1:15:22

Voir dire. The crazy vs the sane.

"You owe your fear of dying, of a vague constellation of agreeably unsettling but not generally deadly symptoms, to a bunch of sterile, humorless, woke public health hacks on the take from the Central Covid Banks."

I heard this great song for the first time in years on the street today. It was playing on a boombox. I walked back to listen to the song until it finished.

Going to rewatch the 1975 Stepford Wives tonight because I've been thinking a lot about mind control and split psyches lately (how central those two concepts are for today's woke-identitarianism). Something I've written about for years when it comes to Hollywood, masculinity, fame. Many of the street adverts are of fractured people and their phantasmatic clones; their alters; their duplicates. These kinds of mirrored images were once seen as horrific and alienating--the province of thrillers and horror. But now with technocapitalism and transhumanism, narcissistic doubles and alters are promoted as the ideal, the norm. It started with the CK ads in 2019 and 2020; now Lure has a series of ads that spin the same web-like concept of hall of mirrors and happy schizoid reflexivity.

I'm starting to fear that maybe all these great horror masterpieces from the 70s and 80s, masterpieces like The Rosemary’s Baby, Stepford Wives, 3 Women, The Shining, Images, Taxi Driver, The Parallax View, Blade Runner, etc., were really just visions of the inevitable future (not inevitable in my eyes, inevitable in Mr Globals'). As Dr. Northrup always says: "They have to tell us and show us what they're doing." The psychopathic narcissist's great flaw is that they can't help but flaunt their psychosis. (Notice the creepy "Seen" sign behind the ad campaigns).

At least in The Lady from Shanghai the mirrors were shattered. All those Orwells, all those Hayworths, were cautionary--against deception, against illusion, against betrayal, against fabrication, against incoherence; all of which belonged to and could be understood by the epistemological haven of genre, in this case noir. To be a "Starrrr" today is to willingly walk into a sterile Grimms' fairytale-style technotrap of self-fracturing and willing disassociation. Digital part objects. The internet of bodies. You are omnipotent. It's almost as though the second Lure ad is the result of the first. You walk in, you never come out. You split into a hundred pieces. All of NYC's architecture post-9/11 has become an awful, soulless mise en abyme of looking glass.