There is a part of us that wants to believe there is a unified theory behind the everyday structures that blur all around us ...
that what we perceive as real is no more real than the mock buildings on a movie set.
Pssst.
Here is a secret:
There is a unified theory behind all of Tom Cruise's movies which explains America.
No fooling.
TOP GUN and COCKTAIL:
Young America was drunk on itself and pleasure and ambition which led to a terrible hangover.
Take JERRY MAGUIRE:
It is good at friendship, bad at intimacy, and really was that not America in the ’90s?
Or take his latest movies ...
they are all over the place, mirroring the fact that America is having an identity crisis.
Look behind most of his movies,
and you will find the government is not to be trusted, that the individual is at the mercy of corporate or political power ...
even his latest EDGE OF TOMORROW
tells of a insensitive, mulish military that will not listen to reason though it means the death of humanity.
What about ROCK OF AGES?
It reflects that modern America is locked in an existential search for Meaning.
Actually, I am just "funning" with you, my friends.
I just read that the author, Peter Bebergal, believed that the occult saved Rock N Roll.
I almost got a nose bleed when I read:
"To me, the truthfulness of the occult is irrelevant to the truth of this thing that’s called the occult imagination."
Say again?
Tell that to the many parents of Goth girls and Lost Boys who sought meaning in the occult
only to commit suicide at the end of a long road of depression and drugs.
Growing up in the 1970s,
Bebergal bore witness to a blossoming of rock music that brought with it a peripheral-yet-unshakeable association with the occult,
which dovetailed with his, and many other young people's. interest in the eerier fringes of pop culture.
He received his Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School ...
which lends weight to his words no matter how "out there" they may be.
He recalled being a kid and reading a quote from famed occultist Aleister Crowley:
“Do what thou wilt”—in the runoff groove of his brother’s copy of Led Zeppelin III.
"It was the mystique and the mystery—someone took the time to etch these letters into the runoff, and it was a difficult thing to find.
Not everyone knew about it. It was like uncovering some secret, esoteric wisdom."
That particular "wisdom" sanctioned what every teenager wants to do ... whatever he or she wants without censure.
How wise was that?
So I decided to make up the craziest "wisdom" I could and present it as fact to say:
just because a theory is "out-there" does not make it esoteric or wise.
Sometimes I think education shoves common sense out of some minds.
(I have two degrees, so what does that say of me?)
What do you think of
Peter Bebergal's theory?