Be sure to keep an eye out for Light Surfer, coming to Amazon.com in December
Zeitgeist
When I saw the film Poltergeist (this blog is about Zeitgeist) I walked away from it thinking that ghost were real and at any time the souls of dead people could come and wreak havoc on my surroundings. Of course that was 1982 and since then I have not once been attacked by a ghost or even seen one. I suppose you could say I grew up a bit over the years. I realised that the movies were just that, fictional stories made to look as real as possibly was achievable in the day. Well let’s face it, Salem’s Lot had us all scared, waiting for that one night when a vampire might knock on our window, but the scrappy special effects used in the eighties were never going to cut it in the nineties so the movie makers had to grow up as well. Enter the special effects into the movie industry, well it happened a hundred years before Salem’s Lot. Special effects have been improving since the first silent movies, but those generated by todays computers leave us wondering what is real and what is not. Salem’s lot still had me scared even though I knew vampires did not exist.The imagination is an incredible tool the movie makers utilise with or without their million dollar special effects. Once a crowd is hooked on the story line the imagination is capable of filling in the gaps without us even realising it. When Star wars first come out it was graphically amazing, flawless and won many awards for its special effects but look at it today. In ten or twenty years when I look at Avatar, although today a flawless spectacle it might look just as shabby as Starwars, Star Treck, or I could name many others that in their day were amazing. The story line often is the catch without us even realising it.
Over the past few years I have sought out movies of all kinds and nationalities that hook by story and not by special effects. I love nothing more than to be roped in by a good story and probably why I love to read. Stories are the key even to special effects, well there is no point going out into space if you are not going to find aliens there, so the aliens are the story line with almost every space film I have seen and the special effects just help to show us what they look like. This is true for all movies except for documentaries.
Documentaries give us the facts. They tell us how things really are either in the undergrowth’s of our gardens and the wars that are waged between species even while we leisurely water it thinking how serene it is, or documentaries can take us to the deepest parts of the universe, to places where only our imagination has been able to go in the past. Now with special effects we are able to express our imaginations and those of the scientist that study these far out places. In this form of movie makers we get to see what is in the scientist imagination, a more educated imagination of what might be out there than our own.
Zeitgeist actually means the spirit of the times or the spirit of the age and for all intents and purposes is a documentary, I encourage people to view it.
Movie makers have been exposing and exploiting our vulnerabilities since the first horror movie was made ("Le Manoir de Diable" (House of the Devil)) in 1896, in the past hundred or so years they have come a long way into exploiting those fears but there is a shift in the types of fears they are exploiting and the types of presentations. It was only a matter of time before they dressed the movies up as documentaries to give them that special effect effect of being real or factual information.
Part of telling a good story begins first by bringing the audience into a world that is not completely out of the realms of possibilities and then enhance that experience by backing the story up with facts. Facts aid to have the minds of the audience brainwashed into seeing things how the producers want you to see them. The facts could be images, information that people have already heard and stands alone as something strange, or if really cleverly done, parts of other proven facts. In movies it is getting easier to create the images, and the internet can give you any facts, or the parts of the stories that back up the information you want to portray, as well as many images to support your new facts. The problem with movies like this is that the producers of Zeitgeist are now world renowned and followed by millions because of their art. Not unlike Warner Bros. or Fox Studios.
Over time we have seen secret societies develop in the X-Files, Star Treck, and Dallas, yes that is a wide view of what people watch on television, but add to that the great movies and books like The Da Vinci Code, The Celestine Prophesies and National Treasure and it’s no wonder people are so open to suggestions of government conspiracies. This repetitive form of deception works with neighbourhood or schoolyard gossip too. When you hear a story from a source, fact or fiction, the more you hear that story even in fiction (or jest) the more believable it becomes. If you hear it three times from three different sources then obviously it must be fact, and no longer the fictitious joke it started out to be. It does not matter that the source is one person’s imagination. I am sure there is a psychological name for this phenomenon and if not there should be some study into it, but then Zeitgeist would argue that governments have already performed the studies and have a name and use for it.
Zeitgeist is not the only move out there that is as successful at exploiting fears in people, but it is dressed up as a documentary. Complete with source information from a list of authors who themselves are conspiracy theorist and add to that at the end of the film it states for complete sources download the companion source guide from the website, the information in the film must be true if they are offering up source information. But on the website there is no companion source guide. The information in his films is amazing but of course Zeitgeist is not the only film like this. There are many others and even a History channel documentary Ancient Aliens, exploits this very psychological gossip to brainwashing principle.
We have to try to remember is that the producers of these documentaries are actually getting paid to deceive. People love TV. When you have something that people love to watch and you can prove that hundreds and thousands of people watch your stuff, people who make products and want you to buy their product suddenly become interested in you. These people we call advertisers. You tube is full of advertisers. A video that has millions of hits can easily make hundreds and thousands of dollars, more than a B-grade movie in Hollywood will bring in. Zeitgeist has over 16,000,000 hits on YouTube, and also has a pretty impressive list of Hollywood awards. Ergo with that many people now talking about it, how long before it becomes fact in the minds of those people. In my books - LIGHT SURFER - my main character, Tony Jess, has created a virus that can turn all zeros to ones in all data storage devices all over the world instantaneously. Perhaps I should have called him Peter Joseph, because his virus is going to be just as effective.
