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I finished reading this week Umberto Eco‘s Foucault’s Pendulum. A clever, vastly detailed story about 3 friends inventing a fictitious conspiracy plan for world domination as an innocent game and how it affects their lives.

Much has been said about this book, and a very good summary can be found on Wikipedia, so let me cap it briefly: Casaubon, the narrator and hero of the story is an Italian student interested in Occult theories, and especially everything that has to do with the Knights Templar. He meets up with Belbo and Diotallevi, both editors at a local publishing house.
The three of them go through too many manuscripts written by occult authors (they nickname them “diabolicals”). These writings are mostly about pseudoscientific ideas and conspiracy theories about special hidden powers and the ability to rule the universe using them. Eventually, the three editors decide to start their own conspiracy theory for fun and they call it the Plan.
Being more rational and intelligent than their diabolical counterparts, they create a far more sophisticated theory, reinterpreting the knowledge they gather from different manuscripts and events they attend. They interweave almost every famous person and event in the history of the world into their plan, handing them all a part in it’s great making. They try to approach this task at first without being biased or fanatic, but soon they find out they are succumbed by their theory, and everything in their life somehow becomes connected with it. They start losing grip of reality and any common sense and slowly become consumed by their game.

What fascinates me is how the heroes’ perception of their surroundings is altered based on the psychological changes they go through. You have to understand: dealing with the occult is not a rewarding process at all. Since you are bound by no rules of reason, everything’s possible. I know, some of you might say that being unbound by rules is liberating and everything, but consider this: a research created without a framework, having no rules at all, can be easily disputed since there are also no rules to back it up.

I emphasize this obvious point because Foucault’s Pendulum‘s heroes have had this type of research. And since they could make any claim they wanted and back it up in any way they wanted, inventing the Plan was simply putting random pieces of a giant puzzle together. It was interesting to see how their beliefs in the Plan caused them to be skeptical of their true environment. How every ordinary event or fact triggered a metaphysical debate about their conspiratorial consequences. For example, at one point they discuss the true function of the Eiffel Tower – was it built just to be a giant entrance for the 1889 World’s Fair, or was it really just a cover story for it’s true function as some sort of an antenna meant to do something with the Telluric Currents?
It goes on and on like this. At the beginning, they receive a coded manuscript they discover is actually a description of several secret meetings.  Casaubon, later on, rejects a rational explanation his girlfriend, Lia, has for that manuscript. He is claiming that an explanation as simple as that is unreasonable (Lia said that it wasn’t a code at all, but a grocery list some merchant made a few hundred years ago).

Things in the story become disturbing when the three heroes’ surrounding begins responding to their Plan. The levels of uncertainty and doubt is reaching new limits. The heroes start believing their Plan is actually real. Some people around them develop interest in their ideas. Police officers are blackmailed to keep quiet and one of them even becomes terminally ill, allegedly because of the Plan itself. It’s unclear at this point if they have uncovered something sinister or maybe their theories provoked the wrong people? Even the narrator becomes unreliable and at the end he becomes so paranoid you can’t really trust what you read. This part was really exciting (other than the fact that it brought back some action into the story).

I admit some parts of the book, where they deliver the historical turn of events,  had me lost more than once, but ultimately, this was a rewarding book, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to read a novel packed with lots of occult rituals, conspiracy theories and descriptions of beautiful cities like Paris and Milan.

Warning: contains spoilers.

The debut for director Bill Paxton, who also stars in the film along with Matthew McConaughey, Frailty is an awesome psychological thriller that holds a tight plot and a great twist at the end.

It starts with McConaughey entering an FBI office in Texas, introduces himself as Fenton Meiks and wishes to speak to have an urgent talk with the head of investigation of a serial killer nicknamed “God’s Hand”. I must note here Powers Boothe’s (The FBI agent Doyle) great appearnce. Actually he wasn’t doing much in the film, but he was captivating. I remember first seeing him playing the loathsome character of Vice President Noah Daniels on 24, and he was great there and even better on Frailty.

Anyway, back to the movie. Fenton claims his brother, Adam, is the infamous serial killer. Adam commited suicide before Fenton came to the office. Fenton buried his brother in Thurman Rose Garden, because he made him a promise. He tells Doyle his life story: growing up with just their dad, Fenton is leading a happy life with his small family, until daddy is having revelations from Gods and angels that tell him he should start slaying the demons that walk among men. He comes up with a list of supposed demons. This is the point where the viewer starts asking themselves if God really spoke to Fenton’s dad or has he really went crazy. Judging by how the story unfolds, apparently God is interfering with humanity this time.

The Meiks bury their victims in a garden in their neighborhood, and God sees that no one asks questions. But Fenton is skeptical about his dad’s visions and he thinks his daddy is killing innocent people, so his dad locks him up in the cellar in the shed for several weeks. Fenton sees God, at last, and gains his dad’s trust. But, while being entrusted with the murdering ax in order to kill their next victim, Fenton slays his father instead. Adam, then, slays the victim.

Fenton takes Doyle to the Rose Garden to show him proof of his story, and keeps telling him along the way. He says that after the death of their father the boys both got separated, but before that Fenton had made Adam promise that he must bury his brother in the Thurman Rose Garden. Hearing this part of the story, agent Doyle gets suspicious. Wasn’t it the other way around? Adam was the believer and Fenton the skeptic. Unless… and this is where the plot twists. The man claims to be Fenton was really Adam. And Doyle was lured into the Thurman Rose Garden because he was next on Adam’s list of demons. It is revealed that Doyle’s late mother was actually murdered by him and the plot basically ends when Adam carries God’s will by killing agent Doyle.

This film doesn’t really hold much of a moral message or anything, since the plot states clearly that god is responsible for killing the demons, since he makes sure no one interferes, and, like a professional criminal, leaves no trace behind. And since god is beyond moral reason, anything he does always stay within the boundaries of morality. I know I shouldn’t look for reason here, but the theistic questions you can ask about the film hold still in our reality as well.

Anyway, I lack sleep, so I’ll end this post now.

I just finished watching The Woods, directed by Lucky Mckee and released in 2006. I wanted to explore some more of Mckee’s stuff after watching his 2002 May, which I really liked.

And I actually got disappointed. I expected something a bit more sophisticated from a movie classified under psychological horror. The characters were shallow and the plot pretty boring.

The film is set in 1965 in an isolated school surrounded by forest. Heather, a pretty redhead is being brought to the school by her parents, because her mother is a bossy self-absorbed bitch and her father can’t say a single word for his defense. Heather is soon tested for a scholarship because “apparently her father is not well off as he presents himself”, which is a subtle implication for the humbleness and goodness of his soul.

The faculty happens to be a group of old, withering, twitching and somewhat freaky old ladies, all of them were once students at the school (implying on the horrid future of the current students, perhaps?) For a short while, at this point in the film, it becomes an average high school flick – introducing the hapless nerd, followed by the slutty thug. I would expect an amusing and satisfying scene filled with clever slurs, but all I got was pretty much almost nothing. Heather was good, though, when she was telling the slut to “turn her torpedoes south” because she was trying to have her lunch, which consisted of a large cheese cake. That cheese cake has a special ability: it can recreate itself once half eaten, when the consumer looks the other way.

The introduction is long and tedious, and by the end you know next to nothing about the main characters in the movie and why the social order in the school the way it is. But it’s not important, since now you discover everyone, including the headmistress, is involved in a grand conspiracy that incorporates all the mundane events in the film. Much like Lost. The problem is that all the connections and the causal relationships are so artificial it becomes pointless.

Now the plot thickens, well it doesn’t really, but the supernatural element enters the scene. Trees, branches, kidnapped girls, then some smoke and more branches. The design and effects are pretty good, and I love the shots where the camera rolls around the scene, exploring. Heather, most surprisingly, discovers she’s some sort of “the one”, and that she holds the key to the survival of her decaying headmistress. Being a rebel, Heather decides destiny is not an option, so she starts fighting the man (or in the case, the witch). But the price is terrible and a few close people die because of that.

The movie ends when Heather’s father suddenly realizes he’s in a horror flick, takes an ax and starts smashing open some evil witches, getting entangled in an evil branch, and being succeeded by his daughter until there’s no witch left alive. I wish the characters had more depth to them, that their back story would somehow be part of the film and that their motives would be less stereotypical and more character driven.

By the way, this is my first post in the new home for my blog. Just to let you know.

This weekend I got the book Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals by Christopher Payne. I saw a recommendation on Kitzune Noir a few weeks back and I just knew I must have it.

Asylum is a photography album of the inside and outside of many mental hospitals across the United States. The forward, written by neurologist Oliver Sacks, is an interesting review of the entire concept – how it came to be at the beginning of the 18th century and it’s decline after the 1950s. He wrote about the Kirkbride Plan – a special design of the layout of institutes that was meant to promote comfort for patients, but eventually becoming too expensive to maintain. He also discusses how mental hospitals become a place of confinement, rather than a haven.

Payne’s photographs are simply amazing. They show in great detail the outside of hospitals and the inside of wards; untended forgotten gardens and dismal corridors with paint peeling off the walls. Looking at all the abandoned corridors and rooms makes you imagine them busy with strange patients wandering around and doctors tending them. I try to picture people living and working in such a morally questionable environment.

It’s a fascinating book. Browsing it fills me with inspiration and curiosity. I wish there was more stuff to read on this subject, but I guess that’s what Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization is for.

Check out the book’s website: www.asylumbook.com.