TV, Telepathy, Terror and Pleasure:

The Shining You Haven't Seen

[Abstract: American lunacy is safe and inviting.]

At the present time the conditions for a renewed understanding of the relation of the subject to the object seem to be satisfied. Only a small number of enthusiasts have hitherto taken cognizance of the exciting new possibilty, with respect to the theory of relativity. In what follows I wish to explain how the idea of complementarity has made possible a synthesis of contrasted and at first sight mutually contradictory media. To achieve this aim, far-reaching generalizations regarding the ideas of circular causality, temporal relations among events, simultaneity, and even the idea of physical reality, were of course necessary. The more general question of the separability of subject and object takes us outside the narrower realm of art and entertainment to the larger realm of phenomena of the living. In other words, it's high time that we got on with the greater business of the realization of the full implications of everything:

"The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two media holds us on the frontiers between forms that snap us out of the Narcissus-narcosis. The moment of the meeting of two media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses"
-Marshall McLuhan (1)

With the silent film the potential of film had been realized. The 1920's were a true golden age of film making. Throughout the history of the medium technological change, direction, and "progress" have been determined by forces greater than any single individual, such as the market and the studio, or even the nation-state for that matter. When we treat The Shining, either in it's entirety or parts thereof, like a silent film with the appropriate musical accompaniment supplied by the presenter, the film becomes an entirely new spectacle, at least as profound, interesting, and valid as the standard version. A certain recording, "Meddle" by the music group "Pink Floyd", is remarkably good as a musical accompaniment to demonstrate this. The complementarity is in fact so striking that it might be assumed that it was designed into the film as readymade.

"From my point of view there is no such thing as coincidence. But the word is charged with emotional significance. How many times in fiction, when faced by evidence of ESP or any manifestation beyond his rational understanding, the scientist hero cries out: 'Coincidence! It has to be! Anything else would be unthinkable!' What is the magic word that excercises and banishes magic?...
'It was coincidence.' The universe is random, Godless and meaningless."
-William Burroughs (37)

This might seem like a type of conspiracy theory, a communist plot to infect the drinking water, or playing a record backwards for the secret message, because it is. (i.e. REDRUM) In the spirit of 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining, you are asked to consider an alternate reality. The creative constraints and determinants confronted by the film-maker working within the contemporary commercial studio system, are many. What is the value of dialogue, or idle talk, in film? As a semi-autonomous human-being, the viewer is capable of revealing the real significance of cultural artifacts through processes of active sensory modulation.