Richard Wolstencroft, the Aussie behind the classic underground Boyd Rice vehicle Pearls Before Swine (1999) – a movie that any weirdo reading this should stop and watch right now if they never have before – is back with the second installment of The Second Coming, the first volume of which was finished in 2015. Part of an even grander series that Wolstencroft calls the “March on Rome” trilogy, the two halves of TheSecond Coming comprise a magickal diptych of miscegenated and mutated gleanings from Crowley, Manson, nuclear physics, social Darwinism, Faustian racialism, and William Butler Yeats, whose poem “The Second Coming” provides the inspiration for a nebulous plot involving a global conspiracy of revolutionary dissidents attempting to usher in a new age of unmediocrity through occult, scientific, degenerate, and quasi-fascistic skullduggery. If such a revolt against the modern world is to be successful, The Second Coming indicates, its principal stumbling block will be the mutual distrust of the various elements necessary to bring the new order into being.
This is essentially a no-budget undertaking – the only money spent seems to have been on travel expenses for the mix of dully mundane and dangerously exotic locations – but what makes The Second Coming a must-see film is the assortment of oddballs Wolstencroft managed to assemble to participate in his production. There are too many to name, but readers may be especially interested to know that proto-Alt-Right hate scene legends Jim Goad and Boyd Rice both have small but perfectly cast and hilarious roles as players in the satanic conspiracy. The phone conversation between the two of them, short as it is, is one of the greatest moments ever stitched together for a movie. A gloriously off-the-wall Kim Fowley, Shaun Partridge, and late Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey also have cameos in The Second Coming, in case the foregoing was not already enough to entice the viewer. In my book, I briefly discuss the potential for the emergence of a white nationalist cinema. Is Wolstencroft’s The Second Coming the realization of this ideal? Well … not exactly. Wolstencroft is too individual a creator and too perverted a reprobate for that. The Second Coming does, however, gesture vaguely in the directions that such a cinema might undertake to explore if it ever emerged from the wilderness of its online chaos. Both volumes of Wolstencroft’s epic can be accessed through Affirmative Right – free to view for a limited time.
The following material is excerpted from my [out-of-print] book, Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies.
Sirhan Sirhan, the man who has been characterized as both the first “Palestinian terrorist” as well as the quintessential “Manchurian Candidate”, was described after his alleged assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 as having been “motivated by Kennedy’s support for Israel.” Sirhan is supposed to have written in a notebook, “Kennedy must die by June 5th” (i.e., the anniversary of the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967)1. Sirhan retracted his initial admission of guilt in the crime, claiming to have been “hypno-programmed” by the assassination’s plotters. Indeed, more than one researcher has suggested that Los Angeles sex therapist and hypnosis expert William J. Bryan did the programming. “Bryan, a self-proclaimed eccentric character, once boasted to two of his favorite prostitutes that he, in fact, had hypnotized Sirhan and had worked on ‘top secret’ CIA projects,” writes Forgotten Terrorist author Mel Ayton. “Bryan’s most famous hypnotic subject was the notorious Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, whose name appeared in Sirhan’s notebooks.”2
Bryan served as a technical advisor on John Frankenheimer’s film The Manchurian Candidate (1962)3, which is about a brainwashed assassin. Frankenheimer had been a successful television director in 1960 when he declined an offer to work for the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign. (According to Frankenheimer, United Artists executive Arthur Krim had aspirations to become the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, and was reluctant to green-light The Manchurian Candidate for fear it would upset Kennedy; Krim is supposed to have relented, however, after learning that JFK was a fan of Condon’s novel4.) Frankenheimer, who said he “felt guilty” after the Kennedy assassination for not having done the work for his campaign, proceeded to insinuate himself with the Robert F. Kennedy camp: “when his [i.e., JFK’s] brother declared his candidacy in ’68, I immediately called Pierre Salinger and said, ‘Pierre, I want to be part of this.’” “I never left him,” Frankenheimer recalled. “I was there with him for 102 days.”5
John Frankenheimer
“Bobby became best friends with me,” the director claimed. “He was staying with me in Malibu, and I drove him to the Ambassador Hotel where he was shot.”6 Frankenheimer further related a strange circumstance of this “defining moment” of his life to interviewer Alex Simon. “You were supposed to be up on the dais with him at the Ambassador, weren’t you?” Simon asked. “Yes, then at the last moment, it was decided that having a film director up on stage with him wasn’t the image they wanted, so we had [Kennedy’s labor advisor,] a friend named Paul Schrade, who was about my size and complexion, take my place,” Frankenheimer recounted. “And he was one of the three people shot in the kitchen.”7 Schrade, who survived, has maintained ever since that day that Sirhan only served to create a distraction and that the shots that killed RFK were fired from behind the candidate’s back8.
Ed Sanders, in his biography of Sharon Tate, relates that Sirhan Sirhan, the alleged assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, was reported by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to have been “attending parties on behalf of the Satanist English cult [the Process Church], including one at Sharon Tate’s place.” Sanders points to a possible motivation for the Tate murder that had absolutely nothing to do with some Mansonian (or Bugliosian) notion of an apocalyptic “Helter Skelter” war:
INS criminal investigator Richard Smith’s report stated that an LA law enforcement agency had a female informant who averred that the English Satanist group had commissioned Manson to kill Sharon Tate. […] The reason for the contract […] was “something that she unfortunately overheard that she was not supposed to overhear either in regards to Sirhan Sirhan or about Sirhan Sirhan.”9
Sirhan Sirhan
Tate’s acting coach at the time was an Israeli, Zev Lahav, who went by the name “Laurence Merrick” and had been sent to the U.S. to promote Zionist interests10. Lahav, with partner Robert Hendrickson, produced a documentary, Manson (1973), about the Family, which included interviews conducted both before and after the Tate-LaBianca murders. Members of the Manson Family had come to visit the set of Lahav’s previous film, Black Angels, in 1969 – an eerie circumstance considering the race war plotline’s resemblance to the “Helter Skelter” scenario later attributed to Manson by Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, who participated in the making of Lahav’s Manson documentary. Another of Lahav’s films of 1969, interesting in view of his Tate-Manson connections, is Guess What Happened to Count Dracula?, which is concerned with occult ritualism and mind control (and even features a minor character named Sharon) and was filmed at the Magic Castle, which, as Scott Michaels points out in the documentary Six Degrees of Helter Skelter (2009), sits a few dozen yards from the Franklin Garden Apartments where Charles Manson shot Bernard Crowe over a bad drug deal – also very near the Franklin Avenue apartments from which Manson ran a prostitution ring called 3-Star Enterprises.
Frankenheimer, over the course of his career, would direct a number of movies with explicitly Jewish and anti-Nazi themes: The Train (1964), The Fixer (1968), Black Sunday (1977), The Holcroft Covenant (1985), and Dead Bang (1989). Black Sunday, in particular, depicts the Israelis as allies against Islamic terrorism. Indeed, the assassination of RFK, as Ayton puts it, “might be the first act of the tragedy that culminated in 9/11”11.
Ayton, Mel. The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, pp. 6-7.
Vaughn, Robert. A Fortunate Life. New York, NY: Thomas Dunne Books, 2008, pp. 260-261.
“Dialogue on Film: John Frankenheimer”, in Armstrong, Stephen B., Ed. John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2013, p. 96.
Simon, Alex. “John Frankenheimer: Renaissance Auteur”, in Armstrong, Stephen B., Ed. John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2013, pp. 149-151.
Hart, Hugh. “Frankenheimer Knew Period’s Main Players”, in Armstrong, Stephen B., Ed. John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2013, p. 213.
Simon, Alex. “John Frankenheimer: Renaissance Auteur”, in Armstrong, Stephen B., Ed. John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2013, p. 151.
One of the many unusual figures whose life trajectory intersects with the Manson Family saga is Laurence Merrick, an Israeli Defense Forces veteran who, as critic Bryan Thomas relates at Night Flight, was sent to the U.S. in 1960 “to speak in support of Zionism, and while he was fundraising in New York City, he met his future wife, a dark-haired aspiring Broadway showgirl and wannabe actress named Joan Huntington.” From there the pair “came out to the west coast, and set up the Merrick Studio, located at 870 N. Vine St. in Hollywood, California, and for a time it was an inexpensive place for actors” – including Vietnam veterans – “to learn lessons about their craft.”
The Merricks were subsidized by the government, too, which enabled them to make a lot of money running the school. They bought a nice house in Beverly Hills and then decided to put their studio profits towards making their own movies, which they could then cast with students from the school, a win-win situation for everybody.
Merrick, Thomas writes, is “probably best known for co-directing the legendary 1972 documentary Manson with Robert Hendrickson, which […] ended up garnering an Academy Award nomination for Best Feature-Length Documentary.” The Israeli “was also well-known in Hollywood […] for the fact that one of his students, Sharon Tate, would later be killed by members of Manson’s Family, during August of 1969, the same year he spent fourteen days directing [the biker film] Black Angels.” Note the interesting choice of words, too, when Thomas relates that Huntington viewed her husband’s movies as “training exercises”.
A 1977 UPI article states that “Merrick became interested in the Manson Family because actress Sharon Tate, who was murdered with four friends by the group, had been a student at his school” – implying that Merrick only took an interest in Manson after the killings had taken place; but Merrick and Hendrickson had begun conducting interviews with Family members “before and after the shocking murders that rocked the nation in 1969,” Thomas indicates (italics added). As his account of the making of Black Angels tantalizes, the totality of Merrick’s involvements with this movie, Tate, and the Manson Family strains the limits of what can be dismissed as mere “synchronicity”:
In fact – in yet another example of the parallels that existed between Southern California’s biker and hippie countercultures – members of Manson’s Family would occasionally drop by Paramount Ranch, located at 2813 Cornell Road, in Agoura, California, and visit the set while Merrick and his cast and crew were filming scenes. […]
Merrick’s script focuses on two biker gangs at each other’s throats, a white motorcycle gang called Satan’s Serpents — led by Chainer (once again played by Merrick’s favorite leading man, Des Roberts) — and a black motorcycle gang, called the Choppers (their leader was played by Bobby Johnston, whose biggest role previous to this one was as a prison guard in In Cold Blood).
The film’s title, Black Angels is actually the name attributed to the highway patrolmen who observe the two rival biker gangs from a distance, waiting for the race-motivated war for turf to explode.
Merrick recruited a real black biker gang to play the Choppers in order to provide authenticity.
The main plot concerns one “Black Angel” in particular – a lieutenant for the highway patrol named Harper (Clancy Syrko, who also edited the film) – who wants to see all of the biker gangs wiped off the face of the earth, and he plots to pit the two gangs against each other so they will end up in a race war leading to both of them being destroyed. […]
It’s interesting to note that this film’s concept of pitting white against black in a race war, in the year 1969, is very similar in some respects to Manson’s concept which he called “Helter Skelter”, an apocalyptic war arising from racial tensions between blacks and white, which he believed was foretold in Chapter 9 of the book of Revelations in the bible (as well as hidden messages he believed he heard in the Beatles’ “Revolution #9”).
Makes you wonder what kinds of conversations they were having at Paramount Ranch between members of the cast and crew and some of Manson’s followers.
There were also many interesting cameo appearances, including a real member of Charles Manson’s gang, Mark Ross (he plays “Singer”), who later claimed to write a theme song for the film that was never used […]
The film’s tagline “God forgives, the Black Angels don’t!,” incidentally, was borrowed from the hugely successful 1967 Italian spaghetti western, God Forgives… I Don’t.
Another tagline – and perhaps another reference to Manson? – was “A portrait of the family.”
Speaking of Manson and his family, again, it was during the film’s production that Merrick was invited to head over to Spahn Ranch, with a 16mm camera, in order to film the Manson family on their own turf.
Merrick also shot footage of them at Devil’s Canyon, their Barker Ranch hideout in Death Valley, and then later – during the Manson trial – at the Hall of Justice in downtown Los Angeles, in addition to other locations.
Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, who did as much as anyone to shape the public’s perception of the Manson Family mythos, participated in the production of Merrick and Hendrickson’s documentary and appears onscreen.
Des Roberts as Count Adrian in Merrick’s Guess What Happened to Count Dracula?
Merrick’s previous movie, Guess What Happened to Count Dracula?, concerns the occult, mind control, and, at least subtextually, acknowledges Jewish power in Hollywood – and it only intensifies the Tate-LaBianca resonance of Merrick’s work, even featuring a minor character named Sharon. Thomas continues:
The movie featured several of Merrick’s students in key parts, and chiefly concerned what happened to Dracula’s son, Count Adrian (Des Roberts, who plays the vampire while sporting a wicked John Carradine-style goatee). Roberts and his musical partner, Andy Wilder, also provided the film’s musical score.
The film was shot at the Magic Castle in the Hollywood Hills, a mansion built in the 1920s which had been renovated for performances by magicians.
One of Merrick’s students owned the place, and had invited Merrick and his wife over for dinner, which left a lasting impression, and when the couple began thinking of locations where they could shoot their Dracula movie, they both remembered the Magic Castle, which was just about to undergo a renovation. […]
The movie also contains a subplot straight out of the then recent box office smash Rosemary’s Baby, when one character — an actor named Guy (just as John Cassavetes’s character was in Roman Polanski’s film), played by John Landon — is all too willing to sell his soul in return for being given a successful acting career.
It’s also interesting to note that Merrick’s film features a “surprise” ending that was clearly inspired by Polanski’s previous film, 1967’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck, when Polanski’s future wife Sharon Tate sprouts fangs in the film.
According to Horrorpedia, “more obscure X-rated edits of the film [Guess What Happened to Count Dracula?], with an emphasis on male gay sex, were released as Does Dracula Really Suck? and Dracula and the Boys.”
Adding to the mystique of Merrick’s Manson documentary is the fact that it features Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme caressing a rifle and explaining, “You have to make love with it; you have to know it […] so that you could pick it up any second and shoot.” This interview took place several years before Fromme was convicted of (supposedly) having attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in Sacramento. Merry Prankster and founding Yippie Paul Krassner claims that Manson sent him a letter instructing him to get into touch with Fromme around 1971:
I called, and we arranged to meet at her apartment in Los Angeles. On an impulse, I brought several tabs of acid with me on the plane. […]
The four of us [Krassner, Fromme, and her roommates Sandra Good and Brenda McCann] ingested those little white tablets containing 300 micrograms of LSD, then took a walk to the office of Laurence Merrick, who had been associated with schlock biker exploitation movies as the prerequisite to directing a sensationalist documentary, Manson.
Squeaky’s basic vulnerability emerged as she kept pacing around and telling Merrick that she was afraid of him. He didn’t know we were tripping, but he must have sensed the vibes. He may even have gotten a touch of contact high. I engaged him in conversation about movies. We discussed the fascistic implications of The French Connection.
Was Fromme “afraid” of Merrick from the effects of the LSD – or did she have other reasons? This brief encounter, whatever its meaning, in combination with Fromme’s participation in Merrick and Hendrickson’s Manson constitutes another Israeli connection to an eccentric piece of American political assassination drama following the various Jewish and Zionist intrigues surrounding the murder of John F. Kennedy.
Bizarrely, Merrick himself was murdered in an outrageous episode further dissolving any distinction between reality and theater. Bryan Thomas relates the bizarre incident:
Then, in 1977, Merrick’s life would intersect fatally with a potential acting student named Dennis Mignano, who – much like Manson himself – had really wanted to have a music career, but when that didn’t pan out, the struggling rock singer decided to take acting lessons.
That decision had led him straight to Merrick Studio – which by now was teaching classes in acting, directing and cinematography – where he applied to be a student.
He believed that Merrick – due to his association with Manson, bikers, and magic – was the perfect person to help him launch a successful acting career (Mignano had reportedly been obsessed with magic as a child).
Mignano filled out an application to be a student, and then was told he was eligible for government assistance to pay for his tuition, but he had to wait for three weeks for the application to be processed.
Mignano grew irritated and felt like the delay was yet another setback and a disappointment, but he waited, and while he did so he watched episodes of a 1976 TV mini-series called Helter Skelter, which just happened to be re-airing on TV.
The TV series may have played a small part in reminding him that his life was now intertwined with Merrick’s and he then became obsessed with the idea that Merrick had actually placed a curse on him.
On January 26th, 1977, he went to the school and waited in ambush for Merrick to appear in the parking lot for a few hours and then pulled out a pistol and shot 50-year old Laurence Merrick in the back.
Mignano then fled the scene, and much like the opening scene of Richard Rush’s 1980 action film The Stunt Man – which, and get this, starred actor Steve Railsback, who had played Charles Manson in the Helter Skelter mini-series – he, by pure chance, happened upon a movie being shot mere blocks away, on Willoughby Ave., and the killer blended in with the crew (just as Railsback’s character did), pretending to be part of the film production team.
Merrick, meanwhile, staggered into his office at the studio, telling his students “Some son of a bitch shot me and I don’t even know why!” Some of the students thought they were witnessing an impromptu acting exercise, but quickly realized that their teacher was dying in front of them.
Merrick was rushed to Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, but he was pronounced dead within an hour. Students at the Merrick Studio Academy of Dramatic Arts said that Mignano had been hanging around the building all morning, asking them questions about Merrick and his Manson documentary.
Mignano confessed to the crime in 1981 and was confined to a mental institution. Six months after his murder of Merrick, Mignano’s sister Michele, a topless dancer, was also murdered – a case that remains unsolved. Questions about Merrick remain, as well. Why was his actors’ studio receiving government funding? Did his work on behalf of Israel end after he left New York for Los Angeles – or did it continue in some capacity as he interacted with the Manson Family and completed his films?
John McTiernan, director of Hollywood blockbusters Predator (1987), Die Hard (1988), and The Hunt for Red October (1990), began his movie career rather more humbly with the flawed and eccentric but nonetheless entertaining debut Nomads(1986). Notable as McTiernan’s only credit as a screenwriter, Nomads was eviscerated by the critics when first released, and still has only a 13% green splat at Rotten Tomatoes. “Was there any sense in it?” asks leading lady Lesley-Anne Down in an interview included on the Nomads Blu-ray. “I don’t think there was very much sense in it at all for anybody.” Is Down correct in dismissing the film as a shallowly offbeat curio – and were the critics who panned the movie motivated only by an objective assessment of its merits?
Nomads stars Pierce Brosnan as a French anthropologist, Jean Charles Pommier, who in the opening sequence dies in the care of Down’s character, Dr. Eileen Flax, in a Los
Lesley-Anne Down freaks out in John McTiernan’s Nomads.
Angeles hospital. He appears in a beaten, bloodied, and seemingly insane state, and his enigmatic last words initiate what will be a strange paranormal ordeal for Flax, who over the course of the film will both investigate and experience what befell Pommier, with most of the story told in flashback. The anthropologist and his wife (Anna Maria Monticelli) had only recently moved to the U.S. and purchased a house that, as it turns out, has a horrible history attached to it. Soon after moving in, the Pommiers discover Mansonesque graffiti on the garage door and more graffiti inside: “Gutman’s a Hero”. The home, they learn, was the site of a horrific child murder, and a band of elusive antisocial misfits who live out of a van have adopted the house as a holy site.
Pommier, being an anthropologist, follows the titular “nomads” around Los Angeles with the intention of documenting and studying them in order to gain a better idea of the threat he faces and to understand “what kind of people could think of a murder as some sort of shrine.” He determines that none of them have employment and watches them from a distance as they laze at the beach, party, and generally terrorize people. The nomads become aware of Pommier’s surveillance after he witnesses them murder a man and put the body in a dumpster. After first being pursued by them and escaping, Pommier again works his way into proximity with the group – at which point they seem to accept his presence and stage an impromptu photo shoot, with one of them, Mary, played by Mary Woronov, doing an exotic dance. When Pommier develops the film, however, he finds that none of the nomads appear in the exposures, which invites a comparison with vampires – although the nomads, who have no problem frolicking in the daylight, are clearly not vampires at least as conventionally depicted.
These quasi-vampires – vampire lore comprising a traditional understanding of the eternal Jew – are nomads, or what Pommier, drawing on Eskimo legends, describes as an urban variety of Innuat. As related in the film, “It has to do with wandering the desert. […] It’s all the same. Nomads live in deserts, whether it’s a desert of ice or sand or whatever doesn’t make a difference. […] They were supposedly hostile spirits. According to the myth, they were capable of assuming a human form” and traveled from place to place, bringing ruin and madness with them wherever they went. As Pommier tells his wife:
None of this may mean anything. None of it at all. […] But I may have found people who are living outside – outside any structure. They do not participate. No exchange, no constraints. They resort to violence with no provocation and then get away with it. It is as if to the official world they did not exist.
All of this rootlessness, in combination with the confluence of ritual, child murder, the reverence for a killer with the Jewish name Gutman, as well as the general depravity and destructiveness, contributes to an accumulation of clues that the nomads may be the Jews. Curiously, composer Bill Conti mentions during his Blu-ray interview that the soundtrack includes what he describes as a “Middle Eastern sound” – though to this reviewer’s untrained ear such a flavoring is difficult to detect in the synth-and-guitars music cues.
Adam Ant portrays the leader of the titular band of roving marauders.
“You must not try to fight them,” a sinister nun (Blue Velvet’s Frances Bay) tells Pommier. This encounter takes place in a dilapidated cathedral where, in a sequence of nightmarish phantasmagoria, a flock of satanic women in habits is seen running through the halls in masks, one of them flashing her bare breasts at Pommier – all of which points to a faith corrupted. Dancing Mary, the nomad portrayed by Mary Woronov, wears a cross that glints in the sun, and later, when she is seen at night, she wears an even larger crucifix so that the viewer can hardly help but notice it as she cavorts like a stripper. Are these Christian elements ironic and indicative of cultural subversion, or have these been added as fig leaves to hide the almost naked Jewishness of the menace? Woronov’s features, it must be noted, are rather evil and arguably Semitic-looking.
In a key moment toward the end of the film, Pommier says to his wife with an air of wistfulness as they survey the Los Angeles skyline from a rooftop, “We are so very far from home, you know. All of us.” He laments his “bourgeois” life in a “civilized” world – in short, bemoans his condition of rootless cosmopolitanism. Both he and his kindred spirit the doctor, another childless middle-aged professional in the process of moving into a new and foreign home, have agricultural surnames, Pommier (“apple tree”) and Flax, that betray their simple origins and relatedness to the earth – Flax also connoting blonde and distinctively northern European looks – that set them apart from the dark, mysterious wanderers who move in their midst. Pommier’s polyglot cosmopolitanism, peripatetic ways, and sophistication nevertheless present a thematic parallel with the lifestyle of the nomads, so that it comes as no surprise when Pommier finally succumbs to them. The horror of Nomads is loss of a sense of belonging to a place and one’s own native culture – the horror of an alienated world in which, for instance, Dr. Flax’s colleague Cassie Miller (Jeannie Elias) complains about the “meshuggenah lunatics” who people the city. Whatever the meaning of the film, it may be worth observing that it is set in the entertainment capital of the world and that the final nomad antagonist Dr. Flax encounters is unable to pursue her beyond the California state line.
Gelatin, Arc de Triomphe, 2003. (ZOG celebrating a smash success)
As many 9/11 conspiracy buffs and researchers are already aware, one of the most bizarre and mysterious facets of the event’s surrounding mythos is the covert presence of the “Austrian” art group Gelatin (or Gelitin) in the North Tower in 2000 and the resulting conceptual art stunt known as “The B-Thing“. The team, living secretly inside the building, installed a balcony outside the 91st floor, with a few participants finally taking a bow, as it were, and being photographed from a helicopter. What is disturbing is that the prank is known to have been facilitated by the Mossad-linkedLower Manhattan Cultural Council.
A limited edition book documenting the “B-Thing” project was published in the months leading up to 9/11, and it contains what can only be characterized as suggestions of foreknowledge of the attacks. The true nature of Gelatin’s work inside the WTC remains a matter of speculation, but photographs produced in The B-Thing show thought-provoking stacks of boxes. A conspiratorially evocative preface is credited (let the reader be mindful) to “Tex” Rubinowitz, a rockabilly singer and/or cartoonist and/or TV actor – a man or men, in other words, who could hardly be expected to top a list of likely terror suspects.
“Tex” Number One
Just who is “Tex” Rubinowitz, really? Bizarrely, there are actually two men who have used this name. A 1987 profile of “Tex” Number One by Buzz McClain in the Fairfax Journal describes him as follows:
The first time you hear his name you chuckle to yourself. Tex Rubinowitz. It is a comical-sounding name, one with built-in humor. Tex Rubinowitz. The humor stems from the contradictions. What is he, a cowboy rabbi? How many Jewish cowboys are there? But to area fans of rock and roll music, Tex Rubinowitz, who is neither Jewish (he was raised Southern Baptist) nor a cowpoke, is a legend. The singer-songwriter has had a hit record (“Hot Rod Man,” which hit even bigger in Europe) that appeared on a movie soundtrack (“Roadhouse 66”). His bands have sold out nearly every nightclub in the region. His live performances have been hailed by critics as vibrant celebrations of nitty-gritty rock and roll.
Other musicians seek his counsel and engage him to produce their records. But despite the loyal following, Rubinowitz has been frustrated in accomplishing the crossover from local notoriety to national fame. At age 43, it would seem that Rubinowitz’s biological metronome is winding down. But guess what? Rubinowitz, who says he has already had a comeback, followed by a “last-ditch effort,” is gearing up once again.
Arthur Lee Rubinowitz was born in Texas in 1944 to Stanley and Arthurea Rubinowitz. While on his way to becoming a full colonel in the Army, Stanley brought his family – which includes Tex’s younger brother Ben – to the Washington area. They settled into a comfortable house in suburban Springfield, where the four remain together today. Stanley retired from the military, taking a position with the federal government. Arthurea, who was a schoolteacher and later a school principal, began a career with the Fairfax County school system. She eventually retired as an assistant school superintendent.
In 1962, Tex, who was then a student at Lee High School, started playing the guitar. He graduated from Lee in 1963 and attended the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg for less than a year before returning home. In 1970, he began his career in music, playing small local clubs. “I didn’t know what to do, I just knew I wanted to do it,” he says. He made his first music-related dollar two years later. The Cassaloma Cowboys, Rubinowitz’s first band, performed and recorded from 1975 to 1978; in 1979 he formed Tex Rubinowitz and the Bad Boys, the band that would establish and perpetuate Rubinowitz’s foothold in the music world.
Their singles, “Hot Rod Man” and “Bad Boy”, received airplay on hundreds of progressive and college radio stations around the country. Their live shows consistently drew large audiences; the band set the house record at the defunct Wax Museum nightclub in Washington when some 1400 people (400 more than the legal limit) packed the place.
Rubinowitz’s looks are as memorable as his name. He is tall, somewhere in the 6-foot-3 region, and slender and his dark brown hair has given way to an attractive, if premature, gray. He wears his hair short, with a sweep to the left. During a performance, he sports an authentic slicked-back ducktail that funnels into a long, tubular curl dangling past his forehead. He is generally seen in sunglasses: He forsakes his real-life nerdly Wayfarers for hipper aviator frameson stage. (Behind the glasses is a pair of clear blue eyes.) With his curl and shades in place and his acoustic guitar strapped around his neck, Rubinowitz certainly looks the part of heartfelt rock ‘n’ roller. And when he sings, the judgement is verified. Rubinowitz possesses a natural, deep-bodied baritone that rolls like Appalachian thunder.
Although he does not seem weary or burned out, rock ‘n’ roll has interfered with Rubinowitz’s “normal” life. For instance, rock ‘n’ roll has kept him from getting married: “I’ve been close three or four times,” Rubinowitz says, his clear baritone softening. “I’ve always been a little obsessive about music… But my father didn’t get married until he was in his early 40s.” Then he adds: “To get married I have to get successful in music or get out of it.” What will he do if he gets out of music? “Get a job,” he says quickly and to the point. “Something blue-collar, like work at the Merchant Tire store or something like that.”
“Tex is a painfully honest person,” the article goes on to quote Washington Post consultant Joe Sasfy, and ends by mentioning that Rubinowitz has become interested in acting:
The album is out, the concerts are being lined up and Tex Rubinowitz is once again waiting for the figurative fish to bite. Meanwhile he stays busy building guitars and taking acting classes. “I have no intention of ever using acting,” he says. “The classes are just another way to release myself as an artist.” And though the thought of a stable job may cross his mind once in a while, it is hard to believe Rubinowitz, or anyone who could say this, would ever give up music: “I believe what makes most people feel good about music is still there,” he says. “And that is sort of magic,a magic that happens between people and actually takes place. Pop music is one of the strongest things for pop art. When it really works it really can touch a lot of people and affect a lot of people for the good.“
“Tex” Number Two
Another “Tex” Rubinowitz, according to a German Wikipedia profile, was born Dirk Wesenberg in 1961 in Hannover, Lower Saxony, Germany. This second “Tex”, as featured on the German Wikipedia page – which, when translated into English, makes him “Southwestern” Rubinowitz – is a painter, cartoonist, actor, and musician. Confusing matters, however, is the fact that the IMDb profile for “Tex” Number Two gives his birth name as Arthur Lee Rubinowitz, the same as “Tex” Number One. The Wikipedia profile, as imperfectly rendered in English, reads in part as follows:
Southwestern Rubinowitz spent most of his childhood and schooldays in Lüneburg. After his school leaving in 1978, he worked in various jobs, including as a dairy skilled workers and the district government Lüneburg as support acts. In 1982 he made the Naval Air Wing 2 in Tarp from his military service. During this time he was trained to parachute packer. In 1984, he moved to Vienna, where he study art under Professor Oswald Oberhuber began. He broke this but after a week and started for the moths to draw. Rubinowitz was in the late eighties the fanzineAmerican Hospital newspaper out simultaneously with the more familiar to some of Berlin fanzine Me and my vacuum cleaner appeared. [. . .] By means of a recommendation by Robert Gernhardt came Rubinowitz for Haffmans Verlag in Zurich, where he has two issues of the periodical Der Rabe issued and cooperated with other numbers. [. . .] As an actor he has worked with Kurt Palm and Hermes Phettberg and played 1995 American filmBefore Sunrise a supporting role, which he wrote himself. With Gerhard Potuznik he founded the band mice.
Regardless of where he or they were born or whether or not one or both Rubinowitzes are Jewish or if either had any connection to 9/11, which seems far-fetched to say the least, his/their moniker serves as an interesting onomatological case for those who believe with revisionist historian Michael A. Hoffman II that the shadow government or “Cryptocracy” is “telling you what they’re doing to you” as part of what he has termed the Revelation of the Method. This is the scheme according to which a population that is informed of its manipulation and degradation, but which takes no action to oppose its oppression, has thus been further initiated into enslavement and exponentially subjugated. The question then probably ought not to be who is “Tex” Rubinowitz so much as why was the name “Tex” Rubinowitz selected for the attribution of the B-Thing introduction? What, in other words, is its onomatological significance?
Now for some idle speculation and probably futile cryptographic dot-matix-connection . . .
The Texas reference, in conjunction with the fact of there being two totally different “Tex” Rubinowitzes, recalls the circumstance of the two Oswalds, one of whom is alleged to have shot JFK in Dealey Plaza. To return to the question posed by McClain in the Fairfax Journal piece, “How many Jewish cowboys are there?” A better question might be, “How many Jewish cowboys are there in Texas?” The coincidence and confluence of Texas and Jews is of course as 9/11-resonant as a reference could get, considering the event’s Bush neocon provenance. Could “Tex” Number Two’s tenure as a “dairy skilled worker” refer to Zionist exploitation of gullible goy cattle, perhaps?
“Tex” Number One, who has said that pop music hits people “in a way that they feel they have gained an insight about themselves and about reality“, recorded a rockabilly song called “Hot Rod Man“, in which he threatens he’s “gonna get you if I can“. “Hot Rod”, of course, takes on a different connotation in the context of a discussion of the controlled demolition of the WTC, possibly with its columns dissolved by nanothermite.
Manson – cryptographic 9/11 lynchpin?
In the B-Thing introduction attributed to him, “Tex” Number Two compares the members of Gelatin to the Beatles, which, in combination with the name “Tex” and the musicianship of both Rubinowitzes, evokes a symbological Charles Mansonconnection, in light of singer-songwriter Manson’s association with Charles “Tex” Watson, who forms a part of the Manson Family murder cosmology. Whose “family” was in on 9/11, one has to wonder – and how extended was it? (“The shared genetic elements suggest that members of any Jewish community are related to one another as closely as are fourth or fifth cousins in a large population, which is about 10 times higher than the relationship between two people chosen at random off the streets of New York City,” the Times notes of Ashkenazi Jews.)
Charles “Tex” Watson, in addition to playing an allegedly key role in the notorious Tate-LaBianca murders, is also alleged to have participated in the decapitation of Donald “Shorty” Shea in 1969 – a circumstance that draws an intriguing parallel with still another chapter of the interminable “War on Terror“. When the government-media matrix shifted into high gear with its promotion of the ISIS bogeyman as a pretext for further Middle East military intervention, this peaked with a series of silly videos purporting to show the (off-screen) beheadings of James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and others by an elite terror cell/supergroup of jihadis dubbed “the Beatles” in the media. The star executioner in these turkeys is a rapper, “Jihadi John” (as in Lennon), the plan apparently being to glorify, celebritize, and thereby incentivize jihad in order to intensify “Islamic” State recruitment.
Furthermore, in view of both the striking similarity and the various continuities between the JFK assassination cover-up and the 9/11 psychological warfare regime, Michael A. Hoffman’s remarks on the significance of the Beatles are worth revisiting:
What ought to be unambiguous to any student of mass psychology, is the almost immediate decline of the American people in the wake of this shocking, televised slaughter. There are many indicators of the transformation. Within a year Americans had largely switched from softer-toned, naturally colored cotton clothing to garish-colored artificial polyesters. Popular music became louder, faster and more cacophonous. Drugs appeared for the first time outside the Bohemian subculture ghettos, in the mainstream. Extremes of every kind came into fashion. Revolutions in cognition and behavior were on the horizon, from the Beatles to Charles Manson, from Free Love to LSD.
The killers were not caught, the Warren Commission was a whitewash. There was a sense that the men who ordered the assassination were grinning somewhere over cocktails and out of this, a nearly-psychedelic wonder seized the American population, an awesome shiver before the realization that whoever could kill a president of the United States in broad daylight and get away with it, could get away with anything.
A hidden government behind the visible government of these United States became painfully obvious in a kind of subliminal way and lent an undercurrent of the hallucinogenicto our reality.Welcome to Oz thanks to the men behind Os-wald and Ruby.
There was a transfer of power in the collective group mind the American masses: from the public power of the elected front-man Chief Executive, to an unelected invisible college capable of terminating him with impunity. [. . .]
Dave Marsh writing in Rolling Stone magazine (Feb. 24, 1977): “The Beatles have always had an intimate connection to the JFK assassination. He was shot the week before Thanksgiving 1963. By February 1964, the Beatles were number one in the national charts and the climactic appearance on Ed Sullivan’s TV show occurred. Even Brian Epstein (the manager of the Beatles) believed the Kennedy assassination helped their rise — the Beatles appeared to bind our wounds with their messages of joy and handholding… And the way was paved, replacing Camelot with Oz.”
Now the American people were forced to confront a scary alternative reality, the reality of a shadow government, over which they had neither control or knowledge. The shepherding process was thus accelerated with a vengeance. Avant-garde advertising, music, politics and news would hereafter depict (especially in the electronic media) — sometimes fleetingly, sometimes openly — a “shadow side” of reality, an underground amoral “funhouse” current associated with extreme sex, extreme violence and extreme speed.
The static images of the suit-and-tie talking heads of establishment religion, government, politics and business were subtly shown to be subordinate to the Shadow State, which the American people were gradually getting a bigger glimpse of out of the corner of their collective eye. The interesting function of this phenomenon is that it simultaneously produces both terror and adulation and undercuts any offensive against it among its percipients, which does not possess the same jump-cut speed and funhouse ambiance.
Steve (Kristopher Turner) and Tina (Crystal Lowe) are, despite their cutesy neuroses, happy together and engaged to be married in a week. The only problem is that Steve is starting to get cold feet – literally – after a plague-carrying mosquito bites him and turns him into a brain-craving corpse.
Neither the first nor the last romantic comedy to consider itself cleverly different and adorable for featuring a zombie in love, A Little Bit Zombie does nothing to distinguish itself from the rest of the horror comedy pack. With its derivative ideas, cloyingly broad comedy, indomitable preciousness, and the nearly nonstop yammering of Lowe as the shrewish, controlling Tina, A Little Bit Zombie is, sadly, a little bit of a chore to endure. Even the gratuitous gross-out humor, including an homage to Bloodsucking Freaks, gets old before very long.
The film does, however, have a polished look to it, and supporting players Kristen Hager and Shawn Roberts (who resembles a muscular Seann William Scott) are attractive and fun in their respective roles as Steve’s sarcastic sister Sarah and macho, raunchy buddy Craig. Stephen McHattie (a poor man’s Lance Henriksen) is also picturesque as rugged, no-nonsense zombie-hunter Max. Still, it can hardly be said to count in a film’s favor when the mosquito that bites the protagonist is one of the most sympathetic characters. Consequently, ICA advises potential viewers to skip it and watch Warm Bodies (2013) instead.
2.5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that A Little Bit Zombie is:
14. Pro-gay. “I support your decision,” Craig jokingly says of the idea of a hypothetical homosexual zombie wedding. (cf. no. 5)
13. Anti-religion. “Holy fuck, dude.”
12. Anti-German. Craig, overhearing talk of shit-eating, asks if the reference is to Germans.
11. Pro-wigger. “My bad,” concedes Max. “Thug life,” comments Craig at Tina’s plan to abduct a stranger for Steve’s nourishment.
10. Gun-ambivalent. Firearms are fetishized in picturesque moments, but are not employed with consistent wisdom.
9. Anti-obesity. More than one fat zombie meets with flippant disposal.
8. Anti-family. It is at Steve’s family’s cottage where the fatal bite occurs. Steve has a dream mocking stereotypical 1950s domestic bliss. Craig makes reference to Steve’s “fuckin’ freak family” and also calls them the Manson Family. Max’s father left him to fend for himself in a Filipino jungle. He says he would unhesitatingly shoot his mother in the face if she became infected with the plague.
7. Drug-ambivalent. Craig and Sarah are both secret smokers. Drinking makes a dupe susceptible to abduction. One drunk urinates on another.
6. Anti-police. Tina suggests that they ensnare a police officer so Steve can eat his brain.
5. Anti-redneck. A local yokel sits outside and stares with open-mouthed fascination at the sun. Craig calls eccentric meat market proprietor and gun aficionado Capt. Cletus “Admiral Redneck”. Cletus refers to Craig as a “queer-lookin’ feller”.
4. Un-p.c. Steve kills a rabbit by biting into its skull. A “team-building” exercise is described as “retarded”. Craig more than once calls Steve a “gay-ass zombie”. “I hate the Portuguese,” Tina confesses. Max calls a hybrid a “fucking hippie car.”
3. Feminist. “I could teach you to cook,” Tina offers, eliciting a disgusted sigh from Sarah. The pair outsmarts a “big scary guy” by using their womanly wiles. Women fight and wield guns with comfort and effectiveness.
2. Pro-castration, celebrating the sensitive, wimpy man in Steve, a fellow for the “workplace conflict resolution initiatives” who allows his fiancée to micro-manage his life. Craig, after playing the macho man and advising Steve to “grow some nads”, wimpily asks him not to tell Sarah that he smokes. He also cops out in the end and apologizes for calling Steve a “gay-ass zombie”.
1. Pro-marriage. Tina sticks by Steve despite his disconcerting condition.
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Writer-director Harmony Korine’s dope-drenched epic of college-age pagan debauchery suffers from the same fatal ailment as most other movies that insist on taking as their subjects the absolute dregs of society – namely a lack of characters worthy of the least bit of audience sympathy. The introduction of the principal quartet of spoiled and mostly indistinguishable bimbos is so icily off-putting and nonchalantly bile-provoking that it could almost be a set-up for some exercise in torture porn. College students in name only, these are pretty, pot-addled apes who, during a lecture on the civil rights movement, amuse themselves by scrawling lewd notes or drawing a picture of a penis. Where the Boys Are this is not.
Tired of what they feel to be their intolerably mundane lives, four girls determine to travel to Florida to “find” themselves on spring break. Short of funds, three of them successfully rob a restaurant, and off they and naive Christian friend Faith (Selena Gomez) head for the sun and sand, where their participation in grotesque bacchanalia rightly lands the disgusting group in jail. Coming to their aid as if by providence, revolting rapper and drug dealer Alien (James Franco, in a truly transformational character creation) bails them out and takes the girls under his demonic wing, introducing them to his gangsta friends. Faith, though stupid, retains some vague wisp of the notion of decency and so decides to go home at this point; but her three friends remain and go with Alien, who, like a thuggish Charles Manson, will usher them through an initiation into nihilistic evil.
More shocking and memorable than actually good, Spring Breakers does contain some visual coups that viewers will never forget: a man performing fellatio on two guns; three girls in pink ski masks dancing, guns in hand, in the attitude of the three Graces; and, of course, sand strewn with cheap, jiggling flesh. With the anesthetized and dreamlike shoot-out of the climax, the director walks a particularly dangerous line. Are the events at the end of the film intended to inspire audience approval or did Korine even stop to consider how these moments would be received? Is Spring Breakers really the serious social commentary it seems to pretend to be or just a tacky exploiter that points and laughs at societal disease? Is Korine documenting or actually celebrating the decline of western civilization? Either way, this vile opus has much to say about American life, and much of it is true.
Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Spring Breakers is:
9. State-skeptical/anti-business. “Everyone can use a little bailin’ out once in a while,” Alien says in a line that hints at a broader significance. With his neck tattoo of a dollar sign, Alien symbolizes misguided rapacity and mirrors the criminal world of big business.
8. Pro-gay. Girls frequently engage in teasing kisses, grinding, and so forth, none of it particularly sexy. The sum effect, however, is normalization. Alien clearly enjoys sucking the guns and tells the girls afterward that he loves them.
7. Media-critical. “Just fuckin’ pretend like it’s a video game. Act like you’re in a movie or somethin’,” one of the girls advises the others before they commit a robbery. “I got Scarface on repeat. Constant, y’all,” Alien boasts, contributing to the sense that these young people’s poor behavior has been programmed by their entertainment (cf. The Bling Ring).
6. Anti-American. Alien describes his materialistic gangsta lifestyle as “the American Dream” (cf. Pain and Gain). “Seeing all this money makes my pussy wet,” one of the girls says.
5. Anti-Christian. Juxtaposed scenes equate Christianity and substance abuse as means of escape from reality. Two dumb Christian friends of Faith advise her (with good reason, as it turns out) to “pray super hardcore” for her well-being in Florida. (Ironically, her religious scruples do preserve her from the danger experienced by the other girls.)
4. Diversity-skeptical and anti-wigger. “I don’t like it here,” Faith says, finding herself in the midst of a bunch of scuzzy blacks and wiggers and feeling intensely uncomfortable. This moment counterbalances the casual flashes of suggested black-white miscegenation in the film. A theme of Spring Breakers is self-destruction, and one moment in which a girl drinks from a black water pistol, a rapper’s smug face on a poster behind her, indicates the self-loathing and suicidal nature of wiggerism.
3. Culturally and morally ambivalent. From drugs to guns and gangsterism to flippant fornication, Korine keeps such a cold, ambiguous distance that his attitude from one scene to the next is occasionally difficult to fathom. The copious casual sex and drug abuse carry surprisingly few consequences, with only a shot of a vomiter passed out by a toilet (and party-crashing by police) disrupting the flow of fun. There is nothing at all admirable in Alien or his groupie disciples, and yet the amount of time devoted to his misbehavior, his air of a tragic artist of wasted potential, and the martyrish pose pretentiously granted him at his demise would appear to give him a neon sheen of antiheroic myth. The ravages of gunplay, likewise, are mitigated by the fetishistic fascination and sexuality accorded to firepower. One of the girls determines that “being a good person” is the “secret to life”, but fails to act according to this piece of wisdom.
2. Relativistic and nurturist (i.e., anti-science). Spring Breakers points to environment as the key determiner of individual development, discrediting the role that genetics and race play in shaping human intelligence and character. “I was the only white boy in my whole neighborhood,” the worthless Alien recounts. Consequently, he grows up to be indistinguishable from the criminal blacks among whom he moves. “We met people who are just like us. Just the same as us,” one of the girls reflects in voice-over. Only the social context of their spoiled upbringing, sheltered by white privilege, has presumably prevented the girls from sinking into savagery before now. Heritability would appear to play no role in shaping these people, so that Spring Breakers works like a stock anthropology lecture to the effect that those spear-brandishing jungle natives in the National Geographic are no less civilized than the European gentleman reading poetry in his smart smoking jacket, their mating and war-making rituals being identical at bottom. The culture war does, however, appear to hold importance for Korine, even if it is not always clear on which side of the battle line he stands.
1. Anti-human. No likable characters = no reason to care.
Sofia Coppola’s latest effort is very much her own. Bright, punchy, or ambient music, an elegant eye, and a sardonic sense of humor imbue yet another examination of rampant girldom with Coppola’s trademark sensibility. Unlike Lost in Translation or Marie Antoinette, however, The Bling Ring features no strong or particularly likable central protagonist, and is consequently a much more detached and ironic study than its predecessors.
The Bling Ring opens with shots of the Facebook pages of characters Marc (Israel Broussard), Chloe (Claire Julien), and Rebecca (Katie Chang) – an appropriate means of introduction in this true crime story set in an amoral teenage order founded on trendiness and popularity. All attending a high school for affluent problem kids, these are the more sophisticated and fashionable counterparts to the hedonistic nihilists in Larry Clark’s Bully, operating out of the sinister psychological intersection of thug chic and a privileged entitlement mentality. Along with like-minded recruits Nicki (Emma Watson) and Sam (adorable Taissa Farmiga), the group combines its vapid interests in celebrity, pop criminality, and haute couture by committing a series of casual burglaries of the homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and others.
An odd feature of these young people’s lives is how little concerned with love they appear to be. Tawdry apparel, dirty dancing, sex, and group acceptance interest them plenty, but these new teen creatures bear almost no resemblance to their grandmothers, the malt shop loiterers of old, with their puppy love crushes and idealism. The new teen queen is a kind of ravenous beast sustained by a constant regimen of dope, dainty baubles, irresponsible escapades, and protected from introspection by forbidding walls of abrasive music preoccupied with self-determined fabulousness.
It is difficult to watch The Bling Ring and not be reminded of another group of young Californians who targeted celebrity victims – namely, the Manson Family. In both cases, pathological fascination with the rich and famous, coupled with peer pressure, drugs, and an unhealthily violent cultural diet, result in celebrities being simultaneously venerated as idols and dehumanized as potential victims. Marc, reflecting on the meaning of his acts in the aftermath of his arrest, confides that after the story of his involvement hit the news, he received over 800 Facebook friend requests, suggesting that it is criminality itself as much as fame that attracts the adulation of the unsavory masses.
If The Bling Ring has any discernible shortcoming, it may be the dearth of surprising event, as the film proceeds along a fairly straight, predictable line as far as the plot. Apart from the signature Sofia Coppola seal in terms of color, design, and atmosphere, the film’s most attractive strength must be its delightful cast. Israel Broussard, featured in what, for lack of any real hero, is The Bling Ring‘s lead role, has a Byronic look and an enigmatic vulnerability that complements the Coppola aesthetic nicely; and all of the damsels in dissipation, from Katie Chang to Claire Julien, Taissa Farmiga, and Emma Watson, are irresistibly vile, divine, and luscious.
4.5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis kisses Sofia Coppola’s ring and indicates that her most recent flourish as a dependable writer-director is:
11. Multiculturalist/pro-miscegenation. People of different races interact as without the least consciousness of their physiological or cultural differences. One of the girls has a thug Latino boyfriend. The camera lingers longingly over untouchable Katie Chang.
10. Anti-wigger. Pop veneration of the ghetto mentality goes hand in hand with nihilism, crime, and self-destruction.
9. Pro-police. Authorities conduct their investigation and effect the necessary arrests professionally and without inflicting unnecessary harm.
8. Anti-religion. Modern woman’s faith is junk spirituality, “the philosophy of the Secret”, a kooky, relativistic melange in which words like “Lord” rub shoulders indiscriminately with new age talk of “karma”.
7. Anti-gun. Privately owned guns, this film appears to want to convince viewers in one very frightening scene, make homes less safe and endanger the mentally deficient. However, the fact that one of the girls steals a gun and gives it to her thug boyfriend demonstrates that criminals are not above obtaining their guns illegally and that gun control legislation is therefore futile.
6. Philanthropy-skeptical. One suburban family claims a commitment to charitable causes in Africa, but cannot identify the specific country where they are active. This pretended philanthropy is played as a sympathy card after the girls are caught by the police.
5. Statist. The pitiable demonstration of home schooling as practiced by one ditzy mother (Leslie Mann) is an implicit endorsement of public education.
4. Anti-drug. Drinking and driving results in a non-fatal accident, which, however, fails to prevent the girls from going out and behaving just as carelessly as before. Accelerating substance abuse parallels the girls’ increasingly poor judgment and carelessness in their criminal endeavor.
3. Pro-gay. Sexually ambiguous Marc shares his girlfriends’ interest in fashion (including high heel shoes) and refers to a male schoolmate as “hot”.
2. Class-conscious. Coppola (perhaps responding to the criticism that Marie Antoinette depicted a self-absorbed aristocrat sympathetically without taking into consideration the economic plight of the French peasantry?) depicts moral decay as in part deriving from wealth and privilege (cf. Billy Madison).
1. Pro-family. The horror wrought by permissive or absentee parenting is the unstressed theme that haunts The Bling Ring.
Jesus-believing U.S. Constitutionalist EXPOSING Satanic globalist SCAMS & TRAITORS in Kansas, America, and the World at-large. Jesus and BIBLE Truth SHALL PREVAIL!
Then, in 1977, Merrick’s life would intersect fatally with a potential acting student named Dennis Mignano, who – much like Manson himself – had really wanted to have a music career, but when that didn’t pan out, the struggling rock singer decided to take acting lessons.
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