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Formulating Decisions:
Sacred Space and Identity Save The Cat! Goes To The Movies by Blake Snyder. (Michael Wiese Productions, 2007.) Here we are starting 2008 with a new topic—or is it? In 1993, Guy Spiro called me up asking for a science fiction review column delving into the history of science fiction/fantasy (SF/F), including current novels. I was energized by the opportunity to trace broad trends in fiction as they apply to occult studies. I started with a two-part column defining “Intimate Adventure” within the New Age SF/F genre. I went on to delve into vampires and other cross-genre fiction that demonstrates why students of the occult need SF/F. All these columns are posted on www.lightworks.com and archived on www.simegen.com/reviews. In January and April, 2007, in a series titled “The Soul-Time Hypothesis,” I reviewed a non-fiction book about scriptwriting, Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder In the April column I discussed how STC! reveals the music of the spheres that powers our movie industry. I was very excited about STC! because its principles apply equally to novels. Today’s book readers are actually more deeply steeped in film than the printed word, so novels are coming to resemble films. So when the PDF file of a review copy of Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies popped into my email inbox, you could have heard my squeal of delight across all n dimensions! It’s twice the size of STC! I printed out some pages to read until the hardcopy arrives and read the introduction which reprises the salient points of STC!—then I turned to Chapter One. I read page one and I simply could not—I mean physically could not—turn the page! In maybe seven paragraphs, Blake Snyder turned my whole world upside down and inside out, and did it by elaborating only a little on what he’d explained so succinctly in Save the Cat! I stared at that page open mouthed, I leaped up and paced and ranted, I wanted to shout from the rooftops, babble like an idiot, and—well, stop the presses!—award Blake Snyder the Nobel Peace Prize! The Pulitzer! Even now, I haven’t read much past the first page, and I’m telling you, that if you’re serious about learning magick or the science behind Magick, or Kabbalah or Tarot or Astrology or how the magical disciplines actually shape the modern world, you absolutely must study this book! The film industry is the icon of our society for a reason. People march on Congress to protect their kids from violence on TV for a reason. They can’t make any progress on these issues—because they don’t understand what is really happening in our world and why. I will discuss STCGTTM and reference it many times during this sequence on “Formulating Decisions” (yes, I will finish reading it, every word!) because, if you bring an occult education to reading this book, you will find in it a myriad connections between all the occult disciplines—Tarot, Astrology, Kabbalah, Magick, especially ceremonial magick and the Path of Initiation. So what did Snyder say on page one that is so illuminating? He told the story of how he learned—drew a picture of his emotional state of distraction (just like an initiation candidate) when a co-worker enunciated one simple fact that Snyder had already told us about in STC! That fact was that two very different looking films are actually the same movie. More on that below. But first: Snyder has identified ten (exactly ten, as in Tree of Life ten) types of story, and calls them genres to replace designations like Western, Mystery, and SF, which define setting and decoration, and don’t tell a viewer if they’re going to enjoy the film. There are, he explains, just ten stories. Every great, or classic film story fits into one of these ten patterns. Perfectly. It is the fitting to the pattern that causes popularity and classical longevity. See my April, 2007, column—something in the layout of that pattern “sings” to our souls. Also in STC! Snyder explains that to be filmable, a story has to arise from a primal motivation. He defines primal as that which a caveman could understand (without prejudice to cavemen.) To me, obviously: magick! Snyder’s first genre listed is the oldest and most primal, what he calls Monster In The House. All this, I knew from STC! (shrug). On page one, Jim Haggin explained to Snyder that the movie Jaws is the same movie as Alien. And that’s what shattered my world into most intensely delightful pieces! I had always viewed Alien as a failed example of a First Contact story, my favorite type of Monster In The House, because it’s Intimate Adventure. It fails because the hero doesn’t make friends with the monster, or vanquish the monster definitively. I’d never understood the point of meeting a monster without becoming friends with it. Snyder-Haggin explained the point! Haggin defines “house” as an enclosed community. Enclosed is the word that did it for me—he’s talking about sacred space which you have created. (Masons will grasp this point!) Snyder gives us the clue about the monster that’s trying to eat the cast—it’s primal. That is, it is the quintessential nightmare humanity shares. The shape doesn’t matter. This monster is the anti-life force that spawns in the sewer under the bottom of our mind. It is the yetzer rah, the evil inclination. You can’t kill it because it is part of you, an essential part of your identity, and (subconsciously) a driving force within many of your decisions. (James Kirk’s “Wolf.”) Haggin gives the essential clue to this genre. The protagonist must be locked into battle with the monster because of a “sin” the protagonist committed—it has to be his own fault that this is happening to him. “Sin” (no matter your religion) is whatever act shatters the boundary between the “light” and “dark” sides of your self. The protagonist broke through his own wards. Now the monster is in his sacred space to feed—on the protagonist. (Inviting the vampire in!) The essence of the Monster In The House genre is not the monster, but the house—the sacred, private, safe precinct where self is nurtured. The Monster In The House genre takes its power from the crime of violation of trust, of invasion of sacred space: control of the demon summoned has been lost. This is not just a movie genre. This is an initiation—facing your own worst fear and finding it within yourself. Movies externalize this subconscious group mind death-force. Even if you survive, you have “died” the magickal death, the Death card, the Moon card, the processes of profound change of identity. Post traumatic stress! I might not have grasped this with such mind-shattering implications, except that while reading the following novels, I have been posting in September and October, 2007, on http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com installments on the Tarot suit of Swords, tracing the lightning flash down the Tree of Life in thought, word and deed. So I feel that the other nine genres Snyder defines are actually contained in Monster In The House just as the two–ten Minor Arcana are actually all contained in the Ace (or One). My favorite of Blake’s genres is Dude With A Problem—where the problem is the Monster In The House, and the resolution is the intimate adventure of making friends with yourself, and then your monster. I don’t know where Michaela August’s House of the Rose series will end, but it’s a historical fantasy where the monster in the house is the leader of the good guys who happen to be reincarnating vampires. You can download the series at awe-struck.net. The writing is easily as solid as anything you’ll find in paperback. Better! The Sleeping God is a great mystery about who or what the monster is! Five psychics must overcome their personal monsters to send the real marauder, a lost alien, home through a dimension gate. It’s a psychological tour-de-force by a writer who grasps the meaning of intimacy. In The Harlequin, Laurell K. Hamilton pits her main protagonist, Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, against yet another nightmare. Hamilton has shattered Anita’s identity, and is now rebuilding her before our eyes. Has Anita become the monster? Is that OK because monsters have legal rights? Tanya Huff brings us a space-wars novel, The Heart of Valor. Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr has to protect her trainees on a training planet where, the enemy has taken over the computers—or maybe their allies are attacking? It’s about decision making in fast combat situations where you don’t know all the resources at hand and are not sure what the enemy actually is—monster, computer or alien species. Only five-star books reviewed here. Read them all!
Send books for review in this column to: Jacqueline Lichtenberg, email jl@simegen.com for instructions. |
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