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#Post#: 2--------------------------------------------------
Preparatory notes & discussion
DIR By: azuliani
Date: May 31, 2020, 2:04 pm
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Hi all — I'm going to dump everything we had in the top section
of the Google Doc in here, and then we can continue the
discussion below, if that works?
Geoffrey:
Re: Conspiracies
The Chapo Trap House episode about Oliver Stone’s JFK:
HTML https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/3/eyJhIjoxLCJwIjoxfQ%3D%3D/patreon-media/p/post/29546746/e6d0ae0ad0164d8a82f69c786f380def/1.mp3?token-time=2145916800&token-hash=hhpvF8IY3QZgBgfk09sARKFcPVUflldEcPeC3qpXdvE%3D
The Chapo Trap House episode where Matt Christman gets drunk and
rambles about conspiracy theories in light of dwindling USA
hegemony etc, a good companion to the JFK episode
HTML https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/patreon-posts/KNLUn88f0J2o1C9UUhGkobM5Tb_U5HdaJBdV1m4rAdQZpI49oYlpbdKOqO_ZzbXi.mp3
The King of the Hill episode where Dale begins to doubt that JFK
was killed in a conspiracy:
HTML https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6u40eq
A pivotal scene in Oliver Stone’s JFK - Donald Sutherland as the
fast-talking man:
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSw9sjqYK_I
Matthew
See: “Conspira-sea” themed Alaskan cruise here, which sounds
like a metaphor unto itself...free-thinkers adrift in a world of
their own. What if the conspirators gather on a
conspiracy-themed cruise (modeled on these actual cruises but
more absurd and strange) only to find that they are wrapped up
in a conspiracy of their own? Or, more likely, none of them is
aware of it except for one person at first, then maybe
eventually two – and maybe we build toward an ensemble as people
get roped in.
Of course, someone in the group will have to be suspect at some
point. Maybe the conspiracy is that the cruise will be sunk or
that they’ll all be sold for scrap parts or that the cruise is
some kind of playground for something (a figurative monster, of
sorts). Maybe it’s a social experiment run by a government or a
mind control exercise like those conducted in the ’60s.
Susan Sontag had an unwritten story idea about suicide clubs in
Yugoslavia. She said in the end we would find out that the clubs
had been started by the secret police. The protagonist of the
story would have been a researcher, and the story would have
ended with their research being confiscated (after the big
twist). Something like that would be crazy. I feel like the
stakes can still be real (maybe not as real as this Sontag idea)
but the show can still be funny.
Andy
That’s incredible. A JFK assassination conspiracy cruise, with
an actual assassination on it. Can we please please do this.
e.g.:
A failing actor orchestrates a hit on a rival failing actor by
engineering a situation in which the latter takes the part of
JFK in the cruise’s re-enactment of the JFK assassination; he
bribes his way into the role of Lee Harvey Oswald and switches
out the prop gun for a real one. The plot is foiled, or
discovered after the fact, by other elements of the 60s fantasy
world that take on an autonomous life of their own. (This would
be very very po-mo, but: the person who plays Jackie Kennedy
could discover the real truth behind her (pretend) husband’s
staged (but then real) murder, and find a kind of justice or at
least closure denied to the real Jackie O.)
The challenge here would be avoiding this as a terminal plot
arc, unless we decide to pitch it as a mini series. How could we
come back from this level of life-or-death dramatic stakes, and
how could we widen up this scenario into something that could be
more open-ended? This could be a “shallow” conspiracy that is
revealed to be secondary to a more insidious one — that, for
example, the actor-murderer is only a small piece in a larger
bloodbath that is being orchestrated by a third party, a
deranged cruise liner magnate and lifelong conspiracy theorist
who wants to act out a whole alternate history of the 60s, etc
etc etc. (Daryn’s idea: each season is its own micro conspiracy,
and each takes us deeper and deeper into (and closer and closer
to) the Machivellian plot… ) We get a taste of this when,
despite the fact that there was an actual murder on the goddamn
ship, the boat doesn’t turn around, and no authorities are
alerted. When our protagonist(s) ask about what happened, they
get vague and deflective answers. (Maybe the boat going “adrift”
is in a juridical / ethical sense. Cruise ship personnel ensure
the passengers that JFK’s death was just a very very convincing
bit of pantomime; they hide the body and come up with
increasingly untenable reasons for why the actor who played him
hasn’t been seen on the ship for a while now.)
I think something like this would hit those notes of layered
fantasy/artifice that we want — a reconstruction of a historical
conspiracy that is driven by a contemporary conspiracy, that is
uncovered through “code switching” between these two planes of
reality.
The role of Jackie Onassis Kennedy is, obviously, played by an
actor named Kim from Tacoma.
Geoffrey
The Caribbean as locus of the American imperial and
conspiratorial imaginary: USA fights Spain over Cuba and Puerto
Rico under the basically fake pretense of the explosion of the
USS Maine (probably an accident, possibly sunk by los Yanquis on
purpose), USA intervenes in Haiti in 1914 to take over the
banks, USA props up various tinpot assholes during the interwar
years in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, the finest US Navy
Grummans disappear over the Bermuda triangle, Kennedy invades
the Bay of Pigs but forgets to provide air cover, USA and USSR
almost start a third world war over missiles in Cuba, nasty
little Ronald Reagan invades Grenada over nothing, Jeffrey
Epstein hosts Clinton and Prince Andrew at his private island of
Little Saint James - cruise industry itself a manifestation of
these forces, as the denizens of the Global North come to The
Island and look out hungrily at “the graphed seduction of hills
rolling into themselves” (in the words of St. Lucia-born,
Toronto-based poet Canisia Lubrin)...point being there’s a lot
here
Re: the ultimate goals and aims of the conspirators...I think I
see a cruise magnate as someone powerful enough not to have to
believe in conspiracy theories, simply because they are able to
conspire themselves. In my mind conspiracy theories are the
province of a very specific kind of lumpen or lower-middle-class
person, robbed of power but unwilling to see him/her/their/self
as part of a larger whole - like Dale Gribble, or my Dad, or my
Uncle David. But per the Sontag idea Matt mentioned, I think
there’s something to the idea of the powerful attempting to run
a kind of controlled opposition, drawing all the conspiracy nuts
together to play their parts in a reenacted alternate history
that will either destroy or (maybe more interestingly) weaponize
them.
Part of the tragedy/dark comedy could be that a lot of the
conspiracy heads on the cruise have been saving up to do this
for years (possibly getting a special discount as part of the
conspiracy).
If we still have comedians on this cruise, one (probably the
older one) needs to be a Conspiracy Nut and one (probably the
rookie) needs to be a Natural Skeptic, the audience-insert who
completely doesn’t understand what’s going on.
Matthew
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UHiPWgpSzc
I wonder about the JFK angle in the specific context of cruise
ships. It’s obviously not a natural connection, but neither is
any themed cruise. Why reenact JFK’s assassination – which was
such a land-based event – on a cruise ship? And how interested
can we keep the audience in JFK-related intrigues? Another
Stephen King franchise, 11/22/63, builds around the event but
doesn’t try to mine it.
Andy
I wonder if the JFK assassination is just a particular “set
piece” for a larger or more generally-themed conspiracy cruise —
as the kind of “conspiracy of conspiracies” in the States, it
would make sense?
Geoffrey
JFK is the ur-conspiracy that ties together all others. If you
watch the KotH episode, when Dale realizes that the Warren
Commission was correct (well, maybe it wasn’t, but Dale had been
thinking the death car was travelling east, not west, the whole
time) he loses interest in all other theories. There’s something
acutely perceptive about that. “You’ve still got aliens,” Hank
tries to reassure him. It doesn’t work. It is to modern
political conspiracy theories what Roswell is to alien ones.
Take it out of the picture and you’re left with nothing.
Also consider my big paragraph about the Caribbean and its
history - JFK deeply enmeshed in that. Lee Harvey Oswald’s whole
deal was a “hands off Cuba campaign” and he spent the summer
before the shooting hanging out with bizarre right-wingers in
New Orleans (ie on the Gulf). It is the sea of
Euro-colonialism’s original sin, the contact zone, the locus of
everything.
And, hell, Aristotle Onassis, Jackie’s second husband, was a
Greek shipping magnate
Plus, a tiny cruise-ship-sized convertible would be fucking
hilarious
I can’t recommend enough the Chapo episode about Stone’s JFK
(linked above)
Matthew
Yes, excited to listen to that one. I see where this is all
going. I like the idea of a loose historical thing that invokes
characters like Aristotle Onassis.
Andy
My thought was basically that this cruise could be marketed
either as a general conspiracy cruise, kind of a mishmash of
different narratives, and that individual passengers will have
their own ties and investments with different conspiracies — OR
— it's a very specific conspiracy-themed cruise, but it draws
passengers who have a more general hankering for conspiracy and
might not actually know anything about the JFK nexus.
#Post#: 6--------------------------------------------------
Re: Preparatory notes & discussion
DIR By: azuliani
Date: May 31, 2020, 2:33 pm
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I can't get this image out of my head — a young woman in the
costume of Jackie Kennedy, covered in real blood and brain
matter, creeping around the back passageways and false fronts of
a 1960s-themed cruise ship, trying to solve a murder that
everyone else believes is theatrical.
#Post#: 7--------------------------------------------------
Re: Preparatory notes & discussion
DIR By: azuliani
Date: May 31, 2020, 4:06 pm
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--- Quote from: andy link ---
>
> My thought was basically that this cruise could be marketed
either as a general conspiracy cruise, kind of a mishmash of
different narratives, and that individual passengers will have
their own ties and investments with different conspiracies — OR
— it's a very specific conspiracy-themed cruise, but it draws
passengers who have a more general hankering for conspiracy and
might not actually know anything about the JFK nexus.
>
--- End Quote ---
... because this gives us a rich and exploitable range of
character's involvement with and investment in the conspiracy
cruise, and with/in conspiracy theories in general. I like the
idea of having a spectrum of levels of enthusiasm and
bewilderment across the characters.
#Post#: 13--------------------------------------------------
Re: Preparatory notes & discussion
DIR By: matthew
Date: May 31, 2020, 8:21 pm
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For some reason I've been thinking a lot about what Wes
Anderson's cruise movie would be like. In my mind, some mix of
Rushmore and Grand Budapest.
HTML https://www.nme.com/news/film/wes-anderson-to-board-the-grand-budapest-hotel-the-877805
Another thought came to mind just now after hearing someone
talking about burials at sea. This feels more like a movie than
a TV show, but imagine a burial-at-sea themed cruise, where
everyone has their own urn with them and their own story. And
people are all choosing different times to dump the ashes. This
would maybe become a background event to a bunch of side stories
that unfold naturally. Or, if not a whole story, maybe this
could simply be a character on our cruise -- someone who's
brought an urn with them.
#Post#: 17--------------------------------------------------
Re: Preparatory notes & discussion
DIR By: G
Date: June 1, 2020, 12:46 pm
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Very much agree re: levels of investment in conspiracy. One of
the delightful tensions of The X Files is the interplay between
Mulder's belief and Scully's skepticism.
This can be a political tension too - someone with my
straightforwardly left anti-establishment politics (someone in
the crew perhaps) could clash with the conspiracy-heads who are
against the government but also in a paralytic awe of it.
I also think the urn element could be very funny if it was
likewise tied to somebody's odd belief. Someone who wants their
father's ashes to be deposited in the Bermuda Triangle so he can
go to Alien Heaven.
#Post#: 22--------------------------------------------------
Re: Preparatory notes & discussion
DIR By: matthew
Date: June 1, 2020, 2:29 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
--- Quote from: G link ---
>
> Very much agree re: levels of investment in conspiracy. One of
the delightful tensions of The X Files is the interplay between
Mulder's belief and Scully's skepticism.
>
> This can be a political tension too - someone with my
straightforwardly left anti-establishment politics (someone in
the crew perhaps) could clash with the conspiracy-heads who are
against the government but also in a paralytic awe of it.
>
> I also think the urn element could be very funny if it was
likewise tied to somebody's odd belief. Someone who wants their
father's ashes to be deposited in the Bermuda Triangle so he can
go to Alien Heaven.
>
--- End Quote ---
Haha, yes.
#Post#: 23--------------------------------------------------
Re: Preparatory notes & discussion
DIR By: matthew
Date: June 3, 2020, 1:05 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
Thinking: what if we told the story of Bruce Porter Roberts,
author of The Gemstone File? The tone would be Burn After
Reading meets The Death of Stalin and the setting would be late
'60s to early '70s.
Apparently Roberts spent many evenings at the Drift Inn in San
Francisco, a "CIA-FBI safe-house hangout bar where Roberts
conducted a nightly Gemstone rap, for the benefit of any CIA or
FBI agent or anyone who wandered in for a beer."
He claimed to be the victim of a Mafia hit-and-run attack, and
believed himself to be dying of the "Brezhnev flu" (a secret
biological weapon introduced by American agents into Society
leader Leonid Brezhnev's lymph system).
The gist is that he basically positions Aristotle Onassis at the
centre of a global conspiracy to control everything from
newspapers to oil to governments. Rather than trying to jump
around in the massive interconnected web of events presented in
The Gemstone File (and The Skeleton Key -- a 1975 exegesis of
the earlier text), we could stick with one small person who just
barely started to "scratch the surface."
From Wikipedia:
"Originally distributed in 1975 by hand and mail in photocopy
form, the Gemstone File has appeared in slightly revised form in
Hustler magazine and on the Internet. Roberts, known only to
Stephanie Caruana and conspiracy theorist Mae Brussell,
purportedly began gathering information in the file when Howard
Hughes stole his invention for processing synthetic rubies,
hence the title "Gemstone."
There's a lot of stuff below to go on, including some totally
out-there theories in the Hustler article (an 8-page summary of
the 1000-page Gemstone document): "April 18, 1971: A final
overdose of heroin does Hughes in. His coffin is lowered into
the sea from a rocky headland off the coast of Skorpios.
Albanian frogmen, tipped off, are waiting in the water. They
seize the coffin and take the corpse off to Yugoslavia, thence
to China and Russia, and then perhaps to Boston—in a
footlocker."
HTML https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwianvTzsebpAhVNGDQIHeD6CUsQFjABegQIBBAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fjfk.hood.edu%2FCollection%2FWeisberg%2520Subject%2520Index%2520Files%2FG%2520Disk%2FGemstone%2520File%2520A%2520Skeleton%2520File%2520To%2FItem%252001.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0OuCZ-lAz3Grz06OFjYsrP
HTML https://www.sfweekly.com/news/the-absolutely-true-somewhat-spurious-and-totally-impossible/
HTML http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/anti-masonry/gemstone.html
What I find absolutely hilarious is the idea that, like, every
major conspiracy of the century was discussed openly in this one
bar:
--- Quote ---
> G. Gordon Liddy were regulars at the Drift Inn, where they
encountered Bruce Roberts (Liddy would later name his White
House domestic espionage scheme the Gemstone Plan). It further
asserts that while sitting at the bar, Hunt and Liddy hatched
their Watergate plot to retrieve information the Democrats had
supposedly collected on Nixon and Onassis, and that barkeep
Strom taped the conversations and passed them on to Washington
Post publisher Katharine Graham.
--- End Quote ---
Also, you have to love the guy's acronyms:
--- Quote ---
> Roberts claimed an intimate knowledge of a conspiracy dating
to 1932 involving Kennedy’s assassination, the Mafia, the CIA
and an organization "called MMORDIS - Mouldering Mass Of Rotten
Dribbling Infectious Shit" which runs the entire world,
controlling the American defense department, the intelligence
agencies, and the Vatican.
--- End Quote ---
Since so little is known about Roberts, we could have him live
on a houseboat or something to keep that element. For me, his
character could go in a lot of directions, from extreme Quixotic
naiveté (CIA agents fucking with him, feeding him obviously
false leads) to more of a "maybe he's onto something" thing.
Maybe the Aristotle Onassis stuff is our "mythology" arc that
lives in the background of this guy's daily adventures and more
local conspiracies. Maybe he finds his way onto the Christina O
somehow through a "friend" on the inside and that satisfies our
cruise fascination. Maybe he himself, in our telling, is
specifically interested in the whole shipping magnate angle and
spends a lot of time hanging around ports, etc. Maybe we just
hang out with him and his friends as they try to piece something
together that's way over their heads:
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYSBfbjCvAA
#Post#: 24--------------------------------------------------
Re: Preparatory notes & discussion
DIR By: matthew
Date: June 3, 2020, 1:16 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/jun/02/less-less-less-how-the-miniseries-took-over-tv
#Post#: 25--------------------------------------------------
Re: Preparatory notes & discussion
DIR By: azuliani
Date: June 4, 2020, 5:21 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
--- Quote from: matthew link ---
>
> Thinking: what if we told the story of Bruce Porter Roberts,
author of The Gemstone File? The tone would be Burn After
Reading meets The Death of Stalin and the setting would be late
'60s to early '70s.
>
>
--- End Quote ---
Wow. If nothing else, this should at least be a node. This stuff
is incredible.
#Post#: 28--------------------------------------------------
Re: Preparatory notes & discussion
DIR By: G
Date: June 4, 2020, 11:28 pm
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Where do you find these people Matt? Haha. I'm very excited by
this research, and I remain astounded by the extent to which
Onassis is some kind of tulpa or passkey to all this.
The Christina O yacht has odd echoes for me of Robert Maxwell's
yacht, Lady Ghislaine, very creepily named after his very creepy
daughter. He fell off of it in the Canary Islands and nobody
knows why.
San Francisco in the '60s and early '70s also takes us into
Pynchon territory, which is always a delight.
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