Brett's Notes on Hardware, La Femme Nikita, and The Empty Man

Hardware (1990)

General

Mad Max meets Terminator. Or, as an executive at the company that distributed the film described it, “Max Max meets Judge Dredd,” the comic.

Richard Stanley describes his film as “a psychedelic neo-fascist entertainment spiked for the Nineties.” He adds “I’ve included Auschwitz references, genocide and other nastiness to underline how these things won’t mean anything to 21st century people. I’m moving punk from vinyl to film.”

Cyberpunk film, but as Sue Short remarks (“‘No Flesh Shall Be Spared’: Richard Stanley’s Hardware,” in British Science Fiction Cinema, ed. I.Q. Hunter, 1999), “the film also rejects cyberpunk’s central ethos that humanity must ultimately become refigured in technological terms if it is to survive, arguing instead that it will merely be superseded.” Cultural pessimism (see under Ending and cf. cultural nihilism below).

Stanley says Stacey Travis’s (Jill) career ruined by Weinstein after she refused his advances.

Dystopia and elite historiography

Post-apocalyptic setting. Ecological collapse. It looks like a nuclear bomb went off (the deformed dwarf Alvy references “the Big One”), and indeed we see an advertisement for “radiation-free reindeer meat”; but at least one review of the film says it was the Mark 13 model that destroyed civilization in the first place. The Washington Post review describes it as a “population control device.”

If the Mark 13 destroyed civilization prior to this post-apocalyptic meltdown, this would accord well with elite historiography. Whereas the public is increasingly inculcated with a view that history is a series of ultimately meaningless fluctuations, neither cyclical nor truly linear, elites harbor a decidedly cyclical view of history, more akin to that of the ancient historians than the modern or postmodern ones. See Plato, Statesman 270ff., Timaeus 22f., Laws 676ff. Mass destruction and failure do not dissuade elite adventurism in social engineering, as they firmly believe in failing forward. Remember William Sims Bainbridge suggesting that total collapse of civilization may, in the long run, give transhumanist ideas the best chance of success.

Cultural nihilism and eugenics

Recently passed “Emergency Population Control bill,” with people reporting for voluntary sterilization. President announces “a clean break with procreation.”

Jill, by no means sympathetic with the technocracy, also thinks it unconscionable to bring children into such a world. Film thus more or less subtly promotes the same procreation-preventing attitude as evil technocracy in film but does it via cultural nihilism, which is evident in the diegetic media, the toxic media culture presented in the film (see below).

About the Emergency Population Control bill, Mo says, “It’ll never work. It’s our nature to reproduce, to live on through our children.” Jill disagrees: “Mankind’s always gone against his nature. It used to be natural to die of old age before you were thirty.” Mo the bioconservative acts against the programming implicit in cultural nihilism (which has the same objective as the official depop measures), while Jill the denier of the order of nature or divine dispensation, even though formally as rebellious as Mo, succumbs to the programming. Yet Mo’s demise is prefigured in the contradiction that he is a sort of cyborg himself (he has a mechanical arm) even as he opposes the technological imperative: his dependence on technology conflicts with his self-assurance that he is “one of the fittest” and prefigures his death at the hands of the all-powerful AI deathbot.

Sue Short:

“Like The Terminator and countless other scenarios, Hardware hinges on the fear that we will be superseded by our machines, warning against the danger of creating a mechanical weapon that can no longer distinguish between the ‘enemy’ and ourselves. However, Hardware goes one political step further in having the government deliberately programme machines to wipe out humanity, or at least those parts of it deemed undesirable. The implication is that a none too subtle form of eugenics is being carried out by the Mark 13. Its victims are all imperfect in terms of reproduction: Alvy is genetically deformed, Lincoln is bloated and monstrous, and numerous references are made to the levels of radiation to which Mo has been exposed in the Outer Zone.”

The posthuman dialectic of technocracy

Top-down, rigidly managed technocracy.

Surveying the unwashed post-industrial urban masses, Mo says, “Someone ought to help these people, or clear them out.” Problem-reaction-solution dialectic: collapsing economic-social conditions leads to teeming masses of radioactive hobos; production of Mark 13 both creates jobs (see under Ending) and eliminates population (through the deployment of the Mark 13) while ushering in AI control, since deadly force would be monopolized by “the machines.” Consider transhumanist Nick Bostrom’s “singleton,” which he defines as:

. . . a world order in which there is a single decision-making agency at the highest level. Among its powers would be (1) the ability to prevent any threats (internal or external) to its own existence and supremacy, and (2) the ability to exert effective control over major features of its domain (including taxation and territorial allocation). (“What Is a Singleton?” Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations 5(2):48–54.)

Eliezer Yudkowsky also argues for total AI control of society.

Jill says that, through her artwork, she’s trying to merge organic and mechanical forms: “I’ve been basing my work more on organic forms, but sometimes by the time they’re finished it’s hard to tell. It’s like I’m fighting with the metal and, so far, the metal’s winning.” No way to compromise with tech; tech will win and dehumanize us. Learned helplessness(more under Ending).

Drugs, media mind control, and Monarch

She smokes lots of weed.

Shades is deep into psychedelics. In his trip, he “hallucinates” a Monarch butterfly which looks luminescent upon closer inspection. He is beside himself with psychedelic mania/euphoria when he sees it: “It’s so fucking beautiful.”

Shades: “My heart feels like an alligator”—Hunter S. Thompson reference.

Note that psychonaut Shades is also opposed to procreation, i.e., he’s a victim of cultural nihilism and narcotic escapism like Jill.

“Zone tripper” discovers the Mark 13 and sells it to the scavengers—creative/destructive forces as mediated by drug-addled adventurers on the margins of society. The “zone tripper” is played by Carl McCoy, frontman of Lovecraft- and Crowley-inspired band Fields of Nephilim, for whom Stanley directed music and promotional videos.

Jill scorches dolls’ heads with her welding torch (cf. cauterized doll head in Hide and Seek).

TV saturated by technocrat-managed fake news/propaganda and toxic culture (a la the loud, heavy MTV of the day), with lots of apocalyptic imagery (revelation of the Method: apocalypse programming). Also Kabuki theater on TV (think Halex: fake news as Kabuki theater).

Same apocalypse programming in name of deathbot, “Mark 13,” a reference—as the film makes explicit—to the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Mark, which concerns the destruction of the Temple and the end times.

Toxic nihilistic culture as escapism. DJ Angry Bob: “Radio with the good news and the bad news. Bad news is the heatwave’s not going to let up. As for the good news – there is no fucking good news! So let’s just play some music!” Music is like drugs.

Religious imagery

Shades worshiping (or meditating on) wrathful Tibetan deity

Satanism? Pentagram design visible in core of Mark 13’s programming when she’s hacks in (cf. pentagram over robot from Metropolis, which is downward pointing while this one is upright). Downward-pointing red triangle shown in apartment, with pulsing red light, as Mark 13 awakens. In one shot, seen through the POV of the Mark 13, Jill forms an inverted cross lying on the bed.

“BAAL” access code on Mark 13.

Mark 13 “reborn” on Christmas: inversion of Christianity. AI and transhumanism as Satanic.

Mo wears a cross (in the script he carries a Bible) and says to Mark 13, “I’m divinely protected, asshole.” But he is not protected: this is a common device in anti-Christian horror films, to make Christianity appear weak. Remember also that Mo is a bioconservative who resists the depop agenda in his own orientation toward life (see above).

Ending

Moses’s death scene is revelatory. The Mark 13  seems merged with the TV-media environment and the strobing, pulsing ambiance of the apartment after it injects him with a drug, putting him in a trance and inducing him (through his mechanical prosthetic) to commit suicide. In the theatrical version, he hallucinates himself reading the Bible to Jill: he has two real hands, which disappear as a black veil is cast over them.

Consider, in this connection, how Jill finally castrates the robot penis at the end. Heavy implications of robot rape throughout film, rape of humanity by technology, just like rape by biosecurity paradigm subtext of Army of the Dead. DJ Angry Bob, played by Iggy Pop, calls himself “the man with the industrial dick”—toxic post-apocalyptic cyberpunk nihilistic culture programming as lethal mind fucking...self-traumatization, destruction of the soul using drugs in combination with media and technology.[1]And he’s being recorded as he dies? S-n-u-f-*, voyeurism, S&M culture of death.

Cultural pessimism:

Pyrrhic victory: after she destroys the bot, we hear a news report that the government has restarted mass production of the Mark 13. Public enthusiastic because it will “create new jobs.” Public welcomes/deserves its own destruction. Sue Short: “This concept recalls Metropolis (1926), in which the masses shuffle into the mouth of Moloch and humanity is sacrificed to the machine. As Fuchs notes, ‘Jill’s art, Mo’s scavenging, even Lincoln’s voyeuristic thrills serve to reproduce technoculture instead of bodies’ (Fuchs 1995: 296).”

Is this sort of Pyrrhic (false) victory not typical of the dystopia genre (e.g., Minority Report), where the pro-freedom heroes must be seen as scoring a victory of some sort even though the invincible juggernaut of techno-dystopia marches on? Predictive programming as inculcating learned helplessness.

Sue Short on cultural pessimism:

“In winning the battle and slaying the beast, Jill not only confirms her will to survive but stakes a claim in the future. Yet victory is only temporary. The final image shows Jill looking at the droid’s remains as we hear that the Mark 13 is about to go into production. Like the only survivor of Westworld (1973), or Sarah Connor facing the approaching storm at the end of The Terminator, Jill knows that humanity doesn’t seem to have a hope in hell, but at least she knows what’s coming. Suzanne Moore has criticised the negative fatalism of this conclusion as emblematic of ‘Left pessimism’ and what Fredric Jameson called the ‘atrophy of the utopian imagination’–the cultural inability to conceive of any alternative to capitalism (New Statesman and Society 5 October 1990). As Moore says, ‘The attitude in Hardware is one of resignation–the world is fucked up and we can do nothing to change it.’ Stanley admits to this pessimistic streak in his work, citing the strong influence of the seventies cycle of post-holocaust sf, which had a similarly ominous view of society’s fate: ‘It does tend to say that the world’s going to hell very quickly and there’s not a lot anyone can do’ (Board 1990: 66). Despite criticising war and industrial capitalism, the film falls short of any solutions and lapses instead into nihilistic despair. The repetition of PiL’s insistent refrain of ‘This is what you want, this is what you get’ in the final reels appears to be a wake-up call to cynicism and complacency, but Hardware strongly implies that it may already be too late for change. Despite the film’s lack of solutions, it remains an essentially critical dystopia in placing its concerns within the context of an extreme but believable world. In this sense Hardware is a political film played for entertainment.”

But Short also discerns an optimistic lining behind Jill’s (Pyrrhic) victory over the machine:

“At this point the film undergoes an interesting gender reversal as Jill is resurrected from her fall and returns upstairs with a baseball bat. Like the ‘Final Girl’ of the slasher film, it is Jill rather than Mo who displays the courage and resourcefulness of a true survivor, realising the need to fight to stay alive (Clover 1992: 35–41). As Stanley put it, ‘I wanted to give a thumbs-up for essential human savagery’ (Dorgan 1990: 14) and it is significant that Jill finds the strength to face the enemy. Facing the enemy is synonymous with naming it, and Jill understands not only the purpose of the droid but why she is a threat to it, shouting, ‘Why don’t you come after me, you fucking power junkie? You’re scared.’ Her threat to the Mark 13 is implicit. Able to kill male characters with ridiculous ease, the Mark 13’s pursuit of her is difficult and prolonged. Although capable of perpetual rebirth, it is unable to compete with the human female’s ability to generate new life, and sets out to destroy it at source. This fear of the female as the site of reproduction is also evident in Alien (1979), with its depiction of monstrous fecundity, as well as Inseminoid (1980) and Xtro (1982) (see Wright, this volume). Vivian Sobchack has lamented sf’s tendency to obscure the realities of reproduction and the female role within this (Sobchack 1990: 108–9). Hardware makes a significant contribution to redressing the balance, with reproduction as a central theme.”

Loose ends

Why does perv guy go into apartment when he knows robot is in there?

And why are there kids’ shoes on the wall of his apartment? P-e-d-o???

Method

First shot: strobe lights (flicker rate), colored (red and blue) lights, pulsing sounds. Jill is receiving “signals” through meditation/trance-induction.

Flashing red-and-blue lights throughout the film (Dario Argento influence). Sensory-bombarding soundtrack (at times) to match.

[1] In his Cthulhu article, Stanley associated the Lovecraft mythos with “cosmic nihilism.”

Richard Stanley Notes

Describes himself as a sort of picaresque adventurer—definitely intelligence material.

Artistic anthropologist mother divorced father at age 4. Mother did not think kids needed men, “radically feminist” outlook.

Short article:

Richard Stanley started out directing rock videos, like Fincher and Snyder. He directed several music and promotional videos for Fields of the Nephilim, a Lovecraft- and Crowley-inspired British heavy metal act with a deep interest in magic and psychedelics.

Stanley’s childhood spent travelling around war-torn parts of the world and his subsequent experiences in Afghanistan strongly influenced the film’s image of an overpopulated future destroying itself through perpetual warfare. As Stanley perceived it, ‘The way things are in the third world at the moment is a good model for what things would be like in the first world if things just slipped a notch, like they did in Hardware’ (Dorgan 1990: 14).What causes this ‘slip’ is the trusty convention of a post-apocalyptic society derived from the Book of Revelation, a childhood diet of horror comics and Michael Moorcock, and the obvious influence of a lifetime of films. Hardware’s visual and thematic concerns place it within the select sf sub-genre of cyberpunk cinema, including Blade Runner (1982), RoboCop (1987) and Akira (1988), which feature violent urban dystopias and disenfranchised masses.

His Cthulhu article:

Stanley’s virtue signaling, writing that, his admiration notwithstanding Lovecraft’s “views are known to be tainted by elements of racism, fascism and misogyny.” Not only does he have lots of Cthulhu t-shirts but “a hot pink Cthulhu badge proudly sewn on the combat jacket I have worn in my recent travels.”

He openly observes endorses Cthulhu mythos as religious engineering: “we are witnessing something akin to a psychoactive virus that has finally reached pandemic status, or what evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins termed a 'religious meme': a new idea, style, fad or form of behaviour spread through imitation and capable of evolving through natural selection in a similar manner to biological evolution.”

He observes that the cutesy, tongue-in-cheek Cthulhu products are really just another way to insinuate the mythos into culture: “Perhaps as a natural human reaction to the sheer bleakness of Lovecraft's cosmic nihilism, subsequent generations responded by turning the Old Ones into toys, the subject of jocular Christmas carols, cartoons and fridge magnets, reducing the inexpressible to something they could at least get a handle on. By the end of the century, the critical community seemed on the verge of inducting his work into the pantheon of American literature, with Lovecraft's stories frequently surfacing as recommended reading on high school syllabi.”

“Given the protean entity's fictional origins, Cthulhu can never be discredited - nor exposed as a pædophile or sexual predator like any other earthly saint, spiritual guide or guru - making his tentacled presence an ideal deity for a post-truth era in which our very environment is seemingly turning against us. I suspect in two or three centuries from now, should humanity survive so long, the Necronomicon and Lovecraft's Old Ones will still be with us, whereas a great many other contemporary religious movements (Scientology, TM, ISIS, Christian Identity, you name it) will have happily faded from memory.”

In Voice of the Mooncommentary, Stanley says he traveled to Afghanistan with the help of “former” heroin smuggler. First trip, though, was with UN. It says UNESCO sponsored the film in the credits. Went out there chasing rumors of lycanthropy. All three crew members “so stoned they could barely speak.” was there toward end of Soviet war. We know from Argo that movie productions can serve as fronts for intelligence operations. Is Stanley an intelligence operative doubling as a director? Stanley says he believes in political anarchy and thinks that’s what America would become if it “balkanized” and stopped being controlled from Washington.

Podcast interview:

Living in a “Cathar enclave” in Pyrenees. Interest goes back at least to Otto Rahn documentary. Says he stopped being an atheist through working on Otto Rahn story, over about 17 or 18 years. Synchronicity a big factor. Has glow-in-the-dark ouiji board, which he credits with the story “Mother of Toads” in the anthology film he did…and he sounds to be generally involved in occultism. Consider himself a “pagan or neopagan.”

“Secret Glory,” short film about Otto Rahn, opens with myth of Lucifer’s fall, relating how Lucifer’s crown became the Holy Grail.’

Not Coming interview:

Thinks much media imagery, including commercials, is toxic and if he had kids would shield them from it.

Alludes to suspicions that his journey to Afghanistan may have had an intelligence purpose: “The sheer fact of having known about some of these people makes you automatically suspect, and rightly so. Because even having been there in the first place, regardless of whether one thinks of oneself as a spy at the time, one is automatically bringing things into the popular ken and making things known.”

La Femme Nikita (1990)

Besson’s parents “scuba instructors”—cover for intelligence operatives?

Cinema du look—style over substance, MTV aesthetic of France.

Green caduceus on neon sign in opening scene. Did Stone take the neon green caduceus symbol for the pharmacy in Natural Born Killers from this?

Drug-addicted street girl; she dissociates during shootout.

Fake power trip for the powerless: stabbing the inspector with a pencil; court outburst; biting/kicking martial arts instructor; etc.

She’s drugged in prison. What does she think is happening? Does she know they are supposedly illegally killing her with an overdose of tranquilizers (she asks to speak to her mom)? For the fake death, erased identity as condition to enter mind control program, cf. Control(dir. Tim Hunter).

“That’ll clip your wings.” –Psychological terror and trauma to break psyche and depattern it for reprogramming. Also the continual trauma she experiences.

Masonic checkerboard floors at training facility, where she trains to be a sex operative. Also Masonic checkerboard in “George V” bar.

Check graffiti on wall: “shit,” “snake,” “sex,” etc. Rock-and-roll posters, including Meat Loaf, on wall (music programming?).

Degas ballerina painting on wall.

Body doubles (last operation).

“The Cleaner” (Jean Reno) bears comparison to Winston Wolf (Harvey Keitel) from Pulp Fiction. And indeed, Keitel plays “the Cleaner” in the American remake of this film, Point of No Return (1993). Leon (1994) is a spinoff of this character: p-e-d-o stuff.

Notice her death pose in the shower after a traumatic mission.

Mention of “the videocassettes” in final scene (discussion between handler and boyfriend). Blackmail? porn?

Empty Man (2020)

General

Connecting deep politics with the New Age (cf. Inherent Vice), Eastern philosophy, and urban legends. Movie about demon-driven religious engineering.

Theme of occult cabal infiltrating all sectors of society (some cops seem involved in one scene). Cf. No Place to Hide, Spellbinder, Eyes Wide Shut, etc.

Theme of trauma-based mind control (see mostly under Ending), with implication that trauma opens up the psyche for paranormal and mystical spiritual experiences.

Dark self archetype. (TV dialogue: “The god is coming.”)

“In his early conversations with executives, Prior compared it to Mulholland Drive rather than something in The Conjuring universe or the Blumhouse arsenal” (Thrillistinterview). Director David Prior a Hollywood insider; this film, like Mulholland Drive, reveals something about “how Hollywood works,” i.e., that it is shot through with demonic cult activity bent on spiritually reengineering the mass mind over a relatively long period of time.

Themes and observations

Intro:

First impression: Westerners seduced by pop Buddhism into thinking they are suited to confront the depths of the “unconscious” or “the void.” Troubled looks on faces of monks the first sign that “enlightenment” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The guy literally falls into a void and is catatonic when his friends reach him. (Cf. opening sequence of My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, where the overconfident yoga bros die on the Amazon River while the spiritually stunted protagonist refuses to go and survives.)

Conversation with Amanda, girl who goes missing:

She tells him that “nothing can hurt you because nothing is real.” Gnostic escape from reality, spirituality of dissociation—but it’s all a giant psyop on the main character. She refers to thoughts that are “old and hidden,” thoughts that are not our own traveling “down a wire”—alluding to demonic sources of thoughts in the “noosphere” (Teilhard de Chardin).

There are somewhat risqué photos of Amanda among the scrapbooks in her room. Intimation of NXIVM-style blackmail photos?

Interviews Davarra, Amanda’s friend, at Jacques Derrida high school. Deconstruction of reality.

A tulpa is an orientalizing concept of the Theosophists, which is here aptly used as a bridge concept between Eastern religion and demonology.[1] Jay has suggested that Freddy Kruger, e.g., is a tulpa. Nightmare on Elm Streetis also an “urban legend film.” Is the “tulpa” a key to understanding the American urban legend?

“Practitioner of Satanism” comes up in James’s online research.

The urban legend angle connects the cult—and therewith the spirituality they represent—to suicide-glorifying cultural nihilism of youth culture, the implication being that teens are encouraged to summon demons on their own (think about what The Gate implies about the heavy metal subculture). After being invaded by the Empty Man, teens are seen in group meditation: group/mass meditation as mass demon summoning.

Victims of the Empty Man apparently die of suicide. Consider that one of the phrases on the Pontifex personality tests is “Suicide is a form of thought control.” For other films about mass suicide induced via hypnotic cues in pop culture, see Suicide Circle (2001) and Kairo aka Pulse (2001), and also the prequel to Suicide Circle, Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005). Consider also Mo’s techno-media-drug-induced suicide in Hardware.

Journey into the initiatory cult:

“Pontifex Institute”: “Pontifex” is the word for “priest” in Latin; it means, literally, “bridge builder.”[2]The cult is attempting to build a bridge to—to channel—demonic forces…and then to transmit those forces to the rest of society. Their motto is “We transmit. You Receive.” Religious engineering as demon possession gone viral. Think Esalen channeling Tibetan demons. My Ghostbusters theory: demons summoned through 60s psychedelia turned loose on society in 80s (through new wave of acid experimentation?).

1.

Outer portico of cult—Masonic checkerboard floor signaling the deliberate confusing of would-be initiates, who are plied with New Age wish fulfillment fantasies.

Personality tests with New Agey philosophy/techniques used to gain information with which to control initiates: cf. Scientology, NXIVM. Some more phrases from the personality tests:

“Until a civilization has fallen it has not yet served its purpose.” “Science says the genders are discrete.”

2.

Beyond inner court, more philosophical-mystical but teachings still not fully interpreted. “Empty Man” is said to be simply “a construct for meditation.”

Next layer of the initiation—Stephen Root (fictional name is Arthur Parsons, probably a reference to Jack Parsons) speech, which is a kind of distillation of mystic-New Age spirituality:

“Our message has always been” that “You are complete in yourself. There is no struggle.” Everything is an illusion, above all the illusion of “separateness.” “There are no distinctions,” implying that “there is no right and wrong.” Antinomian/transethical spirituality.Nondual theosophy: “We were one before; we will be one again.”

He refers to Nietzsche (“the abyss”). The message here is that we are made in the image of the void, of emptiness, not of God—inversion or negation of Christian creation theology.

“What’s real starts here,” in the mind—we make our own reality. Power of positive/negative thinking. He indicates, though, that “thoughts begin somewhere else,” i.e., in “noosphere,” from angels and demons.

3.

Next layer (moves into or toward basement area) revealed as he walks through the barracks where they brainwash cult members. Epistemological nihilism (part of breaking down all patterning in the mind) promoted using Gorgias over loudspeaker: “Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others.” Epistemological nihilism at root of cultural nihilism.

4.

Inner sanctum (basement) is the group meditation scene. Psychic invasion/demon possession through group meditation. Cf. Strieber and Steven Greer (mass meditation using his CE5 techniques to summon UFOs).

Explanations offered by “Neil Cassady,” dispatched to address James’s skeptical, refractory character. In their second meeting, after James kidnaps him, his message seems calculated to terrify James (spiritual terrorism).

“They don’t have five-year plans [like the Communists?]; they have 500-year plans.” Resistance is futile.

Lovecraftian themes. “Neil Cassady” guy speaks of “black endless chaos.”

“Detach from a false reality to join a [better]? one.”

Possible cultural engineering wink when he references Leonard Cohen (“Things are going to slide…”)? Cohen’s The Future album used for its apocalyptic prophecy in Natural Born Killers. Is the cult trying to trigger the apocalypse, like so many other cults. Does this trend start with the Process Church?

Final lines about Amanda somewhat cryptic. “She’s on the bridge” but “there is no bridge.”

Ending and evaluation

Audience identification with the main character and his journey into madness designed to decohere and “initiate” the viewer. Prior virtually confirms (from Thrillistinterview): “The narrative was intended to atomize along with the psyche of the main character. The movie and the character are reflecting each other as it goes, and that becomes a feedback loop where no one knows what's really true anymore.”

Diegesis validates worldview of cult, pushing gnosticism as usual and thereby psychically assaulting and disempowering the audience. Like in Come True (et al.), the ending of the film tends toward incepting the idea that our world is not real even as it exposes the manipulative potential of the idea (James as mind control victim). This film goes further than the usual gnostic cinema in suggesting not only that our world, our thoughts, etc., are simulations or inceptions but that our very existence is constructed by occult manipulators (that we are all tulpas, empty men): this is a cipher for trauma-based cultural engineering as mass mind control, informed by New Age-imported Eastern mysticism.

Consider James as mind control victim: in a flashback, he sees himself naked, seated on (strapped to?) a metal chair in an isolated chamber. The “carrier,” his predecessor, was subject to psychiatric experiments “gone wrong,” or, rather, “gone right,” i.e., gone as intended, with the patient’s psyche shattered in order to channel demons. The carrier is Paul from the Bhutan expedition. So did they begin experimenting with Paul before or after the trip? James is marked as his replacement, so we are permitted to view him as a victim of psychiatric experimentation, with the whole gnostic time loop narrative as potentially part of his programming—and part of the audience programming. The fact that James was deliberately traumatized by the cult (or had traumatic memories fabricated, according to his initiation) in order to make him more receptive to demonic invasion suggests that Paul, too, was traumatized prior to his trip to the mountains—perhaps, outside of his “Matrix” reality, he was being traumatized in a room like James sees himself in, seated naked on a metal chair, but in his dissociated state he experienced this trauma as a personal encounter with the “empty man” in Bhutan while seeking some uplifting spiritual truth.

Symbols and tropes:

Triangles everywhere.

Tree of life woodcut in front of his house.

Davara, girl who dies: covering her eye for the one-eyepose, then stabbed in one eye. James has one eye covered during birthday song in restaurant.

When Davara covers her eye and looks up at the night sky, through her POV, the metal latticework forms a tilted pentagram. (See reference to Satanism above.)

Jay: 3 days and 3 nights an inversion of triune structures in Christianity. Claims not only a pyramid but a butterfly or dragonfly symbol associated with Pontifex Institute.

Method

Hypnotic sound editing (murmurings) throughout.

Attempt to induce in audience (an intimation of) the mountain climber’s catatonic state, to induce insanity in audience? Same intent with audience identification with protagonist.

Pulsing soundtrack.

Strobe sequence toward end.

[1] In his Cthulhu article, Stanley mentions the influence of Theosophy on Lovecraft.

[2] In the Thrillist interview, Prior confirms that the meaning was intended, as was the “bridge imagery” seen throughout the movie.