Friday, Nov. 12, 2004 - 6:48 p.m.

A Skull Above Any Other

Just for shits and giggles, I rented The Skulls, a Hollywood movie very loosely inspired by Skull and Bones. I wanted to see how the story comes out after going through that filter. I was pleased to conclude that The Skulls was a very competently crafted mediocre film with a familiar story arc and a nice car chase at the end. And that's saying a lot, relative to all the garbage out there. The film got the basic spirit right: wealth, power, secrecy, and corruption centered around one building on the campus of Yale University. They mention that 3 U.S. presidents have been members, they mention that the CIA was started there, and they rightly place emphasis on the fact that this is not a goofy fraternity, but rather an entrance into a lifelong network of the elite of the elite. The film even included an excursion to Deer Iland [sic], the island retreat that in real life is owned by Skull and Bones in the St. Lawrence River. The film takes a great deal of artistic license with the look of the Tomb and with the initiation rituals, which probably makes the movie version of The Order way cooler than the real thing.

The Skulls II is really bad. More running away from black SUV's, and little else. The plot doesn't even make sense. The villian appears to have gotten lost and wandered in off the set of Grease or perhaps West Side Story, which is especially odd in a group of the best-bred of the aristocracy. The main character and the blonde girl are the only decent actors, and the only other notable thing is that one of the Skulls members has the surname Taft, which is one of the powerful families in Skull and Bones, and produced William Howard Taft, the first Skull and Bones U.S. president. Avoid this movie.

The Skulls III is thankfully as good as the first one...well, except for the extremely hackneyed script, but the acting was good enough that I tended not to notice that they were uttering lines more appropriate to an episode of Scooby Doo. This one is about the first female member of the Skulls. It's a reversal of the real history: in the movie, the Patriarchs (graduate Skulls) tap this young woman to the chagrin of the Knights (college students), whereas in real life, the graduating Knights decided to initiate several women in 1991 despite vehement opposition from many Patriarchs, who locked them out of the Tomb, until the Patriarchs eventually voted to accept them, ushering in new era of opportunity for future Margaret Thatchers, Janet Renos, and Condeleeza Rices (and Queen Elizabeth I's?). (Absent from the movies is any depiction of the racial diversity Skull and Bones has nowadays, but I'm glad the directors chose to keep the fictional version all-white to emphasize the elite nature of the organization.) This film has a funny error, confusing an IP address for a MAC address, but I doubt either number would be sufficient to prove anybody guilty of murder. This sequel hints at Skulls loyalty possibly compromising politicians withing the U.S. Government, but dares go no deeper.

In each movie, there's a different set of initiation rituals, as if tradition means nothing to this group, but at least they always have the branding, which I think is the coolest part. They also changed the number of annual new initiates from 15 to 8 and removed the homoeroticism of the initiation, to make it more manageable for the viewing audience. I just read a bunch of reviews and the funny thing was that the elements viewers found most cheesy and unbelievable were the very aspects copied from the real Skull and Bones! (e.g. if it's a secret society, how come everyone on campus seems to know about it? Answer: it's a somewhat secret society.) I wish life were more like the movies, where the shadiest thing Skull and Bones ever did was cover up an occasional, solitary murder. Then they'd be mostly harmless. But what if a really good director made the next Skulls sequel? I could imagine M. Night Shyamalan making a spooky but brooding character drama out of it. David Mammet would have people giving ponderous monologues against capitalism punctuated by rapid one-syllable exchanges. Quentin Tarrantino would turn it into a bloodbath with sassy dialogue. But of course, best of all would be Oliver Stone, who would certainly implicate the Skulls in the Vietnam War and the Kennedy assassination. You gotta have a conspiracy director when dealing with subject matter rife with conspiracy.

Maybe I could have gotten into Yale. Probably not, but I never applied, so I'll never know. Maybe I could have been tapped for Skull and Bones. Again, probably not, but it's eerie to contemplate.

Be silent as you endure.

Check out Eminem's "Mosh" video. With its seeming call for insurrection, I was astounded, except for the anticlimatic ending, at which I felt nauseated. This video was directed and produced by the Guerilla News Network, and if you look closely, you can spot a Deception Dollar, and also a big headline saying "Bush Knew". I would not have guessed that Eminem would be the next celebrity to join the 9/11 truth movement. I'm glad he finally got overtly political, because as much as I admire his talent, I disagree with most of what he says with the exception this song. I was alerted to this video at the most unlikely of websites, Empire Notes, the website of a journalist in Iraq. I went to mtv.com, and was shocked to discover that they actually play this video on MTV. I guess the impotent conclusion renders it commercial-friendly.

And speaking of commercials, I caught a bit on CNN talking about some 9/11 conspiracy TV commerials that were recently broadcast, paid for by the same rich guy who funded the 9/11 Zogby poll. The CNN person tried to laugh it off, deriding these commercials, and interviewed an expert who assured us that there's no conspiracy, but what I thought was notable was that it has reached the point where even the mainstream media cannot ignore this issue, even if they want to.

I noticed that lately, I've been focusing on symbolic representations of things, to the exclusion of direct action. This is because I think it's more efficient. Although of course nothing will change until people start behaving differently in real life, I think people tend to stick to the status quo, despite obstacles, until they have a new idea that it would be promising to do something else. This is why I disagree with the tactics of the Earth Liberation Front; their tactics merely inconvience a few people who are destroying the environment; no one is likely to have an epiphany as a result. Changing minds alleviates the need to fight and force people to do what you want. The public relations industry certainly understands this. The difference between PR and the type of propaganda I support is that I think it's important to be transparent about one's motives, and frank about ambiguity and the limits of one's knowledge and wisdom. I also hope that viewers don't passively assimilate these ideas--I want to encourage everybody to critically examine everything with an active mind, and then only tentatively accept what seems most reasonable, if they're not approaching things that way already.

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