, Carnegie’s adopted daughter Solara, is fascinated by Eli for another reason: the glimpse he offers of what may exist beyond her stepfather’s domain.

But neither will find it easy to deter him. Nothing – and no one – can stand in his way. Eli must keep moving to fulfill his destiny and bring help to a ravaged humanity.

The cast includes Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman, and the film is directed by Allan Hughes and Albert Hughes. It opens in theaters January 15.

The final film is also related to the end of the world, but in this case it is pre-apocalyptic. It is Legion. Like previous postmodern treatments of apocalyptic, this film turns Judeo-Christian notions of judgment, apocalyptic, angelic roles, messianic themes and apocalyptic in general upside down. As the film’s website describes, “When God loses faith in mankind, he sends his legions of angels to bring on the apocalypse. Humanity’s only hope lies in a group of strangers trapped in a desert diner and the Archangel Michael.” Michael goes rogue, turning against God as he unleashes judgment in the form of the angelic host under the leadership of the Archangel Gabriel trying to murder a child of promise.

The cast includes Paul Bettany as the Archangel Michael, Kevin Durand as the Archangel Gabriel, Dennis Quaid, and Charles Dutton. It is directed by Scott Stewart and is scheduled for release on January 22.

Mark your calendars and prepare for a fantastic January.

Justin Leach’s
MAJESTIC XII
Leach & Kilian

By Richard Moore

For those who’ve been keeping track of the dwindling comics market (yes, I’m speaking to both of you), it’s not pretty out there. No one knows the difficulty of launching a new comic title better than myself, which is why I’m loathe to criticize a new entry into the field. I genuinely wanted to find something worthwhile to recommend in Justin Leach’s MAJESTIC-XII, but unfortunately I was limited to the contents of the book.

MAJESTIC-XII is the story of a team of superheroes charged with fighting a secret war against alien invaders. One has to wonder how these aliens–who already control most of the universe–can possibly be held off by a handful of superhumans, who seem to do nothing but engage in chaotic fist-fights with other superhumans, and moon over each other in constant, maudlin interior monologues. Oh, and did I mention that most of these superheroes(?) are criminals, freshly sprung from prison? See, that makes them a rag-tag group of anti-heroes; it makes ‘em edgy.

The writing is awkward at best, from confusing scene jumps to sledgehammer exposition delivered through cliche-ridden dialogue. Consider this charming example, followed by “revealing” inner thoughts, from a superheroine in the midst of a super-powered brawl:

“Eww! That smells like fried zucchini–Ick!” Wow, Legend is soo dreamy!!“

Even the emphasis of particular words within the dialogue is baffling. Emphasis should crystallize dialogue, help it come alive inside the reader’s mind. Here, it creates a verbal obstacle course, tripping-up the reader and requiring multiple readings of the same lines to make sense of them.

All this might at least have been tempered by good (okay, great) artwork, but such is not the case with MJ-XII. Backgrounds are virtually nonexistent, which not only means that no sense of space is created, but at times makes it difficult to tell exactly where things are taking place. Bodies are uniformly massively-muscled, with the only difference between genders being huge breasts on all woman. I realize subtlety is not the point here, but it would be nice if every single character didn’t look like his or her super power were superhuman tolerance of anabolic steroids.

This is only the first issue of MJ XII, and normally I’d allow for the possibility of growth. Unfortunately, about the best that can be hoped for here is that readers will mistake the book’s glaring flaws for camp.

Joseph Laycock is an independent scholar who I have interviewed previously on his book Vampires Today. He has submitted an article to the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion titled “The Folk Piety of William Peter Blatty: The Exorcist in the Context of Secularization.” This article presents the thesis that “ The Exorcist represents a cultural moment in which the perceived decline of supernaturalism inspired a resurgence of folk piety.” It is always interesting to explore a significant facet of this influential horror film and I look forward to discussing this with Joe.

Speaking of the demonic and Satanic, W. Scott Poole, who recently wrote an article for religion dispatches that contrasted the depiction of the feminine in Jennifer’s Body with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is the author of Satan in America: The Devil You Know (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). In this volume he explores America’s relationship with the figure of Satan, but thus far interviews on his book have not discussed his treatmetn of horror films on this issue. Scott will be here to address this neglect.

I recently “met” Corvis Nocturnum, a vampire who contacted me after reading the interview with Joseph Laycock to express his appreciation for the volume and the spirit of the interview. Nocturnum is the author of Allure of the Vampire: Our Sexual Attraction to the Undead (CreateSpace, 2009). Amazon describes this work as follows:

The mere mention of vampires used to be enough to make people think of a nocturnal predator. But over the centuries the vampire has changed from monstrous villain to sexual object, for both men and women alike. Allure of the Vampire examines our intimate attraction to these beings in a detailed manner. Now, join occult author Corvis Nocturnum as he reveals the fascinating evolution of this icon as it has lured and enticed us in folklore, film and books from the days of ancient civilization to the living breathing inhabitants of our modern subculture, the vampire community.

In the near future Nocturnum will appear here for an interview on this volume.

Finally, as a teen I loved many of the made-for-television horror films of the 1970s. Many of these appeared on the ABC TV Movie of the Week. These included offerings like Duel, Trilogy of Terror, and The Night Stalker. Michael Karol has written a volume that discusses these and other films in The ABC TV Movie of the Week Companion: A Loving Tribute to the Classic Series (iUniverse, 2008). Karol will be here to discuss these interesting pieces of pop culture that still hold up years later for horror fans.

This film does include a bit of depth for those willing to probe below the comedic surface, just as other zombie films, horrorific and comedic, have done before. Within the context of late modern apocalyptic Zombieland presents the struggle of individuals to rise above their distrust of others and their stance of American rugged individualism on steroids in order to embrace some form of friendship, community, and family. The end of the film includes a voice over narration that concludes that some of this has been realized, however imperfectly in light of the circumstances.

Beyond these considerations Zombieland also includes zombie mayhem performed by humans including the idea of a “Zombie Kill of the Week.” Although I laughed at this idea as much as anyone else in the theater, it does raise frightening prospects. We might wonder whether the continued popularity of zombie films presents not only a forum for the social out workings of our angst over our mortality and the limitations of our flesh, but perhaps also (and disturbingly) a socially sanctioned forum for mayhem against other human beings. Granted humans kill and mutilate the dead returned to cannibalistic life in a form of self-preservation, but it must be remembered that the zombies were once human beings, and the ease with which we enjoy zombie kills raises questions about respect for the dead and the ease at which we create demonic “others” fit for destruction at our own hands. Similar concerns have been raised in regards to zombie kills in video games. But this was a comedy after all, even with the mayhem and zombies munching on the flesh of the living, so any deeper ideas within the film for reflection must be balanced against its intent to make the audience laugh.

In the opinion of this reviewer Zombieland belongs in the top three of quality zombie comedy-horror films along with Shaun of the Dead and the often neglected Fido.

Last weekend my teenage son bought me a copy of Diary of the Dead (2008), George Romero’s latest installment in his infamous zombie series of films. I realize that the movie has been out for a while and that a number of reviews and commentary have been posted, but given the focus of this blog I may have something to contribute as I touch on aspects of Romero’s continuing social and cultural critique 40 years after his groundbreaking classic Night of the Living Dead (1968).

While I cannot say that this is my favorite Romero zombie film it did not disappoint, and it rounds out the director’s treatment of this iconic monster. In the late 1960s Romero changed horror films and popular culture forever with his unique take on zombies, transforming the previous conceptions of the figure of a living being in drug-induced limbo in servitude to others taken from from voodoo to corpses risen from the dead in search of the flesh of the living. The original film introduced Romero’s frightening apocalyptic scenario and each successive film in his series built upon this as the living came to grips with the challenges of survival. Diary of the Dead brings Romero’s zombie films full circle in that they return the time frame to the initial moments after the dead begin to rise.

A unique aspect of this film is its almost exclusive use of hand held cameras which simulate the characters’ subjective viewpoints as they record the zombie onslaught. Of course, this technique goes back to The Blair Witch Project, but this is the first time it has been applied to zombie horror. At times I found the use of this technique forced at times and I wondered whether the human desire for video documentation of graphic tragedies could really be stretched to such extensive proportions. Even so, I appreciated what Romero was trying to accomplish with his use of visual imagery in this fashion. As Romero fans are aware, the director has incorporated social and cultural critique in his zombie films, focusing in the past on racism, the breakdown of the nuclear family, and consumerism. Diary continues in this tradition by offering a brief critique of racism and an extended critique of our media saturated and voyeuristic culture.

Four decades after his initial critique of race in America, Diary expresses Romero’s continued concerns in this area. It is expressed in the film as the group of college filmmaking students traveling to escape the zombies encounter a group of African Americans. With the collapse of society they have formed a tight knit group focused on race as they come together to build their collection of weapons, gas, and food for survival. Although this is a brief segment of the film and nowhere near the extended treatment provided in Night of the Living Dead, at one point the leader of the African American group states that the tragedy has provided his group with the means of attaining power. This is obviously indicative of Romero’s continued concerns about racism in America, but given that this film was released prior to Barrack Obama being elected to the presidency it would be interesting to see how this segment of the film might have been modified with this change of circumstances reflecting changing American attitudes toward race.

Diary also includes a major and sustained critique of America’s obsession with the media and voyeurism through the recorded visual image. This plays itself out from the opening scene where the group of college filmmaking students stops their horror film production and the director continues filming which sets the stage for his continued recording of virtually every moment of their struggle for survival. This makes many of the other students uncomfortable, but eventually they take it for granted, and one of them even takes up the cause for continued documentation with [spoiler alert] the eventual death of the character behind the camera. Beyond the critique of our propensity to want to record and share every aspect of our lives, Romero also offers a critique of the expansive presence of the media and its technologies. Various images are shown in the film with voice-over narration that portray our global news media reacting to the zombie tragedy hauntingly familiar from 24/7 news broadcasts available via cable and satellite. Further, the characters in the film depend greatly upon their technology in the form of cell phones and wireless Internet connections expressing great surprise and dismay when these technologies give out as a result of the breakdown in society. No doubt Romero takes advantage of the media and its related technologies that have benefited him in the production and dissemination of his films, but he raises valid concerns about the extent of influence of these things and our obsession with them in terms of priorities and dependencies.

One might wonder whether Romero has gotten any less pessimistic since he first captured his zombies on celluloid. In his first zombie film a strong sense of pessimism, if not nihilism, is present as the major character survives the zombies and great interpersonal conflict with the living only to end up dead as a result of an overzealous “redneck” zombie hunting squad. This pessimism continues throughout the remainder of Romero’s zombie films with a slight injection of hope in Land of the Dead as it appears that zombie culture and living human culture might be able to learn to co-exist. With what may be Romero’s final installment in his zombie series, Diary seems to return once again to a sense of pessimism regarding human nature and the possibilities of avoiding self-destruction. It does so through not only the scenes of worldwide chaos that ensue with the breakdown of society, but most strongly in the final scene. This involves a dangling zombie tied by her hair to a tree limb. Once again the symbol of unthinking human destruction surfaces in the form of the “rednecks” who have been using zombies for target practice. In the case of the woman hanging from the tree they use a shotgun and shoot her in the head leaving only the head from the nose up remaining on the tree, the rest of her body falling limp to the ground. The camera slowly zooms in to the remains of the head as a blood trickle slowly works its way down from the tear duct of the left eye as the narrator asks the question as to whether humanity is worth saving. Although this scene is very graphic it is also very effective in providing a strong visual that climaxes the film while drawing attention to the human predicament. Like The Mist, this film suggests that it is only our social structures that prevent us from self-destruction, and we might indeed engage in sober self-reflection on our violent tendencies. It appears that Romero may not think humanity is worth saving, particularly if we are little more than self-obsessed, animated meat bent on annihilating ourselves and others, whether we document this in our visual diaries or not.

George Romero zombie film fans, and those interested in the social critique which is provided through late modernity’s favorite monstrous icon, will find this film entertaining and thought provoking.