The Joker in the Patriot Movement

Now would seem an ideal time for reflection on the bizarre murders committed by Jerad and Amanda Miller this past Sunday in Las Vegas now that the pundits have had a full week to say their piece. Recluse has been eagerly monitoring the conspiratorial right's response to the murders since they unfolded this past Sunday and much of it was rather predictable. Alex Jones naturally detected a false flag operation at work. Raw Story noted:

"On his Monday radio show, Jones immediately called the shooting a “false flag” operation by the U.S. government.

"'Tens of millions of people are flooding here, hundreds of thousands a month, pouring over the borders, being given driver licenses in California to pull the lever to ban guns,' Jones warned. 'We are in the middle of a globalist revolution against this country right now. And my gut tells me that the cold-blood degenerate evil killing of two police officers and a citizen in Las Vegas yesterday is absolutely staged.'

"The conservative radio host said that his 'mind exploded with hundreds of data points' proving that the incident was staged when he first read about it on Sunday.

"Jones explained that conspirators were using Batman villain The Joker as a 'programming template for mind control' because Jerad Miller had dressed as comic book character while he was in Las Vegas.

"As evidence, the host began yelling that Aurora shooter James Holmes — who killed 12 people at a Batman movie in 2012 — had been part of a mind-control program called 'MK-ULTRA.'

“'[Sen. Majority Leader] Harry Reid comes out and says we’re going to do something about this, these are domestic terrorists at the Bundy ranch, everybody needs to be arrested,' Jones continued. 'I told you they’ve been building this behind the scenes, now they’re rolling it out.'

“'Would they stage this now? The answer is absolutely,' he insisted. 'If they would stage al Qaeda attacks, if they would do all of this, would they do this to get our guns and blame the Tea Party that’s sweeping in every runoff election and every primary right now? Defeating, in almost every case, 90 percent of Republican incumbents are going down! 1776 is happening, peacefully, through the system. They want to start a civil war with the police.'

"Jones speculated that the government had sent CIA 'cutouts' to the Pizza shop to kill the officers."

The Joker meme is one of the most interesting aspects of this case and shall be dealt with in a moment. Before getting there though let us consider remarks made by Vigilante Citizen, a website that's held in shockingly high regard by many conspiracy theorists. Largely echoing Jones, VC stated:

"Was Jerad Miller a government agent used to infiltrate and discredit specific groups? Was he programmed to carry out the murders to then take his own life? Was he just a crazy guy with a gun?  It’s difficult to say. It is however clear that the media spin on the Las Vegas shootings is perfectly in line with a top Agenda element of the elite : To discredit, demonize and lump together various groups that are not welcome in the U.S. anymore. Whether we look at Libertarians, constitutionalists, survivalists, or religious and pro-gun groups, they are all being targeted by the elite.

"While I won’t claim that every person involved in these groups is a kind, balanced, law-abiding citizen, it is clear that most of these groups exist because rights and freedoms are being chipped away in America. The main goal of many of these groups is to preserve the original spirit of the U.S. Constitution, which has been seriously violated in the past two decades. However, as the elite is transforming America into a NWO-friendly police-state, these groups are now perceived as a serious threat. More importantly, the elite needs the public to turn against them."

Essentially Jones and VC are echoing many of the longstanding allegations made by the "Patriot movement", i.e. that their movement is the target of relentless persecution by Federal authorities and that even when followers of their ideology carry out horrendous crimes they should not be criticized because these individuals were government agents, mind controlled patsies and so forth.

By and large these claims are baseless, especially the latter. As I've documented before extensively here, the modern day Patriot movement was largely the creation of the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community. As that series and my one on the Oklahoma City bombing should have made abundantly clear to regular readers, government agents within the Patriot movement are not the exception, but the rule. The movement has been dominated by "former" high ranking military officers (many of them with backgrounds in intelligence) for decades. Major movement personalities long suspected of involvement in violent crimes (i.e. William Potter Gale, Frazier Glenn Miller, Louis Beam, etc) have inexplicably avoided any serious legal complications until they commit acts so blatant authorities can no longer suppress them (again, Miller).

William Milton Cooper, one of the most revered figures in the movement and a "former" Naval intelligence officer

The ties between the Patriot movement and the Pentagon/CIA first began to emerge at the onset of the movement, in the early 1960s, when members of the Minutemen were implicated in arming anti-Castro Cubans in the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle.

"The record suggests that, even if the FBI would carry out raids at the Kennedys' request, Hoover's heart was not into making trouble for Lauchli and his Minutemen. Despite their involvement in illegal bomb-making and sabotage plots, Hoover did not see them as dangerous. In 1965 he told the California Senate committee that 'little real evidence existed that the Minutemen are anything more than essentially a paper organization with just enough followers over the country so that they can occasionally attract a headline.'

"Hoover's remarks are consistent with his career of treating mob financed anti-Communist operators as supportive of, rather than inimical to, his notion of proper law enforcement. In this he was not alone. Mob-backed intelligence operations, such as the New Orleans branch of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, served the purposes of all U.S. interests which hoped to reverse Castro's expropriation of their Cuban assets."

(Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pg. 89)

a 1960s era Minutemen poster

Yes, these patriot groups have been implicated in the assassination of JFK, as I noted before here, here, and here. Nor was Hoover's view of these groups atypical of the FBI for decades to come.

"The basic radical-right complaint that it had been the target of COINTELPRO abuses was justified, even if the rhetoric used to denounce the government was steeped in bigotry and exaggerated claims. However, it is difficult to make the case that the Bureau's investigation of the Posse included illegal, COINTERLPRO-style methods. Little evidence exists to support the charge, either in the Bureau's own records, in news reports, or from other sources. Unlike its treatment of dissident groups under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI seemed to respect the constitutional rights of Posse members. Among other things, it closed investigations early – sometimes too early – as soon as it judged that the targeted individuals were engaged in constitutionally protected activity and were not planning any crimes. This was a far cry from the 'anything goes' mentality of the Hoover era. A more serious problems stemmed from the on-again, off-again investigative approach taken by local offices where agents – out of laziness, sympathy with right-wing groups, or concerns for career advancement – did not appear to take the Posse Comitatus very seriously. The memos from Director Kelly may have clamored for more substantial information from the field, but investigating right-wing hate groups was not a path to promotion in the Bureau – that came more readily to agents who distinguished themselves by working 'real' cases involving bank robbery, kidnapping, and murder. The consequences of this dynamic proved embarrassing two decades later when, in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Bureau had to scramble to get up to speed on right-wing hate groups because it had failed to devote sufficient resources to the problem much earlier."

(The Terrorist Next Door, Daniel Levitas, pgs. 137-138)

COINTELPRO was an operation launched by the FBI in the 1960s against the counterculture as the Vietnam conflict began to rapidly lose support. For years Right Wing groups claimed they were subjected to similar tactics. The Posse Comitatus movement, which began to emerge in the early 1970s, is the basis for much of the modern day militia and sovereign citizen movements. It was founded by a "former" military intelligence officer named Colonel William Potter Gale. It succeeded the Minutemen as the chief militant "grassroots" Right Wing group in the nation and was taken no more seriously than Hoover took the Minutemen.

the "Reverend" William Potter Gale

So yes, the claims of persecution by the conspiratorial right are largely frivolous. In point of fact, the Federal government has seemingly did everything in its power to avoid cracking down on the movement until the Oklahoma City bombing. Even then the movement was not dismantled, but simply pushed further underground. A decade later it managed a vigorous resurgence. What's more, it has seemingly more violent than ever. Let us briefly consider some of the violent crime linked to Patriot/white supremacist (I do not think its unfair to lump these two groups together as they and much of the other "grassroots" Right Wing movements are driven by a similar conspiratorial world view) ideology and groups in the past decade:

• Jared Lee Loughner, the Tuscon shooter who murdered six people while trying to assassinate Democrat Gabrielle Giffords, was a major conspiracy buff and an Alex Jones fan
• Serial killer Israel Keyes, who had been active since the late 1990s, was a Christian Identity follower with ties to Elohim City, the white supremacist compound long linked to the Oklahoma City bombing
• As noted here before, Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza's mother was an uber gun enthusiastic and actively engaged in survivalist culture
• The Wisconsin Sikh Temple shooting, which left six dead (seven counting the shooter), was committed by white supremacist Wade Michael Page
• Tom Clements, the head of the Colorado Department of Corrections, was assassinated by a member of the white supremacist 211 Crew gang; the event was surrounded by bizarre circumstances, as I noted at the time
• former White Patriot Party head and Klansman Frazier Glenn Miller was recently arrested for murdering three people during the Overland Park Jewish Community Center shooting; Miller was a "former" government informant who was instrumental in derailing the Federal government's Fort Smith Sedition Trail that would have put many of the heads of Patriot movement behind bars; he's also suspected of committing several murders in the 1980s
• In March of 2014 a sovereign citizen was killed during a shootout with police in Ohio
• the son of a sovereign citizen murdered two Alaska State Troopers in May of this year when they tried to arrest his father
• Nearly 100 hate crime murders have been linked to Stormfront, the Internet's premier white supremacist website

And now we have the killing spree of the Millers, in addition to a shooting in Georgia involving a sovereign citizen days before the Las Vegas shootings. Needless to say, this constitutes a lot of dead bodies. And these are just some of the major incidents and random shootings Recluse happened to save in his files. I suspect that the number of minor shootings linked to Patriot ideology and such like over the past ten years is quite significant but no one in a position of authority is trying especially hard to keep track of them all.

Are these indications of a broader conspiracy? Maybe, maybe not. As I noted during my initial examine of the Las Vegas incident, the modern day Patriot movement is displaying striking similarities to the Freecorps movement that emerged in Germany in the wake of the First World War and was instrumental in the rise of Nazism. Freecorps were paramilitary bands actively engaged in suppressing communists and occasionally attempting to overthrow the Weimer Republic. They, like the modern day Patriot movement, were driven by a conspiratorial world view revolving around the notion of world government being brought about by a cabal of Communists, Jews and Freemasons. So yes, this present wave of violence has some eerie parallels that likely are not mere coincidence.

Freecorps men

But this researcher finds the notion that the bulk of these murders were committed by mind controlled patsies or even conscious government agents to be ridiculous. Americans are already buckling under the pressure of over three decades of neo-liberal economic policies that have left more than a few of us incredibly desperate if not outright destitute. Throw into this maelstrom the apocalyptic rhetoric and siege-like mentality that Alex Jones and his ilk specialize in and you have a perfect storm.

Thus, this researcher does not feel any hesitation in suggesting that memes being floated by Jones and such like are triggering these incidents of Patriot-related violence on some level. This is most obvious when considering the appearance of the Joker in the latest Las Vegas shooting. Predictably the conspiratorial right have attached much significance to Jerad Miller's apparent fondness for dressing up as the Joker. Probably the most noteworthy examination put forth has been by self-professed revisionist historian (and fascist sympathizer) Michael A. Hoffman II. On his blog Hoffman wrote:

"... The alleged killers in Las Vegas of two policemen at a restaurant, and a bystander at a shopping center, are being variously described as white supremacists, Constitutionalists etc. They may be all or none of those things, but they are most certainly demon-possessed individuals initiated into a devil cult by immersion in the soul-killing Hollywood movies and television and New York entertainment “culture” that permeates the US like the fumo di Satana.

"Examining the photos of the supposed killers of three people, we see the extent to which they have inculcated the Batman meme, which has been occult-saturated since the first, 1989 film in the series, and which reached its apogee with the most notorious and soulless entry ('The Dark Night') starring the late Heath Ledger, who died at age 28.

"On July 20, 2012 James Holmes, a PhD. candidate in the science of the brain (neurology), entered a theatre in Aurora, Colorado that was screening the most recent Batman movie, 'The Dark Knight Rises,' slaughtering 12 people. (The two 'Dark Night' movies have grossed more than $2 billion).

"The establishment media dubbed Holmes 'the Dark Knight shooter' and 'the Joker.' He appeared as a Joker in his first court appearance. His July 2012 massacre was embedded with occult significance (see Revisionist History newsletter no. 63, 'Predictive programming and ritual stagecraft: The Batman movie shooting synchronicities').

"Prior to the attack by Holmes, the name 'Aurora' (i.e. the goddess of the dawn), showed up in the movie trailer for the Dr. John Dee ('007') 'Skyfall' movie. The words 'Sandy Hook' appeared in 'The Dark Night Rises' Batman film prior to the school shootings at Sandy Hook.

"In the case at hand, we have Jerad and Amanda Miller, the putative Las Vegas cop killers leaving behind unmistakable links to the Joker of the Batman genre. No extensive investigation was needed to elicit this clue. It was online for all the world to see on 'Facebook.' The perps themselves revealed it in the Revelation of the Method, part of the pattern of self-revelation which the Cryptocracy permits and encourages in this time in which we live, the last stage of the age-old process of human alchemy, when Satan can walk openly among us and the American people don't give a hoot at any fundamental level of their waking consciousness..."

the Millers

But while the symbolism of the Batman universe has always been fascinating and occultic, it has been changed radically in recent years thanks to the Christopher Nolan films. And this change has been in especially sinister. The great Christopher Knowles astutely noted this in the wake of the Aurora rampage. He wrote then:

"I do know that is just more bad news attached to a Christopher Nolan film. This is a guy who puts forward psychopaths as his protagonists (Following, Memento, The Prestige) and cast a guy previously best known as Bateman, the American Psycho as Batman. He also seems especially fascinated with mindfucking as we've seen in Inception and the first Batman film (how people led Inception slide is beyond me). I do know this is a guy who revels in fascist, brutalizing imagery and themes in his work.

"I do know that he deliberately created a brand new archetype with his Joker, the real protagonist of The Dark Knight. A figure of pure, wanton destruction- the killer that every Jugalo would love to be when they grow up. This was pure psychological manipulation of the worst kind, and has had terrible real world results.

"Of course no one wants to think about that because a lot of the same people who immerse themselves in Conspiratainment want to play their ultra-violent video games and watch their torture porn. And their Batman movies."

But what Knowles does not note (at least not that I've found) is that this Joker-as-wanton-destruction archetype has been heavily reinforced in the real world by the "grassroots" Right Wing. Look no further than the Obama Jokers that sprang up in 2009. The Obama Joker image was originally designed by college student in Chicago, who posted it on his Flickr page during January of 2009. Initially it received little attention, but things suddenly changed. The LA Times reported:

"On Jan. 18, Alkhateeb uploaded the image to photo-sharing site Flickr (shown at right). Over the next two months, he amassed just a couple thousand hits, he said.

"Then the counter exploded after a still-anonymous rogue famously found his image, digitally removed the references to Time Magazine, captioned the picture with the word 'socialism' and hung printed copies around L.A., making headlines."

Soon the image spread to several other cities and was adopted en mass by the Right. Likening Obama, whom the Right perceives as a dictator, to the Joker is something of curious choice, at least in the context of Nolan's Batman films. Batman himself would have been more apt. In The Dark Knight Harvey Dent favorably compares Batman to the Roman institution of dictatorship in which democracy was suspended while a military commander dealt with the "enemies were at the gate." By the end of the film Batman has effectively had to assume dictatorial powers (most notably in the form of NSA-like technological surveillance) to contain the anarchy unleashed by the Joker.

As a kind of archetype for chaos and anarchy Nolan's Joker is a much more apt symbol of the Patriot movement itself and their Red Dawn fever dreams. While no doubt an armed revolt against Obama's America may seem like a romantic idea to any number of Internet tough guys who frequent Infowars the interwar period in Germany tells a much different story. Freecorps gleefully turned their cities into full scale war zones and relished in assassination of various stripes. In theory this was done to contain the spread of communism after the Bolshevik Revolution but more often than not deteriorated into destruction for destruction's sake. This was a crucial part of the much mythologized "Freebooter spirit."

"The accepted authority of the Freebooter mentality suggests another reason why he and his comrades revolted against their class. He argues that since the very raison d'etre of the Free Corps was total destruction, the movement obviously could not draw its rationale from the Weltanschauung of the bourgeois-liberal world. Of necessity, therefore, that world must be destroyed. In a revealing essay von Salomon writes:

"'When we probe into the make-up of the [Free Corps fighter] we can find all the elements which ever played a role in German history except one: the burgerlich. And that is only natural because the peculiar experience of these men... had forged them into one single force of consuming destructiveness. Their purpose could only be accomplished by the emphatic renunciation of what they felt most strongly to be the falsification of true German substance. The spirit of the past centuries [i.e., of bourgeois-liberalism] had not been able to meet the uniquely severe test – that of the hardness of war. This is why the warrior, of necessity, despised the whole system which the spirit had created. The task required of him was not only to build up a new spirit... More than that. The task required... that all ballast, all sentimentalism, all other values must be ruthlessly cast aside so that this whole strength could be set free... Ecstasy and death, tumult and adventure, heroism and excess, cold deliberation and burning idealism, robbery and plundering, arson and murder – a mixture of every passion and demoniacal fury formed... the fighters who dominated the postwar period.'

"The memoirs left by the fighters of the Free Corps movement are a veritable hymn of hate directed against the Weimar Republic, which was the symbol and hence the target of the revolt against bourgeois society..."

(Vanguard of Nazism, Robert G.L. Waite, pg. 56)

scenes from Munich following the overthrow of the Bavarian Soviet Republic

The trauma that the Freebooter spirit inflicted upon Germany during the 1918-1923 period was profound. Germany's economy improved somewhat after that, bringing a brief period of stability in the mid-1920s. But when things began to go sour by decade's end the siren song of Nazism began to work its spell on the German populace. Despite mythologizing the Freecorps movement to the hilt, the movement's stubborn sense of individuality and libertinism had no place in Nazi Germany and many key former Freecorps men, many of whom having joined the SA, were purged during the Night of Long Knives.

Effectively then the anarchist Freebooters were a crucial competent to the rise of Nazism and the authoritarianism it promoted. And it is quite likely that if the violence perpetuated by the Patriot movement continues to grow that something similar will occur in these United States.

Thus the Joker is quite apt for the Patriot movement, a notion I suspect Alex Jones is quite in agreement with. This blatant disinformation agent played a key role in the spread of the Obama Joker amongst the "grassroots" Right. Jones appeared in Joker makeup for a now notorious broadcast and even ran a poster contest on Infowars for the Obama Joker image. Amusingly, when one of Michael A. Hoffman's readers pointed out Jones' promotion of the Joker meme in the comment section of Hoffman's article on the Las Vegas shooting the revisionist historian was quick to insist that "It was Satanic arrogance, not Alex Jones, that dispatched this duo on their mission to play God in the name of saving the Republic."

Hoffman

Of course, in the article itself Mr. Hoffman had no problem blaming "soul-killing Hollywood movies and television" and usual suspects such as abortion, homosexuality and demonic possession for the murders. Really, about anything seems fair game in Mr. Hoffman's mind except Alex Jones and the Pentagon/CIA-created Patriot movement. Nor is Mr. Hoffman alone in this double standard... far, far from it.

Aurora and the Kallikantzaris -Updated 1/7/13

Tragedy has struck Aurora, Colorado again. This past summer gunman James Eagan Holmes killed 12 and wounded 58 other individuals during a midnight showing of the latest Batman film on July 20, an event I chronicled before here. Since then a wave of bizarre and increasingly deadly mass shootings have terrorized the nation, climaxing with the Newtown school massacre on December 14.

Holmes (top) and Newtown shooter Adam Lanza (bottom)

The latest incident in Aurora revolved around hostage standoff that ended with four people, including the gunman, dead. MSNBC reports:

"Three people were found dead inside a home in Aurora, Colo., after a gunman took them hostage early Saturday morning, police told NBC affiliate KUSA. The gunman was also shot and killed by police after hours of failed negotiation attempts.

"Another person who had been inside the house was able to escape and alert authorities, KUSA reported.

"Officers were called to a town home around 3 a.m. after reports of shots fired. Several nearby homes were evacuated for safety reasons and police sent out emergency notifications for the other residents in the area."

This event occurred at a time when James Eagan Holmes has been back in the news (naturally). On Wednesday a judge set a preliminary hearing for Holmes, who is expected back in court of January 7. Meanwhile, the movie theater in which the shooting occurred was planning a reopening on January 17, a plan that is already spurring much outrage. Incidentally (or not) the number 17 has long been considered unlucky.

"The Ancient Romans seem to have regarded the number seventeen as unlucky since an anagram of the letters of which it is composed (XVII) gives the word VIXI, I have lived."
(Dictionary of Symbols, Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant, pg. 867)

Italian culture still considers 17 to be a most unlucky number to this day. Details are still extremely sketchy, but I was immediately struck by the twilight language of the date of this shooting: January 5. Most recently January 5 marked the twelfth day of Christmas but it has a far more ancient association. In ancient times December 25 was regarded as the winter solstice throughout Europe and the twelve days following that date, ending on January 6, were considered a time in which the axis mundi between this world and the metaphysical realm was thin. It was said that it was easier for various mythological creatures such as satyrs, centaurs, elves and fairies to cross over into the real world during this time.

the Axis Mundi

Possibly the most curious of these creatures said to be able to cross over were the Kallikantzaris, gremlin-like creatures.

"The Kallikantzari are essentially gremlins, little people with the legs of an ass (horse) or a goat. They are overall hairy and dark skinned; generally they are benign, but like leprechauns and other diminutive beings, can by sly and devious. While not exactly evil, they have several rapine qualities: they love to dance (to ecstasy) and are extremely sexual. If given the opportunity, they will carry off human women to their caves during the twelve days they are allowed to emerge from the bowels of the earth: the days between Christmas (December 25) and Epiphany (January 6). Only at night do they come out of these caves, where they spend the day eating toads and lizards. After the twelve day allowance, they return to the underworld, where they spend the rest of the year trying to saw... through the trunk of the great tree of the earth --the axis mundi."
(The Apples of Apollo, Carl A. P. Ruck, Blaise Daniel Staples & Clark Heinrich, pg. 39)

It will be most interesting to see if the Kallikantzari or the twelve days of the solstice somehow factor into this tragedy. So dear reader, please keep your eyes peeled for all things gremlins.

UPDATE 1/7/13:

While I've yet to find any ties with gremlins in this event there are some interesting associations with the winner solstice  The great Loren Coleman has already published an excellent blog on this incident, which can be read here, but here's a brief snippet:

"The second gunman to cause multiple fatalies in Aurora, Colorado in seven months has been identified by neighbors as 33-year-old Sonny Archuleta. Aurora is also the location of the The Dark Knight Rises shootings on July 20, 2012. 

"The surname Archuleta is a family name which was originated in the Basque Country of Spain. Archuleta is of Castillian derivation of Basque Aretxuloeta, which ultimately comes from the place name Arechavaleta (Basque: Aretxabaleta). The placename uses the Basque words '(h)aritz' (oak tree), 'zabal' (wide) and 'eta' (indicating plurality), with the combined meaning of 'wide place where oak trees grow.'"  

the Green Knight

The association of the gunman's name with the oak tree is interesting.  As regular readers of this blog will remember the oak tree appears connection with the winter solstice in the Arthurian myths involving Gawain and the Green Knight.  Of this association the legendary poet and historian Robert Graves noted:

" the Green Knight is an immortal giant whose club is a holly-bush. He and Sir Gawain...  a typical Hercules, make a compact to behead one another at alternative New Years --meaning midsummer and midwinter --but in effect the Holly Knight spares the Oak Knight.

"... the Oak Knight and Holly Knight fought every first of May until Doomsday. Since medieval practice St. John the Baptist, who lost his head on St. John's Day, took over the oak king's titles and customs, it was natural to let Jesus, John's merciful successor, take over the holly king's."
(The White Goddess, pgs. 179-180)

Thus, according to this myth, the oak king would have recently decapitated the holly king this past solstice. The Aurora theater massacre occurred on July 20, 2012, a little less than a month after the summer solstice, which is typically celebrated on June 24. It would be interesting to know if James Eagan Holmes had any associations with holly. More on this topic can be found here.

Sonny Archuleta, the shooter

The latest Aurora shooter also had an associations superheroes, naturally. Pictures of the gunman reveal a prominent Superman tattoo upon his chest. Batman and Superman have often had a curious relationship with one another, sometimes being allies, sometimes being enemies. Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (which was fingered as a possible inspiration for Holmes rampage due to a sequence depicting a theater shooting) series depicted a battle between an aging Batman and Superman, for instance. Are Batman and Superman in some way modern stand-ins for the oak and holly kings?

Death and the Prestige

In the wake of the Dark Knight Rises shootings I've been feeling the need to revisit director Christopher Nolan's back catalog. Nolan is the director of the current Batman trilogy in addition to several other acclaimed and highly profitable films such as the art house sensation Memento and the 'high concept' summer blockbuster Inception. Truth be told, none of these films (aside from Memento to some extent) has ever really grabbed me. There's just something about Nolan's work that feels inhumanly cold and mechanical. Regardless of how fantastical the plot lines of Nolan's films come off as he has uncanny knack for reducing to the level of humdrum and even dull. Filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg have made millions making the mundane world seem magical. Mr. Nolan has made considerable coin in recent years by doing the opposite: making magical worlds seem mundane.

Nolan

It is perhaps for this reason that my favorite movie by Nolan is one that deals directly with the contrast between the magical and the mundane: 2006's The Prestige. The Prestige features two key actors from Nolan's Batman films in major roles: Michael Caine (who plays the faithful and long-suffering butler Alfred in the Batman films) and Batman himself, Christian Bale. In many ways they're essentially playing the same roles in The Prestige with Caine once again cast as the assistant (or ingenieur in this case) and Bale as the antihero. The major difference is that they are on opposite sides in this picture.

Caine in The Prestige (top) and Caine and Bale in The Dark Knight Rises (bottom)

The film revolves around an increasingly bloody feud between two magicians, a working class Brit named Borden (Bale) and an American named Angier (Hugh Jackman) against the backdrop of Victorian England. The film also briefly relocates to my old stomping grounds, Colorado Springs, at the turn of century where the American West is rapidly being taken over by industrialization.

Angier (top) and Borden (bottom), played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale respectively

Like all Nolan films, the themes of The Prestige are most grim. A blatant instance of this is the conflict between art and capital that runs throughout The Prestige. Of course many filmmakers have tackled this theme before, but few have made it seem as hopeless as Nolan. In the world of The Prestige, the true artist is a long-suffering individual being driven slowly mad by obsession. Several of the magicians presented in the film are forced to live lives of total fraud for the sake of their art. The Chinese magician Chung Ling Soo, whom Borden and Angier observer early in the film, can only perform his signature trick convincingly by pretending to be an old, enfeebled man whenever he appears in public. His entire public life is essentially nothing but an act.

This becomes true of the Borden character as the film progresses. His signature trick is a performance he dubs 'The Traveling Man,' where he seemingly enters a door on one side of the stage and exists a door on the other side of stage a split second later. This trick is made possible due the fact that Borden has an identical twin called Fallon, who only appears around Borden when wearing a fake beard and wig, stage makeup, and padding. Borden and Fallon also pretend to be one and other frequently, leaving both Borden's wife and mistress more than a little confused.

Fallon (left)

Borden's rival, the American Robert Angier, is not actually an American or named Angier. He is in fact British nobleman named Lord Caldlow who took on the persona of Angier so that he could pursue his interests in magic without embarrassing his artistocratical family. As such, one is left with the impression that Angier never would have become so involved in magic in the first place if not for his rivalry with Borden. Angier's wife, Julia, dies during a magic trick he and Borden are involved in, leading Angier to blame Borden for her fate. However, evening the score is not merely enough --Angier becomes increasingly obsessed with also becoming a better magician that Borden.

Borden and Angier are thus at the forefront of The Prestige's art-vs-capital conflict. But their struggle is more broadly symbolized by the real-life conflict between rogue inventor Nikola Tesla (played in the film by none other than David Bowie) and Thomas Edison (who does not actually appear in the film as a character, but who is mentioned throughout), which is used as a backdrop in the film. Tesla is a most apt choice --he has obsessed conspiracy researchers for decades.

"Many... regarded Tesla as virtually superhuman, and yet he was s naive in practical matters that he was cheated again and again by the businessmen to whom he sold his inventions. Tesla's major goal in life was to make abundant energy so cheap that all the world would live in affluence; he came so close to this in his later work that the corporations which had funded him withdrew their support, fearing he would undermine the monopolies which made them rich... 

"Tesla's greatest discovery was the mechanism by which alternating current can be electrically generated and used; far more than Edison's direct-current machines, Tesla's A.C. generators unleashed the modern technological revolution. This illumination came to Tesla in a series of quasi-mystical visions during his adolescence. The key events were: 

"1. The visions themselves, in some of which Tesla literally went into trance and talked to entities nobody else could see. 

"2. A series of mysterious illnesses between the visions. In some of these, Tesla became acutely sensitive and felt all perceptions as painful (colors were too bright, noises too loud, etc.) Several times, Tesla nearly died of an apparent draining away of life energy which his doctors simply couldn't explain. 

"3. After the final vision... Tesla was transformed into a kind of secular seer. He developed a most peculiar inner vision. He could literally 'see' in perfect detail any machine he thought about, right down to microscopic measurements and dimensions, as if h was using actual tools to measure an actual machine. He patented dozens of these devices and became a millionaire before he was 30."
(The Cosmic Trigger Volume I, Robert Anton Wilson, pgs. 137-138)

Bowie as Tesla

Naturally the viewer will not pickup on any of these curious facts surrounding the life and times of Nikola Tesla from watching Nolan's film. Sure, Tesla was only meant to be a minor character in The Prestige, but he has generally been described as a very vibrant and honorable, if incredibly naive, man in many accounts I've read. Here Tesla comes off as being every bit as drab, world-weary, and morally ambiguous as every other character Nolan crafts. Tesla frets about the consequences surrounding the machine he ultimately builds for Angier, but this does not stop him from building it anyway (nor from accepting a considerable amount of money, given under false pretenses none the less, from Angier). The film's one saving grace, as far as Tesla is concerned, is that he's played by David Bowie. Bowie is a man likely every bit as eccentric as Tesla was reported to be.

"Bowie's occult dabbling had become an obsession, resulting in paranoid delusions. He kept his urine and other bodily fluids in jars... and was convinced a coven of witches were planning to kidnap him and force him to impregnate them. Everywhere he traveled he dragged around a massive library of occult texts which he read and reread constantly. And yet his stamina and creative powers remained nearly superhuman. Glasses of milk and orange juice were the sum total of his diet, along with the occasional raw egg."
(The Secret History of Rock 'N' Roll, Christopher Knowles, pgs. 157-158)

Bowie's natural mojo is able to cut through and provide Nolan's Tesla with some much needed mystic.  It's a good thing as Tesla is highly important to the film thematically even if his appearances are brief. Both Borden and Tesla are true creators, pushing forward innovation in their respective fields. By contrast, Angier and Edison are great technicians that produce more financially-lucrative products, but both are ultimately dependent upon the innovations of others. Essentially, the latter pair are stand-ins for multinational corporations that swallow up the genius of common peoples in order to maximize profits. Borden and Tesla are dreamers working to bring a little magic into the world, even as the world is increasingly turning toward the consumerism that is the lifeblood of multinational corporations. This state of affairs is perfectly captured by Tesla when he wearily intones "The truly extraordinary is not permitted in science or industry."

Thus, the film presents the viewer with a kind of warped duality: ravenous corporatism, or the suffering artist who will eventually end up mad, financially destitute, or both. And this is just the surface theme. The real occult stuff that we shall now examine is every bit as thematically morose.

As the film opens, Borden is in prison awaiting execution for the murder of Angier, whom he apparently drowned in a tank in the midst of one of Angier's performances. The film puts us on notice that things aren't as they seem via the number displayed prominently on Borden's prison jumpsuit: 23. Veteran synch-watchers will immediately recall Robert Anton Wilson's 23 enigma. For those uninitiated, Wilson described the 23 enigma as something like this:

"I first heard of the 23 enigma from William S Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23. 

"Burroughs began collecting odd 23s after this gruesome synchronicity, and after 1965 I also began collecting them. Many of my weird 23s were incorporated into the trilogy Illuminatus! which I wrote in collaboration with Robert J Shea in 1969–1971. I will mention only a few of them here, to give a flavour to those benighted souls who haven’t read Illuminatus! yet: 

"In conception, Mom and Dad each contribute 23 chromosomes to the fœtus. DNA, the carrier of the genetic information, has bonding irregularities every 23rd Angstrom. Aleister Crowley, in his Cabalistic Dictionary, defines 23 as the number of 'life' or 'a thread', hauntingly suggestive of the DNA life-script. On the other hand, 23 has many links with termination: in telegraphers’ code, 23 means 'bust' or 'break the line', and Hexagram 23 in I Ching means 'breaking apart'. Sidney Carton is the 23rd man guillotined in the old stage productions of A Tale of Two Cities. (A few lexicographers believe this is the origin of the mysterious slang expression '23 Skiddoo!'.)"

The number 23 is also important to the Sirius tradition, of which I've written much more on here and here. As for 23's connection to Sirius, Wilson writes:

"...July 23.... is the day when, according to Egyptian tradition, the occult link... is most powerful between Earth and Sirius... 

"Celebrations of the Dog Star, Sirius, beginning only July 23, are the origin of the expression 'dog days,' meaning the days from July 23 to September 8, when the last rituals to Sirius were performed."
(The Cosmic Trigger Volume I, pg. 87) 

The inclusion of 23 and its ties to Sirius are one of the film's few direct links to the Aurora shootings. I wrote much more on the Sirius/Dog Days synchronicity surrounding the shootings here. An obvious link to Aurora and The Prestige is the use of the theater as a site of terrorism by Borden and Angier, though in this case the terror is directed at one another rather than the audience. Thus, Angier attempts to murder Borden via pistol on the stage (though not in a theater per se), but misfires and blows off two of his fingers instead. Later, Borden (with the aid of stage makeup) ruins one of Angier's tricks and badly wounds a patron in the process before a sellout crowd and smearing Angier's reputation. Borden later moves padding beneath a trapped door during one of Angier's tricks, which Angier falls through and badly damages his leg. Angier fakes his murder during a performance, leading to Borden's arrest at the theater.

Angier preparing to shoot Borden on the stage

Another link is the location of Colorado Springs, which plays a pivotal role in the film. Colorado Springs is just a little over an hour from the Denver area where Aurora resides. In The Prestige Colorado comes off as an alien place in stark contrast to the comfortable location of Victorian London, with it's mad scientist and curious inventions. It is an area of possibility quickly being swallowed up by industry, here appearing in the form of Thomas Edison's men. More broadly speaking, Colorado is a stand in for the American West and its untapped individuality that is slowly giving way to the refinement of corporatism. The American West was a refuge for the common man to explore his vast potential, as Tesla personifies. And now it is dying, as the arrival of Edison's men indicates. Nolan presents Colorado as a thematic place of death and now his films have brought literal death there. But I digress.

For now I will focus on a major reoccurring theme throughout The Prestige: Twins. Obviously there's Borden and his twin Fallon, the secret behind the Transporting Man trick. When Angier first sets out to replicate the Transporting Man trick his assistant, Cutter (Caine), is convinced Borden is using a double. Unconvinced, Angier continues his pathological search for Borden's secrets. It eventually leads him to Colorado Springs where Angier commissions Tesla to build him a machine that will transport him. Tesla agrees, and manages to build a wondrous machine shortly before being run out of Colorado by Edison's men. The only problem is that the machine does not transport Angier --it creates a double, or twin of him. Thus, Angier comes full circle to Borden's methods, after considerable cost and suffering.

The twin is a most curious symbol.

"All cultures and mythologies display a special interest in the phenomenon of twin births. In whatever shape they may be conceived, as completely identical, or as one dark and the other bright, or one tending heavenwards and the other earthwards, or one black the other white, or one red the other blue, or one with bull's and the other with a scorpion's head, they are expressions simultaneously of interference from the Beyond and of the twofold nature of all beings and the dualism of their physical and spiritual, diurnal and nocturnal tendencies. This dualism is light and darkness, the heavenly and earthly aspects of the cosmos and of the individual. When they symbolize in this way the individual's internal contradictions and the struggle which needs to be waged to overcome them, they acquire the character of sacrifice, the need for self-denial, destruction or submission, the surrender of one part of the self so that the other may come through victorious."
(Dictionary of Symbols, Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant, pgs. 1047-1048)

Castor and Pollux, one of many mythological twins

There are clearly strong shades of Zoroastrianism and several strands of Gnosticism coloring the mystical concept of the twin. Both Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism are highly dualistic faiths that divide the universe into light and darkness. In both religions there are two beings that control either light or darkness. In Zoroastrianism the being of light is known as Ahura Mazda while Gnosticism refers to it as Abraxas or the Great Archon. Their respective counterparts are Angra Mainyu and the Demiurge. The Gnostics did not always associate the Demiurge with Satan, but rather with Yahweh, the god of the Old Testament.

"The Father receiving praise... cannot be identified either with the God of the Old Testament or with the Father of the New. The best analogy is with Ahura Mazda of the Persian myth. Yahweh or Elohim is then approximately the counterpart of Angra Mainyu, the creator of the world of the Lie, in which we live and from which the savior is to set us free."
(The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, Joseph Campbell, pg. 373)

Both Angra Mainyu and the Demiurge are at times described as copycats. While their rivals are always depicted as creative forces, the heads of darkness can do little more than copy the works of their betters. As noted above, this is a reoccurring theme throughout The Prestige as far as the pairs of Borden/Tesla and Angier/Edison are concerned: the former create, the latter can only copy them.

Angra Mainyu (top) and the Demiurge (bottom)

But back to the twins. The concept of twins also has an interesting Jungian meaning in the context of the Winnebago Twin myths:

"Though the Twins are said to be sons of the Sun, they are essentially human and together constitute a single person. Originally united in the mother's womb, they were forced apart at birth. Yet they belong together, and it is necessary --though exceedingly difficult --to reunite them. In these two children we see the two sides of man's nature. One of them, Flesh, is acquiescent, mild, and without initiative; the other, Stump, is dynamic and rebellious. In some of the stories of the Twin Heroes these attitudes are refined to the point where one figure represents the introvert, whose main strength lies in his powers of reflection, and the other is an extravert, a man of action who can accomplish great deeds."
(Man and His Symbols, "Ancient Myths and Modern Man," pg. 106. Joseph L. Henderson)

This is apt description of Fallon, the introvert, and Borden, the extrovert. In a way, its almost inevitable that Fallon and Borden would have to pretend to be the same person, for they cannot otherwise project a full personality separate from one another. A few page late Henderson makes another fitting remark for our purposes here:

"We saw in the myth of the Twins how their hybris, expressing excessive ego-Self separation was corrected by their own fear of the consequences, which forced them back into a harmonious ego-Self relation.  

"In tribal societies it is the initiation rite that most effectively solves this problem. The ritual takes the novice back to the deepest level of original mother-child identity or ego-Self identity, thus forcing him to experience a symbolic death. In other words, his identity is temporarily dismembered or dissolved in the collective unconscious. From this state he is then ceremonially rescued by the rite of new birth. This is the first act of true consolidation of the ego with the larger group, expressed as totem, clan, or tribe, or all three combined."
(ibid, pgs. 121-123)

Nolan tries to apply the concept of a mystical death-and-rebirth to the twins found in The Prestige. Just before Borden is to be executed, he tells Fallon: "So... we go alone now. Both of us. Only I don't have as far to go as you... You go and live your life in full now, all right? You live for both of us." Borden then goes onto be hanged, which is symbolically associated with illumination, the goal of initiation.

"Esoterically, the Hanged Man is the human spirit which is suspended from heaven by a single thread. Wisdom, not death, is the reward for this voluntary sacrifice during which the human soul, suspended above the world of illusion, and mediating upon its unreality, is rewarded by the achievement of self-realization."
(The Secret Teachings of All Ages, Manly P. Hall, pg. 91)  

Borden about to be hanged

When next we see Fallon, he is dressed and speaking like Borden, as though the latter had risen from the dead. I suppose this is meant to represent a kind of rebirth, implying that the souls of Borden and Fallon have now finally formed a whole personality. But in Nolan's world, the first thing the new, enlightened Borden opts for is revenge: He murders Angier/Lord Caldlow before retrieving his daughter, who had been in the care of Caldlow. This killing is supposedly a just one as Caldlow, by faking his own death, brought about the execution of Borden, who was blamed for the former's murder. Yet Caldlow's killing comes off as yet another act of petty cruelty in a film short on likable characters.

The original Borden contributed to the death of Angier's wife, continued to escalate the rivalry with Angier after he was ready to move on, and drove his own wife to suicide (or possibly even murdered her) due to the double life he was leading with Fallon. I suppose Fallon is meant as a sympathetic character, but he does little more than bare witness to his brother's destructive behavior over the course of the film and ends as a murderer in hiding with his young daughter. Fallon is ultimately little more than a coward, right down to the fashion in which he slays Angier. Angier at least showed a little grit in the film's third act, most especially in the manner he framed Borden for his murder. If Fallon is meant to be the 'new man' of initiation, then one must conclude that Nolan has grossly misunderstood the symbolism he employs.

Borden's counterpart, Angier/Lord Caldlow, does not fair any better. Symbols of initiation follow Angier throughout the film, most notably water, which serves as a kind of bookend: Angier's wife dies via drowning, which leads him on his quest. Drowning also weighs heavily on the end of Angier's journey. Death is thus closely associated with water throughout The Prestige in stark contrast to the typical associations of life commonly used.

"The symbolic meanings of water may be reduced to three main areas. It is a source of life, a vehicle of cleansing  and a center of regeneration. These three themes are to be found in the most ancient traditions and they provide not only the most varied, but at the same time the most coherent series of combinations of images. 

"The undifferentiated mass of waters stand for the infinite nature of the possible, containing all that is potential, unshaped, the seed of seeds and all promises of evolution, as well as threats of reabsorption. To immense oneself in the waters and to re-emerge without having been utterly dissolved in them, except by dying a symbolic death, is to return to the well-springs and regain fresh strength from the vast reservoir of the potential. It is passing phase of regression and disintegration which brings with it a progressive phase of reintegration and regeneration..."
(Dictionary of Symbols, Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant, pg. 1081)

Angier's wife drowning (top) and Angier (or one of his twins) drowning (bottom)

Clearly Angier did not make it past the regression and disintegration parts. After his wife dies as a result of Borden, Angier's entire life is seemingly dedicated to besting Borden at his one love, magic. To this end Angier destroys all his close relationships, spends a fortune, and ultimately ends up dying night after night to accomplish this goal. The machine that Tesla built for Angier's to replicate Borden's 'Transporting Man' trick is not a teleporting devise, but one that creates an exact replica of the individual using it --an identical twin, in other words. In order to copy Borden's trick, Angier enters the machine every night during his performance. As it goes into effect, a trap door opens beneath the stage leading one Angier to fall into a padlocked tank of water where he drowns while the other walks out from the back of the theater to energetic applause. It is implied that the 'original' Angier is sometimes transported to the back of the theater, but sometimes also ends up in the tank. Thus, Angier's undergoes his own brand of death and rebirth night after night, and it leaves him with about as much illumination as Fallon.

Before Fallon finally puts Angier's out of his misery, he pathetically proclaims: "You never understood why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It's miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you... then you get to see something really special... You really don't know?.. It was... It was the look on their faces..."

And yet the world is not simple and void of mystery... Tesla and his machine are ample proof of this. Angier, in his quest to best Borden, discovered actual magic, and preceded to reduce it to a truly grotesque parlor trick for bored aristocrats attending the theater. And in a way, this is as apt a symbol of Nolan's films as one is likely to find.

Whether Nolan deals in magicians, superheroes or dreams themselves, it is always with a lack of wonder. Indeed, Nolan seems to subtly indicate that such things are a threat to social order itself. The bulk of The Prestige unfolds against the back drop of Victorian England, a society rigidly organized around class. While it's never mentioned, there's a lingering fear that figures such as Borden and Tesla  are a profound threat to this order. They are plebs endowed with incredible visions who routinely upstage their betters, and this is a state of affairs that cannot be allowed to stand. Thus Borden is dead by film's end while Tesla is clearly a broken man. Both men were undone by their dreams and the assault on the social order that their dreams represented.

Nolan seems to take the view that this is the natural, if not just, order of things. While men such as Angier and Edison may not be particularly innovative, skilled or honorable, they have the means to guide progress in an acceptable way, one that largely hides true wonder from the plebs. Against such men, why would anyone wish to rock the boat? Such a path can only lead to obsession and destruction, as Borden and Tesla are a testament too. Just settle in and enjoy the show --Be thankful for what you have, and whatever you do, do not try and rise above it.

the tank's containing the bodies of Angier's twins, the final result of his aristocratical ambitions