2:21:23

A few notes on the 2014 documentary, Open Secret, below.

Now I know why middle-age men like Leo DiCaprio pathologically date 18 year old girls and why DiCaprio seems to be utterly incapable of any kind of mature intimacy with a mature woman.

Childhood trauma.

The acronym DEN, Digital Entertainment Agency, an 90s internet network for kids was a secret hidden in plain sight. Its name gives it away.

150 million dollars was “pumped” into the online video media broadcasting company by male Hollywood directors like Bryan Singer, male politicians like Michael Huffington, and billionaire and Hollywood power broker, David Geffen. This was the early days of the internet, and 150 million was a lot of money back then, late 90s. So dial up.

DEN was treated and funded like a major studio even though the internet did not have the speed capacity to stream its programming.

A lot of these boys were called “snapshot” boys—unknown child actors whose head shots and photos were sold secretly without permission (or knowledge of the parents) by well known Hollywood male publicists, talent scouts, managers, agents, and executives.

All the boys look the same, corn fed. Blonde, blue eyed. All the boys have the same pornographic eyes. Eyes that are hiding things, showing things they are not saying, flirtatious. A look that is not at all innocent despite their young age.

Below is the etymological history of the word den. The 19th century definition of the word was “brothel”!

In 1956, however, the word gets refurbished—and domesticated—literally. i.e., TV den, etc. We know what a seductive tool television was for kids and teenagers, despite its ties with the family home. See Halloween 3, see Poltergeist.

The saying, parents don’t have a clue, comes to mind. Or they don’t want to have a clue. Or the worst thing you can imagine, they are selling their children with full knowledge that they are selling them.

“Transferred to den-like places in human habitations in Middle English: ‘secret lurking place of thieves, place of retreat’ (late 13c.); ‘apartment, private chamber’ (late 14c.), but the modern use for ‘small room or lodging in which a man can seclude himself for work or leisure’ [OED] is a modern development, originally colloquial, attested by 1771. In 19c. it also often had a bad sense, ‘a haunt, squalid place of retreat’ (as in the set phrase den of iniquity for a brothel, etc.). By 1956, however, at least in U.S., the den had come to be a sort of family all-purpose room.