by Travis Mateer
While the main movie I’ll be looking at for this post takes place primarily in New York City, I’m including the location of the DECODER of this movie (me) in the title because I think the geographical location where I was born, and currently reside, is important for what I’m going to be claiming.
The Pacific Northwest is also, based on a t-shirt, important to the creators of this film, a film about obtaining material power through child sacrifice. And who is involved in this film worth noting? Mark Frost, the guy who helped David Lynch create Twin Peaks, that’s who.
Yes, the 80’s started with quite a boom when Mt. St. Helens blew. I was two years old and living in Spokane, a city David Lynch spent time in with his family after being born at St. Patrick’s hospital in Missoula, Montana.
In 1987, the year The Believers came out, I was 9 years old and living in a suburb outside Seattle. Was my mother aware of Johnny Gosch, the young kid in Iowa who went missing in 1982 while delivering newspapers? I assume she was, since Gosch’s disappearance was a catalyst for using milk cartons to raise awareness about missing children. From the link:
During the late 1970s and 1980s in the United States, missing child cases garnered a great deal of news media attention. Chief among these were the disappearance of Etan Patz (1979) and the kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh (1981), whose story was told in the 1983 television movie, Adam. These reports developed into a type of moral panic called “stranger danger”. In 1984, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was founded.
In September 1984, Anderson Erickson Dairy in Des Moines, Iowa, began printing the photographs of two boys — Johnny Gosch (age 12, missing since September 5, 1982) and Eugene Martin (age 13, missing since August 12, 1984) — who went missing while delivering newspapers for the Des Moines Register. A similar milk-carton advertising program for missing children launched in Chicago, Illinois, with support from the police and statewide in California with support from the government.
Why am I talking about milk and missing children? Because the movie opens with the traumatic death of a young boy’s mother, and that death is facilitated by milk spilt from a carton and a malfunctioning coffee machine. Here’s more context from the plot:
After his wife Lisa dies from an accidental electrocution, psychologist Cal Jamison relocates with his young son, Chris, from Minneapolis to New York City, where Cal begins working as a police psychologist for the New York City Police Department. The city has been plagued by a series of brutal, ritualistic child murders. The first victim is a young boy found murdered in an abandoned movie theater. A policeman named Tom Lopez frantically phones in the discovery of the body, and claims the crimes are being committed by members of a Hispanic cult practicing a malevolent version of brujería. Cal is appointed to examine Tom, who raves about the cult’s powerful leader.
I won’t bog this post down with all the details that jumped out at me while watching this movie, because there were a lot, but some interesting ones include a joke about drowning in a bathtub, the mentioning of “trickster” and the phrase “consecrate the ground”, a German Shepherd dog (Son of Sam reference?), and other things relevant to my interests, like a rabbit, a clown face, the number 19 (in the morgue), and the Native doll the kid carries around, a doll he calls “Chief Black Cloud”.
Oh, and the name Lisa–that name has a STRONG connotation of death for me, and it was the proliferation of that name that recently kept me from considering a relocation to Spokane. So there’s that.
Going back to that t-shirt, the phrase ROCKIN’ IN THE NORTHWEST is obviously a reference to the volcano that blew its top in 1980, Mt. St. Helens, but why use this t-shirt in the movie? Are volcanoes sometimes associated with human sacrifice or something?
Before returning to my neck of the woods, let’s get even MORE Pacific with a comedy about human sacrifice and a volcano, starring Tom Hanks, titled Joe Versus The Volcano. From the link (emphasis mine):
Joe Banks is a downtrodden everyman from Staten Island, working a clerical job in a dreary factory for an unpleasant, demanding boss, Frank Waturi. Joyless, listless and chronically sick, Banks regularly visits doctors who can find nothing wrong with him. Finally, Dr. Ellison diagnoses an incurable disease called a “brain cloud”, which has no symptoms, but will kill him within five or six months. Ellison says that the symptoms he has been experiencing are actually psychosomatic, caused by trauma in his previous job as a firefighter. Ellison advises him to live the few remaining months of his life well. Joe tells his boss off, quits his job, and asks former coworker DeDe out on a date. Their date is a success, but when Joe tells DeDe that he is dying, she tells him she cannot deal with the revelation and leaves.
The next day, a wealthy industrialist named Samuel Graynamore makes Joe an unexpected proposition. Graynamore needs “bubaru”, a mineral essential for manufacturing superconductors. There are deposits of it on the tiny Pacific island of Waponi Woo, but the resident Waponis will only let him mine it if he solves a problem for them. They believe that the fire god of the volcano on their island must be appeased by a voluntary human sacrifice once every century, but none of them are willing to volunteer this time around. Graynamore offers to pay for whatever Joe wants to enjoy his final days, as long as he jumps into the volcano within 20 days. With nothing to lose, Joe accepts.
Isn’t this curious? I’d like to say more, like how this makes me think of the disappearance of MH370 and the connection to semiconductor technology, but there’s more REAL ground to cover, so let’s move on to a show that takes its name from a CALDERA volcano by the name of Yellowstone, and the actor peddling whiskey, who is from Hollywood royalty AND has deep Montana roots.
Ok, I admit it, at first I clicked on this article to hate-read it for Missoulian/mockery purposes, but by the end I was like DAMN, we’re not young and stoned watching Dazed And Confused anymore, are we.
I mention Dazed and Confused because that is the context most people will have when it comes to the actor, Cole Hauser. But thanks to the Missoulian, I have a much better idea of how Hauser’s Montana roots influenced Hollywood, and NOT the other way around.
From the link:
His great-great-grandfather was Samuel Thomas Hauser, who served as the seventh governor of Montana Territory from 1885-1887. Granddaddy Hauser arrived in what would become Montana in 1862. He tried his hand at mining in Bannack and Alder Gulch, but soon learned the same thing that copper King William Andrews Clark picked up on: the easiest way to get rich in Montana Territory wasn’t prospecting — it was banking.
The S.T. Hauser Bank opened in 1865, one of Virginia City’s first banks. Hauser later built Montana’s first smelter. Pretty quickly he was invested in railways, mines, cattle – pretty much anything he could make money with. He was part of the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition, the first large group of white men to explore what would become Yellowstone National Park.
Hauser was in the banking industry during Montana’s boom, but he was also holding the levers when the system busted. When silver collapsed during the panic of 1893, Hauser’s First National Bank of Helena failed, and as its president, he was investigated by a federal grand jury.
Afterwards, he invested in hydroelectric dams, and was instrumental in the series of obstructions that slow and swell the Missouri around Helena, including Holter Dam, Canyon Ferry and, of course, Hauser Dam. Hauser died in 1914, but that last dam and reservoir still bear the family name.
Yes, this is pretty damn impressive, but I forgot the Hollywood connection. Have you heard of a little movie house called Warner Bros.? Well, Cole Hauser’s GREAT Grandfather is Harry Warner, the founder of that little movie house. So there’s that.
I’m going to finish with a final “news” story that anyone studying synchronicities and the occult is sure to appreciate, and that’s the charges JAMES BOND (Pierce Brosnan) is now facing after allegedly stepping off a trail in a National Park. Guess which one?
If you don’t know how this ties in to occult research, that’s probably because you don’t know the original 007 was a man by the name of John Dee.
One of the foremost thinkers in England, John Dee combined science with spiritualism to rise to the top of Elizabethan politics and cast a spell over the queen with his counsel. And while his enemies would ensure that he was ridiculed and forgotten, he lives on in the codename for beloved superspy James Bond.
Ok, that’s quite enough for this fourth installment of building a new credibility. To catch up on what might seem like just crazy free-association, here’s part I, part II and part III.
Thanks for reading!
