1/21/22: Camera Obscura – Living The Scream Dream W/ Steve Shippy

MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

When I speak of psychopaths, I am sure there are plenty of images that run through your mind of what one is, however, the creepy thing that occurred to me is while we have about 15 million out there, we are completely unaware of how a psychopath operates. People only assume that psychopaths are always vicious or appear to be crazy. The truth is that they blend in well and finding a psychopath can be as hard as trying to find Waldo in one of those old puzzle books.

Psychopaths are compelled to acquire powerful positions; they often resist critique and scrutiny and develop a network of followers and disciples that are unaware they are being manipulated. Most of the disciples are damaged goods but not so damaged as to not carry out the wishes of the psychopath.

Psychopaths succeed because they use many tools of manipulation, charm, intimidation and sometimes violence in order to procure their position of power. A psychopath has a knack for glibness, a grandiose sense of who they think they are, a lack of empathy and a failure to be accountable or accept responsibility.

Now it would be an easy jump to say that all psychopaths become murderers, however, the degree of the disposition can lead to disregard for human life and from there we see the psychopath act upon their desires to eliminate anyone or anything that gets in the way of their power trip.

The question is what happens to the psychopath that wants all of the power but wants to distance himself from all of the nastiness of killing those who gets in the way?

You begin to see a profile that can be compared to what is seen in the television show “Breaking Bad.”

I have been watching Breaking Bad with my stepson, Liam, and so I am getting reacquainted with the mild-mannered science teacher, Walter White who basically evolves into a killer and drug kingpin.

Walter White, the main character, has been called an antihero by some, however it is better to say that the character demonstrates the superb example of a psychopath who will do anything to retain his power including hiring a network or a private army to take out his enemies.

It goes down the list of character traits of White which leaves you wondering who you are cheering for Walter White or his nemesis DEA agent and brother-in-law, Hank Schrader.

It is a bit frightening how White’s charisma has even won over an audience as the pressure in the series has reached its peak as White has been “found out” and yet still manages to manipulate himself away from being shot or apprehended, even when he is face to face with his brother in law detailing how White ordered the deaths of a drug kingpin and the men that were in prison that were going to “rat him out.”

White can say with a straight face that he regrets ordering the deaths of those men and can also say that all of that ugliness is in the past and that now he is “out of the meth business,” which in his mind is a way to not stand accountable for the lives he has damaged.

It is quite a remarkable tale as White begins the series as a middle class, law abiding American. He is one of those guys you hear about on the nightly news, “a mild-mannered neighbor that wouldn’t harm anyone” and the facade works for him as he slowly becomes this bonified criminal mind that assures his wife Skyler, that he may be in a friendly way, but he is literally the “danger.”

The idea that the show is pointing out just who the enemy is may be lost on the viewers.

However, it is obvious that the enemy is in plain sight.

The Walter White character is a fictitious look at a psychopath. We can see how other psychopaths throughout history are basically the same breed of animal. They always seem to begin as friendly types or begin their lives in friendly ways, but secretly know that it takes that charm and charisma to eventually manipulate and eventually eliminate the useful idiots that get in the way of their power trip.

I have said many times that I am a big fan of horror movies. I especially love the corny B- movies. They are a lot of fun. Over the years we have seen these movies evolve from what Vincent Price called humorous romps — to psychological terror and violence where blood spatters and the killer somehow survives to make more kills in the sequels.

The appeal of the horror movie basically gives the viewer the ability to envision something that is actually worse than your worst nightmares. Some have commented that it gives a strange sense of comfort and hope. You have the experience in the safety of a theater and hope that you will never have to experience what you are seeing.

It’s when there’s nothing you can come up with that is worse than reality that you have found the essence of despair.

Sometimes I think I have reached that point — as I have been noticing, movies like Halloween getting rebooted and of course, Scream has managed to get a “requel” — their term not mine –and when my wife who is also a horror fan attended a screening with me — we both walked away feeling empty.

We both agreed that something about it was silly and predictable.

But I have been thinking could it be that nothing Hollywood can come up with can be worse than the reality we are living in now?

How close are we as a society to that collective edge? Some science fiction writers have complained about the inability of contemporary speculative fiction to produce anything other than dystopia, mainly because that is the dirty window that a lot of writers and directors are looking through and so we are stick with apocalyptic Zombie dread and psychopaths that still lurk in the shadows.

There is even commentary in the movie, Scream regarding high-brow horror films that get thrown into art house theaters where the majority of people avoid.

So it is always a popcorn dystopia for the general crowd and a sort of camera obsucra — a metaphor that was coined by Karl Marx to describe the contortions in the interpretations of ideology, and it’s also an interesting metaphor to think about how information is delivered to us from power. A camera obscura receives an image from a tiny hole where the image is then projected in a state that is inverted and reversed, such is the perspective given to us by the powers that be where we are fed a myopic view and what is shown to the people is the opposite of what is really going on.

We are told that we are being exposed to misinformation and disinformation, which I believe is a way to be distracted from various point of view that don’t belong in the mainstream but remain in the margins.

This is what your mom calls conspiracy theory. or in truth, mainstream sheep call it that because they need to say something derogatory to those who challenge their slap shod reporting and news gathering.

The horror topics that I discuss are a byproduct of the horror mentality that is banal — where evil is shrugged off and people lose their sense of empathy.

Movies like Scream, Halloween, Friday the 13 and Nightmare on Elm Street give us menacing villains that wear masks — or in Kruger’s case, are deformed.

This where our image and action parameters present us with something that looks evil or distorted — many also have the same reaction to clowns.

But all that is flamboyant and less subtle — the subtlety of evil can be found everywhere, At the office, at the PTA meeting, at church — and of course, in government.

The pictures taken from the camera obscura of the oligarchy are then captioned for the people by the corporate media and government propaganda providing obscured narration around the already obscured images which are carefully curated so that nothing is ever perceived by the people other than what is intended by the propagandist photographers.

It is such a brilliant Marxist tactic — the elites wear the mask of caring about you, offering help and being all warm and fuzzy for the camera.

The real faces and actions are obscured and sometimes they just have a hard time lying anymore — no need for a ghost face or a hockey mask — no one wants to be that obvious.

The actions taken by elites must be obscured because if they were done right in front of you without the gaslighting it would strike anyone in a mindset outside of an indoctrinated culture to be horrified.

And when the events that occur every day in our society are thought of on a small scale without the socially applied labels, it’s clear to see the type of people we are truly dealing with, and why ousting their system from power is likely the only option if the story of humanity is to have a next chapter.

Because these are not people acting in good faith; rather these are people who rule over us and are addicted to power and will do or say anything to get another hit to satisfy their addiction.

So we are always threatened with poverty, disease, scarcity, violence and death.

It is all there to ratchet up the fear — and now it appears to be working oh so exquisitely.

Much horror is based not just on the fear of death and violence, but on the confusion between “living” and “dead.” Dead things that act as if they are alive if they ever were but without spirit, ethics, compassion.

How many times have people commented about looking into the eyes of Dr. Facui, President Biden. Mitch McConnell, Nany Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and think that they have no soul.

Not to mention those deathly soulless eyes of Adam Schiff; sure, he wears a suit and tie and sits in the Capitol but put him on a subway train at midnight –and you have a character from House of a Thousand Corpses.

Would you allow any of these so-called leaders babysit your kids? Perhaps Freddy Krueger would be a slight improvement.

The American people are equally as naive, trusting their government, banks, and corporations who are just as crazy as a horror movie slasher and the evidence is directly in front of us.

There are so many things that seem so out of place right now that I am curious as to whether or not people are waking up to the truth . The truth is simple – the people who do dismiss warnings of treachery, the mocking class, need a history lesson about evil and how they tend to dismiss the warnings as mere conspiracy theory.

The more common picture of evil is, perhaps, rather childish in comparison. The cartoon bad guy who simply enjoys being mean. The sadistic psycho who gets his kicks peeling off people’s skin. The Bond villain who rejoices in being bad. The cackling witch who’ll get you and your little dog too.

It’s almost reassuring to think of villains that way. Caricatures who possess traits we can’t imagine in ourselves. But that’s not the real nature of true evil in the modern world. Evil is beyond sadism, beyond malignity. The greatest evils of our time weren’t done with wicked smiles, but by the sigh of a work-a-day clerk.

Evil is quite banal and curiously impersonal. Chaos is welcomed by this who wish to see the world burn — their goal is to make people suffer — those who commit acts of evil do not see the faces of those who suffer so they pay no mind to the consequences of what they do — it is done for what they see is necessary.

If you recall in the Avengers films, Thanos thought that wiping out half the planet made him a humanitarian, thinking that the world would thank him for removing the surplus mouth that needed to be fed. He could not be bothered by the tragedy that it would bring to a lot of people.

This is the kind of evil I am talking about.

Not because those that commit these acts or treachery think it’s right, not even because they secretly enjoy being wrong. They don’t see right or wrong any more. Only opinion polls and balance sheets. They serve the machinery of power now and have lost themselves completely.

Why is it that otherwise perfectly intelligent, thoughtful and rationally minded people balk at the suggestion that sociopaths are conspiring to manipulate and deceive them? And why will they defend this ill-founded position with such vehemence?

Maybe it is because of Camera Obscura, where through the world of the Hollywood lens, the bad guys are suppose to wear arm bands and brown shirts and not shirts and ties. Maybe it is because kindly old men in the Oval Office looked tame compared to cloaked and hooded character with a ghost face.

Speaking of which I am sure many people are unaware that the character in Scream was based on the Gainesville Ripper — a guy you would never suspect to be a serial rapist, murderer and necrophiliac.

He did not wear a ghost face mask — he just looked like everybody else and was the second most brutal killer since Ted Bundy.

He claimed to have been driven by an alternate personality named ‘Gemini’– you may recall that the Gemini Killer was the main villain in the 3rd exorcist movie.

But while Scream provides plenty of slashing scares, in the end, its story of Sydney and the masked killer bears only a passing resemblance to that of Danny Rolling, the “Gainesville Ripper,” whose life of violence and despair would present a difficult task for any screenwriter to depict.

Rolling murdered four University of Florida students and a Santa Fe Community College student in their apartments in 1990. He decapitated one victim, posed with some of the bodies, removed skin and body parts and arranged the murder scenes using props that included broken mirrors.

The macabre slayings began on August 24, 1990 when Rolling broke into the apartment of 17-year-old university freshmen Sonja Larson and Christina Powell. They were found mutilated and stabbed to death. He had raped both women, one after she was dead.

The next day, Rolling killed Hoyt, 18. Her body was found propped up, sitting on her bed bent over at the waist. Rolling had sliced off her nipples and left them on the bed next to her, and police discovered that her torso was sliced open, from her chest to her pubic bone. Her severed head perched on a shelf across the room.

Two days later, Rolling killed roommates Tracy Paules and Manuel Taboada, both 23.

Rolling remained at large until September 8, when he was arrested after a botched robbery in the central Florida town of Ocala. He was later linked by DNA to three more killings in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1989.

He was not charged in the Gainesville slayings until 1992, while serving a life sentence for armed robbery and other crimes. He pleaded guilty to all five murders as the jury was being selected for trial in 1994.

He eventually was executed for his crimes.

Asked if he had any final words, witnesses at the execution said Rolling sang a song in which he repeated the line “None greater than thee, oh Lord,” as relatives of the slain students watched in the death chamber.

Stories of serial killers are fascinating and very dark and we hear these stories every day but we forget that there are people in places of power that got there because of dirty deeds that go unpunished.

We are now beginning to know more about Prince Andrew and his sexual encounters with under aged girls thanks to his relationship with Jeffery Epstein. We know that revelations about Bill Gates at the Epstein Ranch which contributed to his divorce with Melinda — and now we hear that Bill Clinton and Epstein were like brothers.

All of these men are powerful individuals that people look up to — Gates is often interviewed telling us that there are more deadly disease waiting in the wings. He says these things with such maniacal delight and no one even cares to investigate how he knows these things and how his excited grins and smirks make him suspicious.

Let the guilty face their fate but someone needs to think out of the box and take control of a situation that exceeds all of our nightmares.

Thinking outside the box or in the margins is what a lot of people do to try and explain the bizarre nature of evil, treachery and banal criminal activity.

Evil that is carried out at the stroke of a pen or the push of a button. evil that happens because of negligence and of ignorance.

People like those in power now have been running these power games for a very long time and they have no intent of ever changing. They lure the masses in with carefully crafted words every election season and the people gab and gossip over which one of these lying psychopaths is better than the other.

But what would we say if many of our Hollywood killers ran the government?

Would we rationalize the placement of Freddy Kruger as chief of foreign policy? What about Leatherface and his thoughts on immigration. I also hear that Jason Voorhees believes that we should build back better with a great reset — what makes these villains of the technocracy any different than the psychopaths on the screen?

No matter how you illustrate the tailor made nightmare we are in right now, people remain unconvinced that the Freddy Krugerish leader they voted for are bad guys, and perhaps it’s not as obvious when they lack a maniacal laugh , don’t openly look hideous, or wear blood stained knives on their hands.

I think it is worth pointing out that if we continue to encourage their psychopathic behaviors because we think that we have a chance at being like them— that if we support their crazy edicts that they will deliver us form the nightmare.

But you see they are the creators of the nightmare — they are the ones with the ghost face forcing us to live the Scream dream.

It is evident that there are psychopaths everywhere in our government and there are those that defend them and continue to vote for them.

Many of the problems we face are solvable, yet they persist, and it never seems to cross the mind of the common voter that these injustices persist precisely because those in power are doing something awful, the people simply cannot fathom that those they elect to rule would act with such disregard for the well-being for others.

The people buy into a society that has the worst kind of morals built into it and continue to pretend like there is something here worth saving. To the blind masses, it still seems rational to cast votes for people to rule over us while these psychos ramp up their discipline, surveil, and punishment tactics and spread endless warfare and pain across the planet.

Psychopaths succeed because they use many tools of manipulation, charm, intimidation and sometimes violence in order to procure their position of power.

Cheering them on and allowing their treachery to continue would make Karl Marx proud but of course, it is hard to see it when you are looking through the camera obscura.