With God on Our Side

Essentially God is an Honored citizen of [God Bless] America, right up there with the President and Hollywood.

Bob Dylan wrote about how it all works in about 1961 and it went this way:

“Oh my name it is nothin'

My age it means less

The country I come from

Is called the Midwest

I's taught and brought up there

The laws to abide

And the land that I live in

Has God on its side.

Oh the history books tell it

They tell it so well

The cavalries charged

The Indians fell

The cavalries charged

The Indians died

Oh the country was young

With God on its side.

The Spanish-American

War had its day

And the Civil War too

Was soon laid away

And the names of the heroes

I's made to memorize

With guns on their hands

And God on their side.

The First World War, boys

It came and it went

The reason for fighting

I never did get

But I learned to accept it

Accept it with pride

For you don't count the dead

When God's on your side.

When the Second World War

Came to an end

We forgave the Germans

And then we were friends

Though they murdered six million

In the ovens they fried

The Germans now too

Have God on their side.

I've learned to hate Russians

All through my whole life

If another war comes

It's them we must fight

To hate them and fear them

To run and to hide

And accept it all bravely

With God on my side.

But now we got weapons

Of the chemical dust

If fire them we're forced to

Then fire them we must

One push of the button

And a shot the world wide

And you never ask questions

When God's on your side.

In a many dark hour

I've been thinkin' about this

That Jesus Christ

Was betrayed by a kiss

But I can't think for you

You'll have to decide

Whether Judas Iscariot

Had God on his side.

So now as I'm leavin'

I'm weary as Hell

The confusion I'm feelin'

Ain't no tongue can tell

The words fill my head

And fall to the floor

If God's on our side

He'll stop the next war.”

Added in 1980s

“In the nineteen-sixties

came the Vietnam War

Can somebody tell me

what we're fightin' for?

So many young men died

So many mothers cried

Now I ask the question

Was God on our side?”

A Complex Message - Part 3

So let's try to put the thing together by starting with what it is NOT about.

I think Night would be amazed at just how fanatical the bums on seats fraternity got with the "water issue".  The first mention is Night himself as the vet having a "hunch" based on where the crop circles are located, ie that the alien craft as he imagined them were not intended to land on water so they marked spots well clear of water.

The Hess  family votes on Ray's theory and after Bo changes her vote to negative the theory is canned.

Then we see the Hess family alien does not like water on his shoulder, and that is the sum total of evidence.  Now we see the aliens infect dogs with rabies so it is probably safe for now to assume they HAVE rabies, meaning they have rabies symptoms as well, so they would comply with what Wiki explains:

"This anxiety commonly extends to getting wet or splashed with water when it is unexpected, or being pushed or thrown into a body of water".

The death of the Hess family alien [if it existed] is not because of water but because Merril kept swinging away until he broke the bat.  And the question of its existence [other than in the minds of the family] is dramatically shown after the broken bat as the alien INSIDE the broken TV, to sort of strongly return to the War of the Worlds mass hysteria syndrome [ie alien never existed except inside the TV, projected onto the minds of the family].

And as I mention the important issue in the removal of the glasses by the bat seems to be Night's camera lingering on the books HIDDEN behind [at which point Night expects you to pause your DVD [like a Clarise] and say WOW this looks like one of the really important clues.

So if one accepts that, and that all of that [rabies/aliens stuff] was purely the VEHICLE for the bums on seats mob, then next we have to ask why rabies?

Well if you follow what Night is about, he is passionate about his love of his adopted country of America especially Pennsylvania, BUT hates the way apathy and Political Correctness is ruining it, ie the so called American Beauty.  SO all his movies have the WAKE UP AMERICA message, but of course eyes are wide closed and nobody's home.  BUT that never stops Night so he deals with the evils one by one.

Here the evil is the control by the Illuminati aided by a compliant mass media in respect of biological "Weapons of Mass Destruction" as the syndrome got pronked by the Rumsfeld Illuminati.  We must remember that the media was awash at the time with propaganda about "Chemical Ali" in Iraq as a method of diverting attention away from genocide BY America as has existed since and before Vietnam.

So my tilt on this is that Night is doing his normal softly, softly whistleblowing on yet another government cover-up which J Doe accepts with Eyes Wide Shut, eg The Village was the spoof on Fortress America after 9/11.  Here his VEHICLE for bums on seats [$330 million profit] is aliens/crop circles, but MESSAGE wise [apart from the "human messages"] it is more obscure than his other movies.

He introduces rabies as a [politically] harmless nerve agent associated with the aliens, but knowing Night such an introduction always points to a politically SENSITIVE one, but right now it is not obvious - so maybe I stop here and look at the God aspects.

A Complex Message - Part 2

Night reinforces his normal "Assume nothing, question everything" warning this time by way of the police officer and the amusing "interview" she has with the boys.  The boys try hard to follow that and "call the bluff" of the "pranksters" [the logical explanation] but keep on "seeing" aliens.

Night has the wife's [accidental] killer as a Vet, so there is another clue about the rabies connection although it seems very obscure and he too is under huge strain from the accident and he too "sees" an alien, and of course it is he that offers a "feeling" that these creatures "avoid water" based purely on his observations that the crop circles are not near water [ie NOT that they are "harmed by water"], and I will return to the bums on seats BREAKING of all these rules/clues by having water as a major issue with the aliens.  Note how Night as usual taunts those not listening "with ears wide open" by taking that part himself [ie throwing in his fishing line to see what he catches].

Finally for clues, Night seems to have bought up lots of "Illuminati" memorabilia from the Eyes Wide Shut garage sale as we see various star shaped wind chimes etc as well as 2001 ASO crescents. My take on them is that they seem most out of place with a country home and especially a home of a minister, and are left-overs from the wife who was apparently anything but a straight laced "God fearing Christian", albeit that was quite OK by Graham.

Then we have another very strange left-over via the dress making dummy which sticks in your memory waiting for the link and finally there it is straight from Dr Lector himself with his Marcus Aurelius [Simplicity] scolding of Clarise on how to find Buffalo Bill, as we see the rear view of the alien where his costume is in the same panels style as in SOTLambs.  It seems to me this is another Night "instruction" on how to interpret his movie, ie by "keeping it simple" or "what is the thing in itself".

Then we see that one panel has a picture of Bo on it, and that takes me straight to that wonderful start of Brokeback Mountain where E Annie P describes Ennis waking after dreaming of Jack back "high on a hill, nothing was wrong, that's when I had you", and she uses the beautiful expression of pulling forward "a panel of the dream".  I will return to that.

Sorry, forgot other possible clues.  Night explains to us in bonus material [repeated in movie] that these crop circles are unique because they are in corn field where the corn would preclude the normal "planks" methods traditionally used by the pranksters.  So Night is saying these are "for real", but let's not make the mistake of assuming they then must have been made by aliens [as the FBI etc have zillions to spend on "cunning stunts"].

Next, the baby monitor features prominently but a baby monitor is a TWO piece gadget with a microphone at baby end and speaker at parent end and a wireless carrier protocol to connect the two.  Night makes it clear only the speaker end is used so any alien type noises are either tuning in to the carrier signal [ie not audio at all] or the aliens are AT the microphone end already [like in the attic?].

A Complex Message - Part 1

Night is similar in style to Kubrick in that "All the truths to his movies are "hidden" in the movies themselves".

And there sure are a lot of clues in this movie, including "human" issues of faith/coincidence etc, and although Night has these issues "entangle" with the crop circles issues, I will try in this post to separate out the more "physical" issues [and hope that does not actually lead me away from the true meaning].

Night always has a Vehicle for bums on seats, box office success and in this case it is aliens, but as he reveals himself that he uses "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", "Birds" and "War of the Worlds" as the 3 sources of inspiration [apart from the "current world issue" of crop circles], we have to step very carefully before assuming there ARE any real aliens in the movie, especially given the huge strain all those in the story are under.

Further there is the book that we need to "unhide" as a clue from where it is hidden behind the bums on seats red herring of the water glasses [like how devilishly clever is that?].  The book is The Aquitaine Progression by Robert Ludlum, which is an Eyes Wide Shut style story of the so called Illuminati who plan a War of the Worlds cum 9/11 style media assisted terror regime making it easy for "HAL" to rule absolute [and Night goes on to make The Village to show how well it can work].

Then Night ties the word Aquitaine in with Aquaphobia [Hydrophobia] by way of the dogs getting Rabies from "the aliens" - from Wiki:

"The correct Greek-derived term for "water-fear" is hydrophobia, from ὕδωρ (hudōr), "water" and φόβος (phobos), "fear". However, this word has long been used in English to refer specifically to a symptom of later-stage rabies, which manifests itself in humans as difficulty in swallowing, fear when presented with liquids to drink, and an inability to quench one's thirst.
In order to have an unambiguous term to refer to a general phobia about water or drowning, the term "aquaphobia" has been coined, from the Latin word aqua (which normally ought to have the form aqui- when used as a prefix) and the Greek word "phobia"."

So Night ties those clues in with Bo having some strange "thing" about drinking water and dreams, and Graham's revelation of her almost supernatural birth as "an Angel".

Summary

more to come