u/Immediate_Error2135

Morgoth's Ring:

Melkor 'incarnated' himself (as Morgoth) permanently. He did this so as to control the hröa, the 'flesh' or physical matter, of Arda. He attempted to identify himself with it. A vaster, and more perilous, procedure, though of similar sort to the operations of Sauron with the Rings. Thus, outside the Blessed Realm, all 'matter' was likely to have a 'Melkor ingredient', and those who had bodies, nourished by the hröa of Arda, had as it were a tendency, small or great, towards Melkor: they were none of them wholly free of him in their incarnate form, and their bodies had an effect upon their spirits.

But in this way Morgoth lost (or exchanged, or transmuted) the greater part of his original 'angelic' powers, of mind and spirit, while gaining a terrible grip upon the physical world.[...] Sauron's power was not (for example) in gold as such, but in a particular form or shape made of a particular portion of total gold. Morgoth's power was disseminated throughout Gold, if nowhere absolute (for he did not create Gold) it was nowhere absent. (It was this Morgoth-element in matter, indeed, which was a prerequisite for such 'magic' and other evils as Sauron practised with it and upon it.)

The Three Rings were the Rings of Fire, Water, Air. The four classical elements were Fire, Water, Air, Earth.

So I guess this is what was is Tolkien's mind, mythologically speaking. Which I suppose is related to alchemy, in itself suspicious if you're a catholic. I guess we can add malevolent alchemy to necromancy and the rest of evil arts practised by Sauron. (The elves, then, were practising benevolent alchemy with their Rings)

Tolkien:

But at the beginning of the Second Age [Sauron] was still beautiful to look at, or could still assume a beautiful visible shape – and was not indeed wholly evil, not unless all 'reformers' who want to hurry up with 'reconstruction' and 'reorganization' are wholly evil, even before pride and the lust to exert their will eat them up. But many Elves listened to Sauron. He was still fair in that early time, and his motives and those of the Elves seemed to go partly together: the healing of the desolate lands. Sauron found their weak point in suggesting that, helping one another, they could make Western Middle-earth as beautiful as Valinor. It was really a veiled attack on the gods, an incitement to try and make a separate independent paradise. 

Earth, Water, Fire, Air=Paradise? I say this because the 4 classical elements and the Earth as a creation of God seem to be related historically and in iconography:

https://drrichardstemp.com/2020/06/25/day-98-out-of-eden/

And:

https://phoebusfoundation.org/en/beleef/hendrick-de-clerck-the-garden-of-eden-with-the-four-elements/

Sauron had 'earth' on his side, because Middle-earth had already that Morgoth element. And mere power was also on his side, since he was of course more powerful rhan the elves.

So he tried to bind the Rings of Fire and Water and Air to his Earthly Ring, but not to annul their power. The Silmarillion:

"Now these were the Three that had last been made, and they possessed the greatest powers. Narya, Nenya, and Vilya, they were named, the Rings of Fire, and of Water, and of Air, set with ruby and adamant and sapphire; and of all the Elven-rings Sauron most desired to possess them, for those who had them in their keeping could ward off the decays of time and postpone the weariness of the world."

So he wanted to rule the healing of Middle-Earth, as some sort of god. Had that been his plan since the beginning? He left Eregion in SE 1500, when the elves had begun the forging of the Rings Of Power.

But if we follow the Earth/Fire/Air/Water idea, maybe he counted on the elves developing Fire/Water/Air by themselves.

If you follow the timeline of that 'technology' (lesser Rings>the 7 and the 9>the 3), these objects become more and more elvish. The Three were not even made by Sauron or touched by him.

And the elves became more and more immersed in that technology, originally devised by Sauron. They were walking into a trap.

As if Sauron counted on the elves losing sight of what was going on. They would innocently arrive at Fire/Air/Water and then Sauron would use Earth to bind them.

If this theory is correct, then in the beginning tye not wholly evil but wholly suspicious Sauron knew the wholly suspicious art of alchemy and the elves did not. This asymmetry plus the Machine plus Sauron's cunning and power lead to the creation of the Three.

'The Magnitude of his folly' had been as great back then as it would be the Mount Doom chapter, where this sentence appears. The creation of the One Ring and the creation of Sauron's Doom were one thing and the same. After that, it was a matter of time.

The Elves, being good 'catholics', noticed this Doom immediately. But still they could not destroy the Three. In Tolkien's world, in our world, good catholics were perfectly capable of falling under the thraldom of The Machine, as Tolkien himself knew.

It's basically the same shot. And the same gesture, with the same hand.

What do you think Friedkin had in mind?

And of course, we see the statue's penis in other shots, which is related to the idea of male sexuality. We know the kind of language Regan speaks while possessed.

So what would any of this have to do with father Dyer, with his sexuality? He seems to be gay -as he is in the novel. (Friedkin had directed the gay-themed Boys in the Band and would later direct the gay-themed Cruising)

Captain Howdy=Ouija board.

And where was the board? In the closet.

What's an exorcism? An ancient ritual the church keeps in the closet, as one of the doctors say. Same exact words.

So we have:

1. In closet=ouija/Hello/Howdy.

2. In the closet=exorcism=goodbye.

So at an abstract visual level there seems to be something there. But what of it at the plot/character level? What of Father Dyer?

If Regan meant at some level sexual awakening and that means also vulnerability to demons, well, what about being both gay and a catholic priest? That means also demons right? Homosexuality is a sin if you're a catholic priest, and yet homosexuality is not going to go away only because of that. You willl suffer and will have to repress yourself and become angry. So here we have Kinderman being maybe close to the truth:

KARRAS You think the killer and the desecrator are the same?

KINDERMAN Maybe somebody crazy, someone with a spite against the church, some unconscious rebellion, perhaps.

KARRAS Sick priest, is that it?

KINDERMAN Look, Father this is hard for you- please. But for priests on the campus here, you're the psychiatrist; you'd know who was sick at the time, who wasn't. I mean this kind of sickness. You'd know that.

KARRAS I don't know anyone who fits the description.

KINDERMAN Ah, doctor's ethics. If you knew you wouldn't tell, huh?

KARRAS No I probably wouldn't.

There's more:

KINDERMAN And Dennings, you read how he died?

KARRAS Yeah, a fall.

KINDERMAN Let me tell you how Father, and please confidential. Burke Dennings, good Father, was found at the bottom of those steps leading to 'M' Street, with his head turned completely around. Facing backwards.

The song Father Dyer sings at the piano dates back to 1926. We only hear the first line in the film but here are the complete lyrics:

"Down on the East side, on the East side/that's my home, sweet home./Some people think it's the home of black eyes./Just because guys don't wear collars and ties./ That's all the bunk, they just say that in fun./ Real East side folks is the best what come./ They'd give you their shoit only they ain't got none./Down on Thoity Thoid and Thoid./   

Folks buy pianos for one dollar down/Then wait with sticks For the guy to come 'round/Gawd help collectors when they come to call/Three flights of stairs is a helluva fall/Speshly with hard marble floors in the hall/Down on Thoity Thoid and Thoid.

Down on the east side of toidy toidy and toid/That's my home sweet home, sweet home./When a guy dies it's the best time of all,/ We go on out and we hire a hall./ We gets a bathtub and fills it with gin,/Pick up the corpse and we throw the stiff in./Dead or alive you should see that guy grin,/ Down on toidy toid and toid." 

That 'we' at the end is speshly creepy. Possessed Regan says 'us'. Father Dyer drowning himself in alcohol and then becoming possessed (off-screen) would be the idea. Maybe the demon went from him to Regan.

(In Friedkin's Cruising there's supposedly a gay serial killer but then the film ends and you get the idea that there's maybe two or more)

So at the end of the film it's not that Regan doesn't remember. Neither of the two, girl and man, daughter and 'father' do.

We see how Shakespeare modifies and complicates the idea, but seems to be the same idea.

The idea of the worser spirit being female is intriguing. 'Hell' is, as we see in KL and other plays, slang for female genitalia.

And 'conceive' is a shakespearean pun. You can conceive a child. But also a play, or a sonnet. The pun is also in King Lear, right at the beginning.

Curiously enough, 'worser spirit' appears only twice in all Shakespeare. The second one came after the sonnet, also in KL. Same verb 'tempt':

GLOUCESTER

You ever-gentle gods, take my breath from me:

Let not my worser spirit tempt me again

To die before you please!

EDGAR

Let's exchange charity.

I am no less in blood than thou art, Edmund;

If more, the more thou hast wrong'd me.

My name is Edgar, and thy father's son.

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices

Make instruments to plague us:

The dark and vicious place where thee he got

Cost him his eyes.

So the worser spirit tempts you to have sex if you're young Gloucesrer. To the little death of sex. If you're older it tempts you to real death - it makes you conceive the idea.

And if you're a poet maybe it makes you write a sonnet and then, later (when you're older, and notice the young/old Gloucester idea) you revise the idea and write a play.

So at some level KL has a faustian ingredient which came from the sonnet(s), which -as James Saphiro has noted- Shakespeare used to experiment with ideas that would later appear in his plays. Proofs of concept!

Conversely, the voice of the sonnet is the voice of a character, a hypothetical voice, and not literally Shakespeare the man. And maybe the hypothetical voice of this character was faustian in nature, at least sometimes.

Was the Author of the plays faustian too, at some level? The last play written solely by him, The Tempest, does reference Faustus obliquely. Maybe there's a conceptual link between Edmund's mother and Sycorax - Caliban is called thing of darkness in the play.

So here we see Jess' and the other women in his (future) life. Leslie leading him to them.

Maybe the idea is future Jess' mind/heart being conditioned by the completeness he knew with Leslie and then by loss.

For him, Leslie will always have to be there with the other future women and of course she'll never be, being dead.

Maybe Jess will be happy, but non-Leslie, that shadow, or that angel, or that absence, will always be there. There's something sad about that.

In the last two shots we have another angel. Another blonde woman. But this one's sitting instead of walking and this one is old and this one looks away just when Jess is about to be looked at by Miss Edmunds. There's something just as sad, if not more, and seemingly tied to mortality, Jess', about that too.

Pics 1-2. Sonnet 144 and Gloucester in KL. Those are the only two times these two words occur in all Shakespeare.

The sonnet dates back to at least 1599. Lear was written around 1605. So those words from the sonnet appeared in Shakespeare's mind while writing Gloucester. Why?

In the sonnet the worser spirit is a woman. And maybe this was also the case with the duke. With his mind.

If you look at pics 3-4, the idea is reinforced I think. Edmund's mother. Her dark and vicious place -the women's dark and vicious place- which is here compared to hell - and Lear begins by mentioning Gloucester.

KING LEAR

Let copulation thrive; for Gloucester's bastard son

Was kinder to his father than my daughters

Got 'tween the lawful sheets.

To 't, luxury, pell-mell! for I lack soldiers.

Behold yond simpering dame,

Whose face between her forks presages snow;

That minces virtue, and does shake the head

To hear of pleasure's name;

The fitchew, nor the soiled horse, goes to 't

With a more riotous appetite.

Down from the waist they are Centaurs,

Though women all above:

But to the girdle do the gods inherit,

Beneath is all the fiends';

There's hell, there's darkness, there's the

sulphurous pit,

Burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie,

fie, fie! pah, pah! 

"There's hell, there's darkness". Again, the sonnet:

[...]The worser spirit a woman coloured ill./To win me soon to hell, my female evil/Tempteth my better angel from my side[...]

As far as the so called Dark Lady is an idea or a psychological abstraction (and note the pun on 'conceive' - you can conceive a child but also a sonnet or a play), and not a real person, we can probably say she appears in KL.

And by the way, and speaking of 'conceive':

Sonnets to the Onlie Begetter of These Insuing Sonnets Mr. W. H.

CORDELIA

Good my lord,

You have begot me, bred me, loved me

KING LEAR

Is it the fashion, that discarded fathers

Should have thus little mercy on their flesh?

Judicious punishment! 'twas this flesh begot

Those pelican daughters.

Begot=father. So W.H. was the father of the sonnets/daughters and W.S. the mother/conceiver? Is that the idea? Well women marry their fathers, a protector, or so they say.

First picture. Lor San Tekka and Father Merrin.

Same actor. And look at the names: Lankester Merrin. Lor San Tekka.

Lan-kes-ter. Lor-San-Tekk(a).

Same consonants (L r,n,s,k,t), and a three syllable name vs a tripartite name. Some sort of permutation.

Lankester: a priest and an archeologist. Lor-San-Tekka: some sort of Indiana Jones, belonging to the Church of the Force.

Now, second picture. Regan and Palpatine.

Back in 1974, while writing the 2nd draft of what would become ANH, George Lucas wrote some notes describing the 'sith knights', as he called them. 'Like Linda Blair in The Exorcist', he wrote.

That's Palpatine: yellow eyes, disfigured eyes, grey skin, guttural voice.

The girl's name Regan comes from Rex, king. (A masculine name, like Rey) That's what Palpatine wants to be. Originally, and according to Pablo Hidalgo, the boss in episode IX was 'Sith King', without specifying whether he was going to be Palpatine or not.

So the idea is: there is a Greater Power or Powers. Palpatine was someone else's pawn. Someone else's Snoke. There's always a bigger fish, as Qui-Gon said.

This Big Fish is still out there. It's always been maybe.

In 1980 we saw Vader bowing before the emperor. But it was not the first time Vader had bowed in Lucas's mind.

George Lucas' 1976 story conference with Alan Dean Foster about Splinter of the Mind's Eye:

George Lucas: We also wanted to have a scene where Vader goes and bows before the Force and the Force picks him up and tells him that he better go out and get that crystal... But it’s not the Force personified; it’s on the verge of personification. Maybe it’s a shadow or something.

Alan Dean Foster: The ultimate...

Lucas: It's the ultimate evil. It's the devil.​

In the Shadow of The Sith novel we have FG Anakin mentioning an 'ancient shadow'.

By the way, Shmi was originally called Shmi Warka in a TPM draft. 'Warka' is 'Uruk' - Iraq. Same word. That's when we find father Merrin and the statue of Pazuzu at the beginning of Friedkin's film.

Spoilers ahead.

In the film we have Carrie Anne Camera, played by Kiernan Shipka.

But in those flashbacks we see her when she was a girl.

They don't look like each other at all. Not only their faces. Shipka has brown eyes. The girl has blue eyes. Also the hair color.

The age difference is not a persuasive argument. They are too different facially and your eyes don't go from blue to brown just like that (and of course if you look at Shipka as a girl -that's the pic above- you can see the difference even more clearly)

Are we really supposed to believe they're the same girl? What if Shipka killed the camera girl and then someone made sure Shipka became the Camera girl as far as the paperwork was concerned? Longlegs is called Kobble and we see an 'Agent Kobble' in the film credits.

Shipka does mention killing on 'his' command during Lee's visit.

Is that why Shipka was cast? Because that's what her character does in Blackcoat's Daughter.

Sad, spooky (and humorous in a sad and spooky way here and there). Thoughts?