The Friday Follies
The intro to the 1963 show The Outer Limits
Big Day. First day of Spring in this momentous year. I used to have an irregular feature called “Friday Follies,” in which I singled out some happenings in the course of the week past that complemented or contradicted one another in odd ways. The emphasis was generally but not always on humor. This week the old FF framework came back to mind because of quirky coincidences in the background stuff I usually have playing while I’m working on other things. Sometimes the background becomes foreground and seems suddenly relevant to what I’m working on or thinking about. Could be a left brain or a right brain intrusion, like the punchline of this old edition of the Friday Follies from 2007.
She’s a test! Click on her to see the punchline.
I don’t pick the background stuff very scientifically. Out of my ROKU provider I have access to a variety of streaming services, and I cruise through them pretty randomly, looking for titles that don’t fail my crude criteria — nothing produced later than 2022, nothing racially or sexually segregated/focused, nothing overtly political, nothing from the “Saw” or “Hostel” part of the horror spectrum, and nothing featuring actors whose public sermonizing distracts me from their acting nowadays, and nothing I’ve already seen and remember in some detail. That leaves a lot of stuff available for intuitive selections ranging from horror and sci-fi to older action/drama movies and TV shows that seem original or nostalgically appealing in some way. When all else fails, “reality” cop shows and paranormal investigators are good at providing background chatter with no need to watch closely.
Clearly this is a system that’s bound to produce a lot of ‘fails.’ Sometimes something loud happens, I look up from my keyboard to see what I’m watching, am repulsed, and switch to something else. The fail/hit patterns are streaky. Lots of junk in a row, then two or more randomly good finds in a single day. The way things go.
Writing this because it’s been a week with several accidentally good thought starters in the bunch, including a provocative correspondence between a couple of the crapshoot backgrounders.
The video starter up top is, of course, from the original Outer Limits (1963-65), which was a famous but not particularly successful attempt to cash in on the iconic Twilight Zone format, an anthology of ‘out there’ morality plays designed to leave us scratching our chins or heads, depending. It only ran for a couple years, but I saw it when it was new and recall only a sequence of laughable costumes, makeup, and special FX propping up even sillier premises. In the mid-1990s, some network VP thought it would be a good idea to give Outer Limits a second chance. Which I missed when it ran. Until recently when I saw it at IMDB and was impressed by the fact that it had lasted longer than the original. So I checked it out.
The new opening sequence is a pretty faithful reprise of the 1963 ripoff of the Twilight Zone intro. But the shows themselves are much better, worth tuning in to see actors who later became famous, which is generally the indicator of a good producer. The premises are uneven but more original than the, um, original’s were. Then, sometime after I’d done my latest post here on AI software in action, the background teevee coughed this up to do a Jungian synchronicity number on me:
Showing you the IMDB stuff because they can be helpful in finding and assessing stuff.
Nice job. 30 years ago. All the way back then a scriptwriter figured out that unlimited access to information is not a replacement for consciousness or the solving of unanticipated problems. The student users of the system had no need of, and therefore no access to, the documentation of how to fix the system when something went wrong with it. The system did not know that something was wrong with it and had no means of initiating real dialogue with the users, thus defining a terminal infinite loop.
A good, simple addition to our own AI considerations. An AI system cannot anticipate what its programmers have not anticipated. No new problem can be self-diagnosed or fixed by the system experiencing it.
This was fun. Then later the same day, I think, I switched from teevee to movie offerings and wound up turning on a sci-fi film called “The Creep Box.” It actually violated my rule about movies newer than 2022, but I just thought the graphic looked intriguing and didn’t bother looking up the IMDB listing till later on. Here’s the trailer.
The red box turns out to be very interesting indeed.
Typically, I only scan-listened the early developmental scenes, which involved a collaborative project between an AI think tank and the DOJ to bring troublesome cold cases finally to justice. There was a superficial plot resemblance to the standard ‘Asylum’ B-minus movie about a gifted scientist whose work is funded and then stolen and redirected nefariously by the government. The scientist has unspecified family woes, the decisionmakers who connive in the sellout are greedy, and the narrative is all a setup for saving the day, and the earth, from a foreseeable apocalypse event.
Except that it wasn’t an Asylum movie.
The technology underlying the narrative was an experiment in ‘simulated consciousness,’ based on depth interviewing with volunteers who enabled the lead scientists to capture their inmost thoughts as they were approaching some terminal physical state, so that it could be modeled and employed (i.e., interrogated) after death to extract information not known to be important at the time of death. This struck a chord with me. Was this a reworking of the Poe short story called “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”? In that very early mingling of science fiction with spiritualism, Poe had imagined a French scientist using the new fad of ‘Mesmerism’ (i.e., hypnotism) to capture a human soul as it was leaving the body in the process of death. It did not end well. Monsieur Valdemar (precursor of Rowling’s Voldemort?) refused to let the soul depart and held it hostage as he tried to learn what the experience of death was like.
That’s pretty much how the movie played out too. Our tortured lead scientist’s name was Dr. Caul. I remembered the mysterious old phrase “born under a caul” and looked it up.
The scientist as vampire
All the dramatic action is confined, literally, to the dialogue between the ‘simulated’ consciousness in the box and the scientist who is ostensibly seeking to learn the facts about the death of the man’s wife. The conversation is, we learn, desperate on both sides with no raised voices. The man in the box is desperate because he does not know the actual status of his wife, cannot accept that his consciousness if ‘simulated,’ and is consumed by the conviction that he is being imprisoned with no means of escaping even into death if that’s really what he’s on the edge of. Dr. Caul is desperate because he has also lost his own wife, cannot get over it, and is trying to decide whether his own death would free him or consign him in the same state of self-aware but impotent purgatory as the subject of his experiment, who also happens to be an old friend and colleague.
It’s the Poe story juiced up on AI acid. I won’t tell you how it ended because I’m not sure I know. What I do know is that the movie is expressly concerned with the exact same distinction I have been writing about with respect to AI. This movie sharpens the focus to the vital nub of the question: Is there, can there be, such a thing as Artificial Consciousness? Without access to manifold physical inputs, the man in this particular box seems to be telling us the answer is either “No” or “Hell”.
Which leads me to the second instance of Jungian synchronicity. The movie concluded and then, without any acrion by me, rolled automatically into the next in the queue of “related” films it seemed to have chosen on my behalf. These are usually wrong, sometimes offensively so. But here’s the trailer for the one they dropped me into.
Hang onto your hats. And heads.
What’s the Jungian connection here? I’m not giving Freevee streaming algorithms the credit for this one. Right outmof the box (so to speak), this one was talking at me. “That’s right, Bub. This is the universe contacting you directly. You won’t be able to break away from this horror show until you’ve proved that to yourself.”
After the long quiet scenes of The Creep Box, this flick was a punch in the face, the direct opposite in every way but one. It’s a movie that screams its off-the-wall approach at you. Immediate gore in closeup. An in-your-face credit sequence that actually gives star status to a car named “Grace,” a specifically identified 1958 Chrysler Imperial almost identical to the lickety-split 4-door leather living room that began my personal infatuation with Mopar vehicles.
Faster, more sure-footed by far than the ‘58 Cadillac
It took only about half an hour for The Devil and the Daylong Brothers to wear me out. By then, the point had in fact been proven. Even in the trailer there was another vehicle (hot on the ass of the Imperial) in which I had spent many high-speed hours, straight ahead and sideways like always back then, an early Seventies El Camino, a two-seater car-slash-pickup truck owned by the same family that introduced me to Chrysler. Personal reference followed up with a series of other clues I couldn’t ignore. The Daylong Brothers, three of them, are not just killers; they’re a rock and roll band and their movie is a musical containing complete songs that flesh out thematic elements underlying the plot. They’re giving us a rock’n’roll pinball machine going ding-a-ling-a-ling like a punked-out blood-drenched version of Tommy. Instead of Ann-Margaret though, there’s a femme fatale the brothers can neither resist nor kill, and after a long operatic song about her, not just played under the action but vocalized and choreographed on screen, it dawned on me that the cleverest bit yet was the literary reference to the book that constituted my first acquaintance with the works of Alexander Dumas. Our three boys fighting to escape an unfair contract with the Devil are the Three Musketeers and the girl of their nightmares in a new incarnation of the most dangerous woman I’ve ever encountered in literature: the Musketeer nemesis named “Madame.”
The movie is a deliberately over-the-top cross-genre satire of everything it touches, which is a summary that can’t help ringing my personal bell like a gong. I stopped watching soon after. The universe can keep any further innuendoes about me to itself. Stick to the relevant subject matter. I’m listening while I work. Best I can do.
I leave the television on at night. It distracts me from getting too involved in wakeful interior noodling about what I’m working on. The idea is always to choose a show or movie that I’m not that interested in but has a sound or rhythm, usually of voices talking, that lulls me to sleep and keeps me there. Doesn’t always work. Sometimes silence wakes me up. The show, whatever it is, has prompted me to keep watching so I won’t miss ads, and has timed out when I don’t reply. Other times, the kind of show that supports sleeping rolls over into something that wakes me up with noise, loud noise like yelling and explosions. That was my next communiqué from the universe.
A movie I’d never watched blasted me from slumber. White House Down. Jamie Foxx as President, besieged in the White House by some conspiracy or other. I’d seen the other one, Olympus Has Fallen, starring Aaron Eckhardt as President and Gerard Butler as the disgraced Secret Service agent who saves him and the nation. I’d also seen the two sequels. They were fun but that’s all, and the Jamie Foxx version released the same year (2023) got pretty bad reviews as I recall, so I ignored its pop-ups at the streaming services. Now I was in it. So was James Woods of all people, the conservative Hollywood firebrand who was, ironically, a turncoat Secret Service agent and wound up shooting the President late in the third act. (It was already early third act when I woke up…) What I saw that got my close attention:
The shooting happens 1 minute in, the eerie thing at 7 minutes in.
That’s not all. As the ending unfolds, we learn that the real conspiracy was a joint effort spearheaded by the CIA and the Vice President with Secret Service agents as accomplices. All ridiculously impossible stuff, right? This was 2013, more than a decade before the weird sequence of events in 2024. Parallels, not predictions, but the devil is always in the details, isn’t it? The Secret Service fails to protect the President, never mind how, and he gets shot. A bullet that should have killed him is prevented from doing so by the chance placement of a presidential prop that turned fatality into a mere bloody bruise. Subsequently, we learn that the Vice President, the intelligence apparatus, and other powers-that-be had been conspiring to replace the elected President via a treasonous coup concealed by a clever coverup operation. So many elements the same, just their order and cause-effect relationships discrepant from subsequent history. Coincidence. Which is always a strange bedfellows in the Jungian construct of “collective unconscious,” elaborated on by other more mystical sources as the ‘Akashic Records.’
The movie was also a reminder that I had previously discovered a weird coincidence of my own, which I recorded as a non-sequitur video uploaded to Rumble, “When the Lion King Got Shot.”
There was another instance this week of a word to the wise from the universe that I won’t go into now, although I may get to it before long, because it’s timing is also suggestive.
Stopping with what I’ve already shared because of what I was moved to write yesterday about the release of the Kennedy assassination documents. Everything I’ve been discussing here seems to have some relation to that 1963 trauma and its lingering, suppressed effects on the nation and the populace.
I consider that red machine in the Creep Box and I wonder if there is some realm in which a dead man’s consciousness can be held hostage by ties to the life left behind. I have seen, in photographs, the dead eyes of John F. Kennedy on a morgue slab. You can’t unsee them. Is there still some information they have to share with us before he can move on to what comes next? Is there some echo of the doubts we all carry with us that make the CIA a plausible conspirator against the nation and even the President? Is there a new danger rising around us in the form of electronic connectedness that is progressively (pun intended) blinding our insight about the relationship between mind and spirit, some data-driven fraud that reduces human curiosity to an easily scratched and dispensable itch. That keeps us from reading widely on our own, informing ourselves through time about all manner of things, no matter how relevant or irrelevant they might seem to the “experts”?
My way of suggesting that the Kennedy papers in particular, and the emergent revelations of dark details about the Deep State War against individuality and liberty in general, should not be regarded as an opportunity to close the books on past unpleasantness that is now far more knowable in some sense. What if these newly visible phenomena are meant to ensure that we keep the books open on these and other aspects of our behavior and our institutions so that we can learn from our mistakes before we make them again? For once.
Have a great Friday and a truly revitalizing Spring!
P.S. The puzzle graphic above? Depending on which side of your brain is dominant at the moment, she is whirling clockwise or counter-clockwise. If she whirls clockwise, you’re right-brain dominant. If she whirls counter-clockwise you’re left brain dominant. If you try, you can actually make her change direction. If we try, we can all change direction.
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