Know / Now / No / Gnosis / Hypnosis...

synctastic

yes, Nick, the sky is falling

Act 1: What Nick Cage Knows

I haven't decided whether or not I want to shell out 10 bucks to spend 90 minutes watching Nick Cage's infamous drop-jawed "Oh My God!" look in his upcoming synch-fest Knowing, but I probably will. As much as I loathe Cage as an "actor", I can't help getting pulled back into his synch web of sub-par films. Case in point: I recently gained a rather obsessive fascination with the mythical mystical mystery of the honeybee. Hoping to gain some guidance, I started a thread on the subject over at my new favorite place to kill time, The Synchromystic Forum (called "The Secret of The Beehive", if anyone's interested). Sure enough, after about a page and a half of synchs and theories, somebody had to go and bring up The Wicker Man.

I'm getting tired of seeing bees all over my stuff

As expected, the movie got right into the esoteric themes with bee-sting allergies, small towns with big secrets and little girls being set on fire, but in my boredom, I began to wonder about Mr. Cage and this theme of Secret Knowledge surrounding him. Taking into account roles in National Treasure, Next and even Ghost Rider, I began to feel the itch of a forming brain splinter. There appeared to be a pattern in his character imprint of a guy who, sometimes unwillingly, is in on the (cosmic) joke, so to speak. In the back of my mind, I detected a slight hint of jealousy. Why does this terrible actor (who's probably a douche) get to be so in the know, while I have to scour blogs and wikis just to get a glimpse?

. . . In The Now . . . In The No . . . ?

Without any idea of the surface I'd scratched, I wrote down a few random notes and slept on it. The next day, I went over to The Blob to check for updates on Jake's study of Kate Winslet that might shed some light on my own Isis research. Upon reaching the page, I was greeted by a giant red circle with a diagonal slash through its center; the first image of a post called "NO" that questioned the meanings of the symbols we call letters.

The glaring image immediately filled my subconscious with an uncomfortable negative energy. Why was I so affected by this ubiquitous symbol? In an instant, I knew. The conditioning I'd received throughout my life for the prohibition sign had overridden my enthusiasm about reading the latest Blob update. This time, I was awake enough to check myself, but I was unsettled by the revelation... how many times throughout the course of a day does this happen? How many of my decisions were guided by such plain-sight programming?

Did this have something to do with the peddy disgust I had for Nicolas Cage? hmm. Let's come back to that.

Act 2: What Juno Knows

The movie trailer embedded above that inspired this post has been getting major airtime recently, but the first time I saw it from start to finish was in between an episode of NBC's Heroes ("Exposed") and Medium. This off-beat paranormal drama centers around Allison DuBois (aka Alice), a "self-proclaimed spiritual medium" and mother of three gifted daughters played by Patricia Arquette (Ark-ette?). Arquette's character is based on an actual self-proclaimed medium by the same name; the real-life Allison -also a mother of three sisters- chose to call herself a medium due to the "negative connotation . . . associated with the term psychic". The difference between these titles is pretty significant: a psychic has hieghtened extra-sensory perception and influence, while a medium is primarily an intermediary, a vessel, a conduit between the physical realm and the spiritual.

Dictionary.com:

"an intervening agency, means, or instrument by which something is conveyed or accomplished: Words are a medium of expression."

Wikipedia.com:

"In communication, media (singular Medium) are the storage and transmission tools used to store and deliver information or data. It is often referred to as synonymous with mass media or news media..."

But what does all this have to do with Juno?

Juno poster showing Ellen Page putting the "O" in NO with a Halo

2007's breakout indie hit, Juno, has been mentioned in other blog studies for it's obvious (and not-so-obvious) esoteric references, but all I could ever see was lil' Shadokatt trying desperately to be counter-culture trendy, to be anything but a pregnant 16 year-old in a red hoodie (trendy teen pregnancy? sounds vaguely familiar). Ellen Page became a star in that hoodie, but indie buffs will remember that red hood much clearer from the mind-jarring modern fairy tale Hard Candy.

Ellen Page as Hard Candy's Lil Red Riding Hood

Believe it or not, according to the DVD commentary, the wardrobe choice was completely arbitrary. A red hoodie was one of the options on the rack for the character, and Ellen liked hoodies, so she went with it. The director and the cast claimed to have no clue about the connection between the Red Riding Hood allegory and the story's premise of (spoiler alert) a young girl outwitting a predatory wolf. It doesn't end there;

In 2008's Smart People, Juno Page again finds herself rockin' the red hood as part of a gym uniform in a scene with Dennis Quaid. Following her archetype imprint from Hard Candy, Juno, and even X-Men 3, Ellen finds herself, as she put it, “out dealing with issues way beyond my maturity level”, which, as usual, merit their own discussions.

Juno's famous opening scene, shown below...

...is imitated by NBC's Medium -shown above- in the very episode that followed my AHA moment during Nick Cage's Knowing trailer (Season 5, Episode 5, "A Taste of Her Own Medicine"). Medium mimicks the entire opening, complete with red-and-gold sporting joggers, Sunny-D in hand, and a trip to the local store for a pregnancy test. All in good fun, I suppose.

Red Ark-ette to gate 1-23


Kitty Page and The Ice Man in The Last Stand


Shadokatt walking between worlds and gettin jiggy wit the Tin Man

Ellen Page also resonates with Patricia Arquette's Medium in what was probably her least memorable role, as Katherine "Kitty" Pryde a.k.a Shadowkat in X-Men: The Last Stand. She doesn't get to wear her favorite hoodie in this one, since Famke Janssen becomes the red queen as Jean Grey, but as KittyKat Pryde, she has the ability to phase; to move through matter, essentially switching between physical and spirit forms at will. In the final scene she's charged with saving the sacred child, and she also reflects the 3rd sister, or the divine three-as-one, since she is actually one of three actresses to play the character in the X-Men Trilogy. Sumela Kay cameos as Kitty in X-Men, where she walks through a classroom door (shocking Hugh Jackman), and Katie Stuart plays Kitty in X2, where she falls through a bed to avoid gunfire.

As the Shadow Cat, Ellen Page's character ability to transcend planar realities speaks to Patricia Arquette's character ability as a spiritual go-between. Arquette, much like Nick Cage, is privy to otherworldly messages and, sometimes reluctantly, must be the blind Messenger.

More wiki:

"Mediums claim the abilities to . . . go into a trance and speak without knowledge of what is being said; allow a spirit to enter their body and speak through it..."

Arquette takes this concept to it's thematic extreme in a film that literally blew my mind, and , upon re-watching, became the mystical glue connecting so many of the Mother Goddess/Fallen Sophia/Messenger ideas I've been trying to understand. If you haven't seen it, find it:

You better believe I'm gonna break that one down. Next post though, my eyes, fingers and brain are killin me (I don't know how y'all do it).

Oh, and before I end this;



...Nick and Patricia used to be -you guessed it- husband and wife.
Doesn't she look happy with Osiris and her blue dress?

Trust Me, There's Much More to Come...