The Esoteric Nature of Film Art,

The Esoteric Nature of Film Art, and the Collective Imagination

In art, the 21^st Century has brought to us remarkable “technological” tools. This meditation confines itself to works of “film”.

A point of order: a lot of traditional esoteric art, such as the Pieta of Michelangelo and Raphael’s Mother and Child is considered “inspired”. The same inspiration cooperates with our time, and with our skills, crafts, and arts.

Just as one can experience the changes in the fashions of painting, so is film art an ongoing becoming.

To me, the idea of the Collective Imagination is, that while it is boundless, its genres have structure. The film artist needs the cooperation of the audience, to which we have given the inadequate term: the suspension of belief.

There are romantic comedies, aka: Rom-coms. Zombie films. Slasher movies. And, with CGI, the power to create images appearing real, yet are just ones and zeros of code on a computer.

As this process involves people (creator) to people (observer) interaction, we have the consequence of the necessity of human archetypes. Barfield used such terms as “collective representation”, and Jung the Collective Unconscious.

Family, work life, and child … for example. Good and Evil, and love and birth and death, all layered over with the artists intentions and insights.

My experience is that the themes, that form the undergrowth of these works, can give us insight into the human condition, via shared metaphors.

In a sense, there is the filmed story intended, and the incidental results of a community of talents are a kind of song of the world – a case in point follows. Still, to know the hidden mysteries requires conscious attention.

With the creation of the movie characters King Kong (12) and Godzilla (38), we have reached a Weaving Together of those two meditations, via the collective imagination, that unfolds in the last half dozen years or so. They together have made more movies than Star Wars (11) and Start Trek (12) combined. (anime not included).

King Kong can be seen as an archetype of the higher universal mammalian (manifested in the organs of the mid-brain) qualities of the human being. Godzilla is the archetype of the universal reptilian (hind-brain) aspect. These are in us already – together. They are not creatures of the “material” or measured world, but rather of the immaterial imaginative world.

Their origin stories begin the tales. King Kong is first in time, and a good tale of the limits and follies latent in human beings’ relationships to nature, at the time it was made. We try to capture this animal power in order to make money, and always fail.

Godzilla shows up after the atomic bombs rained down upon Japan. Another power not understood.

Each series of films involves a kind of evolution of the themes, as various artists and audiences engage. In both, there is present a positive outcome, in the sense of victory over human evils, rained justly via these nature apex predators on the evil in the inhuman apex corporations, aka: the bad guys.

Wars are fought, and much collateral human death and destruction is endured.

In the latest film (“King Kong versus Godzilla”), King Kong and Godzilla have a fight, and find that the greatest danger is not either of them to the other, for each has a place in the scheme of things.

It is discovered that King Kong power – the mammal nature – is an apex power in the underworld, a life-filled realm – the Hollow Earth where Gravity is reversed, and down is up. (solar-plexus Chakra and metabolic limb system)

In a wonderful nuance, the Hollow Earth is connected to the above world mostly via water ways (lymphatic and blood circulations) connecting all the oceans, a realm where Godzilla power is the “boss”, and a major guardian against human anti-life corporations.

This latest film also has the bad guys inventing a Mechazilla, or mechanical Godzilla. They create a monster mechanical computer driven creature that can be guided by a captured human mind, linked to the creature via electrical apparatus requiring the skull of another ancient sea predator as a resonance inducer.

This forced adaption of the human being “driver” fails during the battle, leaving the artificial intelligence of the monster free of any restraint.

The bad guys were also rich because of pharmaceutical evils. Seeking more power, their lead mad scientist and owner, seeks special powers that legend suggests can be found in the Hollow Earth.

A special aspect is that both modern King King and Godzilla films have acquired an innocent young girl, who is able to interact – the heart’s mind – with the “Monster”. In the Godzilla stories this human contact is an empathetic understanding that Godzilla is a Nature generated guardian of humanity, against the follies of mad scientists.

King Kong has a younger girl companion, who is deaf, and she teaches him how to “sign”. She is the one who convinces him to go Home, and seek the Hollow Earth, the gate to which is in the southern arctic wasteland. (the base Chakra)

If in our imagination, we view the earth as a living being, bearing the same general form as the human being, we find polar powers, one of which is visible (above the surface), the other hidden or invisible (below the surface): aka: the Tree of Life.

Under scientific materialism, we see no “inside” to Nature. Yet, the powers of the seen and unseen remain. The King Kong nature (mammal kingdom) and the Godzilla nature (reptilian kingdom) serve the human kingdom, trying to protect us from our own follies.

Earth and Water, Fire and Air, precipitate consciousness, and our child like nature can commune with this intelligence, which materialism denies. Inside each rogue wave is intelligence. Inside each plague the same.

If we go backwards from the Kong versus Godzilla film, we find in both stories of battles with strange and powerful “monsters”. In a more recent Godzilla film (“Godzilla – King of the Monsters”), these dangerous “monsters” are called: Titans.

A name the ancient Greeks gave to the powers created by the Gods and Goddesses.

The tragic spiritual reality is that we human beings are more dangerous to each other, than are the powers and principalities of Faerie and the Fae.

Keep in mind that the heart’s key is the youthful feminine. “Lest we become as little children, we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven”.

At the time of writing this, a hurricane went from Category One to Category Five in under twelve hours. Never happened before. So fast we lost faith in our models.

Around the same time, Hamas attacked Israel.