The Invisible Counterpoint

Viewing the earth from space is supposed to be one of those opportunities to chuck off familiar ways of apprehending your lived life into a baptism where cognitive categories need to be reapplied … hold on, it's not just blue sea vs. brown terra which this view tells me it is, but of course the Pacific Ocean, and that chunk of terra is California,  and so on.  It's supposed to be one of those chances where in feeling an actual effort to reapply our entire normal way of perceiving, we feel in ourselves the capacity to change … the "us" in us can flow into a better mold. But though in certain kinds of cultural contexts this realization/rapture can be magnified -- like during the space launch, the utopian 1960s -- in some it can be virtually nullified as the fact that it's simply a view from a height lends it strictly not to perspective but to orientation. Arrogant, aristocratic -- entirely-not-our-own -- orientation. I've heard of differing agents in rega...

"Her"  The power of this fusion fantasy can be seen in a simple  experiment that has been repeated over and over again by Silverman and his group.  They showed subliminal messages to hundreds of people, and found that only one —" MOMMY AND I ARE ONE”— had an enormous emotional effect, reducing their  anxieties and pathologies and their smoking and drinking addictions measurably.  “Daddy and I are one” had no effect.  "Iron Man 3" Warriors become fused with the powerful mother that masturbated them during menstruation; they then decorate themselves with menstrual blood-red paint so they can appropriate the fearful power of their Killer Mothers. Wars in early civilizations are fought on behalf of and against Killer  Goddesses, bloodthirsty mothers like Tiamat, Ishtar, Inanna, Isis or Kali. Typical is  the Aztec mother- goddess Hiutzilopochtli, who had “mouths all over her body” that  cried out to be fed the blood of soldiers. ...

Gravity I almost don’t want a movie to provide a simulacrum of what it might be like to be out in space right now. Engineers, and other employees whose brains are 90% scientific data, still after fifty years of space inhabitation, holding court over who gets to tell us what it’s like to see your home planet from the outside--how we might prefer to be in the situation where only Apollo and his lute was able to express the same. We think New Mexico, and we don’t only think of cowboy yokels bearing daily witness to desert beauty, but artists, poets, hippies, doing so. Space, however, is kept rigidly by those who see nothing amiss in their space station--the ostensible center for a community in space--being as cold and human-indifferent as any structure nearly forgetting it was built not just to withstand, but to house . When Sandra Bullock’s character peeps into her shuttle, the objects that float out aren’t items of décor, of domicile, but a Space Jam character--the differe...