Sync Watch: Is Red Mask Symbolism Heralding A New Plague?

"And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all" --Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque Of The Red Death

I noticed a lot of "red mask" symbolism last week -- probably at least one a day, either in news stories or movies I watched. There's also been a lot of talk of flu epidemics, "norovirus" epidemics, and elder celebrities suddenly finding themselves sick and in the ICU.

So here's a little "sync carnival" I put together entitled, "The Red Masque of Captain Chaos."

I'm sure it's not heralding some sort of age of pestilence, or something.

From "Drudge Report," 1/25/13





" The rap titan sported a red makeshift mask similar to the one worn by the superhero in Paris yesterday. "
-- The Sun, 1/24/13

Cover of the comic book "Red Hood & The Outlaws" #16, which hit stands 1/23/13

Jack Of  Diamonds from "Seven Psychopaths"

Dom DeLuise's alter-ego Captain Chaos from "Cannibal Run"

Burt Reynolds in ICU with flu; 1/26/13

Gawker, 1/27/13

Burt Reynolds and Barbara Walters, circa 1980



 





The Atlantic, 1/25/13





"And thus too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumor of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprise — then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust. In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade license of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince's indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood — and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror."

--Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque Of The Red Death

Red Shirt = Death

Jack of Diamonds

 

Red Death reads the cards...



...as does the Joker...



..."Diamond" Jack...






...who started his career as "The Red Hood"





1/30 UPDATE: two more news stories hitting today that carry the red mask/plague theme

From The Atlantic:

And from Drudge (note red mask & red hood):

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Scared To Death: Doomsday Narratives Make People Snap

It seems as if our popular culture has been completely saturated with dystopian, "Doomsday" & disaster narratives and imagery. Two recent tragedies have been directly linked to this mentality: the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings, and the school stabbings in China.

We now know that Adam Lanza, the autistic child who killed 26 people last Friday, had a mom who was obsessed with "surviving" the apocalypse. From The Daily Mail:

"Friends and family portrayed Adam Lanza’s mother Nancy as a paranoid ‘survivalist’ who believed the world was on the verge of violent, economic collapse. She is reported to have been struggling to hold herself together and had been stockpiling food, water and guns in the large home she shared with her 20-year-old son in Connecticut.

Mrs Lanza, 52, was a ‘prepper’ – so called because they are preparing for a breakdown in civilised society – who apparently became obsessed with guns and taught Adam and his older brother, Ryan, how to shoot, even taking them to local ranges. That backfired horrifically on Friday when Adam Lanza began his killing spree by shooting his mother dead in bed."

Nancy Lanza: real-life "Doomsday Prepper"

A Chinese man who, on the same day, went to a nearby elementary school in Chenpeng village in Guangshan county and stabbed 23 children was also plagued with terrors about the "End of the World".
From HuffPo:

"A statement from the Guangshan county government said Monday that police would evaluate Min's psychological state, but that initial investigations found that he was strongly affected by "doomsday rumors."

We can blame the current insanity on the Mayan calendar and the 2012 prophesied date looming, but pop-culture -- and segments of the "New Age"/Evangelical movements -- have been heavily using the "Doomsday trope" for decades.

One of the most popular shows on TV is "The Walking Dead," which can be seen as a metaphor for a crumbling, economically-collapsed society in which one can only defend oneself from the "zombie hoardes" (refugees, the starving masses who might want your food, looters, Socialists) by using guns and setting up "forts".

Recent/upcoming movies such as "The Dark Knight Rises," "The Hunger Games," "Star Trek Into Darkness," "Oblivion," "Looper," "Total Recall," "Melancholia," "4:44 Last Day On Earth," "Red Dawn," "Resident Evil: Retribution," and others feature end-of-the world scenarios and/or horrible dystopian futures and/or striking disaster imagery.

From the Alex Jones video "2012 Doomsday Secrets Revealed"

There are a stunning array of Apocalypse theories presented on blogs and YouTube that syncretise all sorts of far-flung theories from widely disparate (and often contradictory) sources: a "melting pot" of the Book of Revelation, alien invasions, the Illuminati "New World Order" plot, Mayan culture, Native American folklore, channeled information, and more.

But by far the biggest culprit in the "scaring to death" of the world populace is the news media itself. I point to this Roger Ebert review on the movie "Elephant":

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

Even an end-of-the-world theory as ludicrous as that of Harold Camping's a few years ago got the "mega" media coverage treatment, with round-the-clock news coverage and front pages everywhere. Have you ever listened to Harold Camping's radio show? I have. How any major news organization can possibly feel his predictions were worthy of front-page status is beyond me. He sounds like a complete (albeit grandfatherly) loon.

But all these "Apocalypse" narratives keep the populace's energy in a fear-state, a pliable, nervous, continual vibration of helplessness and hunger. It keeps them from planning for the future, instead purchasing a whole lot of useless stuff. It keeps them from getting involved in their government and work towards societal change -- because what's the point, we all gonna die anyway? It keeps them attached to various gurus and leaders and "saviors," instead of believing in themselves. It keeps them buying guns. And, of course, it keeps them buying newspapers, tuning in, and glued to their computer browser.

"oh well in that case, I'm gonna need guns, lol whut"

Truth is: from a science standpoint, we've been long overdue for significant Earth Changes that would significantly impact the world as we know it (pole shift, Ice Age, solar flare, meteor strike, etc). The fact that they have not happened yet, I believe, is largely due to the massive power of the collective energy and intentions of the people of this planet. We "create" our world. We choose to live in fear and hate, or optimism and love. We choose to continue to work towards positive solutions and peace, or give up in a bit of despair and superstition.

Living in this state of perpetual fear of the sky crashing down on our heads -- it already robs us of precious life.

“...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.” ― Robert Anton Wilson, "Cosmic Trigger"

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More Aqua-pocalypse With "Oblivion" Poster; Plus, "Star Trek Into Darkness"

The just-released poster for Tom Cruise's upcoming movie "Oblivion" features yet ANOTHER "New York Underwater" Aqua-pocalypse:

I also didn't want to let the new poster for "Star Trek Into Darkness" go without a mention:

Both the image and the new trailer feature the destruction/attack of a New York-type future world. Also, compare with the poster for "The Dark Knight Rises":

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2012 Thoughts

I did want to get in a comment or two about the "Mayan Apocalypse" looming swift over our heads.

I've been through two major "predicted" end-of-the-world dates, the first being Y2K and the second of course Mr. Harold Camping. These things are so silly that people literally count down the minutes and seconds towards the "end time," giving a rolling series of "whews!" across the globe as the world as they know it is miraculously still there.

The media has a lot to do with the hysteria over such predictions, though certainly our entertainment does a great job "seeding" the fear into us with dystopic visions for the entire family, from "Hunger Games" to "The Walking Dead." We are, in a way, "primed" to fear the worst. The result? A sense of helplessness and fatalism. An "enjoy life now" sort of mantra played over and over again in our subconscious, giving us "permission" to do any number of stupid things that will ultimately add up to our physical, mental, financial, and spiritual ruin.

The catchphrase of the moment is "YOLO" -- you only live once. It might as well be the catchphrase for this 2012 thing, a trademarked catchphrase for a largely marketed-out-of-whole cloth scenario. While I respect the opinions of some, like Terrence McKenna's "singularity" 2012 date and so on, it is clear to me that others have calculatingly used 2012 as a gimmick that launched a thousand ships.

This is not to say that I think it is possible that the world might end at some other date, though even the phrase "end of the world" is vague and unhelpful. Truth is, Earth has been literally overdue for some sort of massive wipe-out natural cataclysm for some time now -- in fact, it is a head-scratcher for some scientists why it hasn't happened yet.

Honestly, the fact that The End -- or rather, some sort of event that wipes out the world as we know it -- hasn't happened yet is very suspicious to me, as is our sudden rapid development in technology and (at least, for some) spiritual evolution since the turn of the century. In short, I believe that the reason things haven't "ended" yet is because we all (more or less) are literally keeping this solid reality around as a subconscious group effort. It is consensual reality practiced on a global scale -- with ever-increasing bits and pieces of us "popping off the grid" as we rise in consciousness.

And this "popping off the grid" is the true "Rapture." As more of us wake up to the true nature of existence, the consensual reality takes more and more of a "hit" -- weakening. And this scares the living hell out of people who have a "Nothing's Going To Change My World" attitude. That is their true "End of the World."

And so I see our current consensual reality as being "under attack" by this rising tide of new consciousness. Rather, people on the "losing" side of the evolutionary track (a track that up until recently has most been only about the physical/biological, but has now shifted to the spiritual) see this as an attack, as a herald of Doom. This fear is nakedly on display on Drudge Report on any given day.

And it is possible that 2012 marks the "tipping point," if you will. I can buy that.

What we really have to watch for are not these predicted doom dates, but the push-back from those who refuse to let go of the consensual reality they have known for so long. This push-back is everywhere, often using the poor, people of color, unions, women, and homosexuals as scapegoats.

But we have to defuse the push-back by not pushing back in return. We have to convert this negative energy into positive energy. That is literally our fucking mission at this point, and we each do it according to our special skills -- writing, blogging, social work, social activism, art, protests, journalism, movie-making, and a thousand little gestures and words sprinkled throughout our days.

Books of Revelations and tales of Mayan End-Times can have some interesting -- and even, to those who understand, valuable -- insights. But they are too easily used as electric prodding sticks to corral the masses.

Consume Content Consciously!

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Aquaphobia: Apocalypse, or Age of Aquarius?

From "Evan Almighty"

 A widely passed-around New York Times article appropriately titled for 2012/apocalyptic flair, "Is This The End?", postulates that sometime in the future -- as close as 50 years from now -- all of New York City will sink into the water, a modern-day version of Atlantis. While couched in a plea for New York's government to recognize the seriousness of climate change, the piece evokes a larger, rather wistful eschatological feeling, almost seeing the eventual demise of my home city as part of an overall civilizations-destroying circle of life.

From The New York Times article, "Is This The End?"

Is that NYT post simply another symptom of the current End-Of-The-World Romanticism that has always infused our popular culture -- through Hiroshima, through the Cold War and the Atomic Age, through the ashes of idealism in the paranoid 1970s, through Y2K, 9/11, and barreling straight down into the end of this sort of "fated" year?

Sync Alert: Steve Carell in the Noah-themed "Evan Almighty"; Carell has also most recently starred in:

 No; I believe that within 50 years or so, maybe earlier, the islands of New York City will experience, at the very least, significant damage due to water. I know what you're probably thinking next, the most important of factors to consider here: where do we put all the important works of art? How do we preserve the punk scene monuments and the Apple Stores?

About 6 years ago, a boyfriend who lived in the Lower East Side, right at the edge of Alphabet City, told me of a dream he had about looking out the window of his co-op and seeing nothing but water. After Hurricane Sandy, I'm sure a portion of that dream might have become a reality. Or maybe it was foretelling an even more distant time in the future. At any rate, the dream bothered him quite a bit, and he mulled selling his place and moving.

I dream a lot about such things as well. I often look out at the NYC skyline from my subway train and think: "one day, this will all be gone," most likely due to the very conditions outlined in another article that ran in NYT the same day as "Is This The End?", "Rising Seas, Vanishing Coastlines." Maybe they'll know in advance and start moving everything to a "New New York City" somewhere more inland; maybe they can lease out Detroit. I have dreams of water decimating cities all the time.

But perhaps such flood dreams are simply primal, part of our DNA; certainly, they pre-date the Bible and the story of Noah. And they are seeded into our pop-culture in countless movies, such as "The Last Wave":

"The Day After Tomorrow":

 

"The Abyss":

 

"Deep Impact":

and, of course, "2012":

The catch-phrase for "2012," by the way, was "We Were Warned" -- which is basically the "message" of both NYT articles cited here. While I do believe in climate change and global warming as contributing factors to the "crazy" weather we have had as of late, I only think this is part of the story -- the other part being, the Earth, much like humanity (we'd like to think, anyway,), is a dynamic system that is constantly changing.

Yes, "We Were Warned" but there is only so much we can do -- and that goes beyond recycling our cans. We need to be smart and start moving our cities off coastlines now -- and pour more money into space exploration so we can eventually get off this rock.

Being a Pisces, I love comic books and stories about underwater superheroes like Aquaman, The Submariner, and the Man From Atlantis. In an "Aquaman" storyline called "American Tidal," San Diego was flooded, and thus dubbed "Sub Diego":

The current storyline in "Aquaman" is called "Throne of Atlantis," in which the underwater denizens of Aquaman's hometown invade the surface-world -- a perfect metaphor for our primal flood-fears:

"The Throne of Atlantis" also mixes in some Lovecraftian "horrors under the sea," a trope that often gets paired with these water-based disaster movies, as in the case with "Cloverfield":

You'll notice that in many of these movies and stories, the mangled Statue of Liberty is showcased in some fashion:

This repeated symbolism of the "Goddess" being torn down is an interesting one, used in all variety of apocalyptic entertainment -- that deserves a post all in itself.

But that brings up the question: does the flood imagery + the eschatological elements = some sort of actual Age Of Aquarius? Or, connected, an Aeon Of Horus?

Again: that's fodder for a future post. In the meantime: try to stay dry.

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