Symbolism you've noticed?

Symbolism is used pretty much everywhere where someone who knows about symbolism is left in charge.

Seriously, there’s too much of it to begin listing!

tin foil hat alert I see a lot of Illuminati-type or attributed symbolism now in film and TV. Two examples that come to mind are The Golden Compass, where every human’s soul exists outside the body as an animal-form “daemon.” During the scene that shows the “Magisterium,” an elite, secretive governing body, the daemon’s that belong to magisterium members include the snake and the owl, both of which are symbols attributed to Luciferianism and Babylonian religion. (“Magisterium” also refers IRL to “the teaching body of the Catholic Church.”) A shot of an owl also appears apropos of nothing in the film “Roswell” right after a military officer reveals to the main character that the recovered wreckage is, in fact, a UFO.

The movie Magnolia was about 82% symbolism.

@dalepetrie – and I missed about 105% of it. Frogs?! What the hell? GREAT sound track though.

The frogs:

OK, if you noticed the # 82 EVERYWHERE in the movie…it was 82 degrees and sunny, or an 82 percent chance of rain, or the phone numbers like Frank TJ Mackey’s phone # or the cop’s voicemail box on the dating line, the apartment # in the opening vignette, the cards in the opening vignette, the coil of rope on the roof in the opening vignette…82 was EVERYWHERE.

In one crowd scene in the Quiz Kids show, an audience memeber is holding up a sign that says “Exodus 8:2”, which says, “If you don’t give up I will smite your borders with a plague of frogs,” or something to that effect. Remember just prior to the frogs, they were all singing “Wise Up” by Aimee Mann….“it’s not going to stop, until you wise up.” All these people were at crossroads in their lives, and they had reached this point where their lives were not going to get better until they gave up on their old hangups and wised up. The frogs were the catalyst, the sign that it was time to give up/wise up and they were a device used to drive home the greater theme of chance and coincidence as a role in our greatest life changing decisions. The whole opening was about all these strange things that seem so outrageous, so unbelievable as to seem almost divine in nature, but yet they did happen. You may notice in the library where the Quiz Kid is studying, there is a picture on the wall, and they flash a shot of it just before the frogs start to fall, and in the corner, there are words, “but it did happen.” It’s all meant to symbolize the greater message of the entire film….that coincidence is a natural part of life, it is how we deal with it that makes our lives play out as they eventually do, and that our guiding principles should be wise by not dwelling on those strange occurrences which just happen. There’s certainly a lot more symbolism than that, but like I said, the movie in and of itself is about 82% symbolism.

You may have guessed it’s my favorite movie.

Keep an eye out for the number 42. Which is, of course, The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Watch Hitchcock and Kubrick films if you want to see a lot of symbolism.
Or study the facades of most of the pre-1900 federal buildings in DC.

But, don’t forget Sigmund Freud’s observation that, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”.

@steelmarket – and whatever you do, don’t forget to bring a towel.

@dalepetrie – Wow that is cool. I am going to go back and watch that again now. Thanks!

@Bri_L – hope you enjoy it more this time! It’s a powerhouse of a movie if you actually “get” it.

@Bri_L – a couple more notes to blow your mind. One is that the whole 8:2 thing was added after the fact, writer/director PT Anderson didn’t know about Exodus 8:2 and only learned of it when someone told him just prior to filming. The whole study of strange phenomena as part of everyday life was actually the focus of a man named Charles Hay Fort, on whose writings Anderson based his main theme. The concept essentially is that things we regard to be coincidental are indeed rather commonplace…it’s like you may have heard of the mathematical fact that the odds of any two people in a room sharing the same birthday are greater than 50/50 if there are at least 28 people in the room, which makes sense if you understand math, and odds and factorials and such, but intuitively you’d think you’d need 183 people, not 28 (notice the 8 and the 2?). Anyway, Fort had an idea that all of these weird things originated from a place called the “magonia”, which is what Anderson co-opted for his title.

Now the whole point was driven home by the fact that all of these weird occurrences…the 3 that set up the film (even though 2 of the 3 are actually urban legends) did actually happen (again, supposedly). Such was the frog scene…indeed even though there is a bible passage (which Anderson didn’t know about when writing) about smiting one’s borders with frogs, he got the idea of putting in a large coincidence such as this from Fort’s writings (one of Fort’s books is being read by the Quiz Kid btw). Anyway, looking for a grand occurence, something that seemed unlikely, but which actually did happen to serve as the backdrop (the point being that these characters were dealing with so much that even frogs falling from the sky seemed commonplace…which it should, because after all, it DID happen), he read about an occurrence in 1997 in a small town in Mexico where a tornado passed over a lake teeming with frogs, and spewed the frogs all over a neighboring town.

One thing that Anderson DID originally intend for the film’s symbolism was masonic symbolism…if you’re at all familiar with Masonic symbols, you’d notice a lot of them in the TV studio (including one on Jimmy Gator’s ring). So given all these great referneces to 82, the Masons, and the idea of chance, one very interesting thing that was not in any way planned prior to the filming was that it just so happens that Mason Lodge #82 is located, of all places, in Magnolia, Arkansas! Thus proving in real life the whole point the movie was trying to make.

@dalepetrie – Sweet! Thanks. I can’t wait to see it again!

Benjiman Button has alot of Symbolism

@keybo
Cool movie. I picked up a huge poster at the theater with the Polar Bears-it’s like 7 feet.. I’ll sell it on ebay in about 20 years.
As to Symbolism it’s these “Gelatinous zooplankton” that I’m seeing everywhere,
First it’s Squidoo with the one eyed tentacled freak and now these jellyfish—I read somewhere that they are much more intelligent than we give them credit for as well. And how about the invasion in the South China Sea with an all out onslaught on Japan “their numbers have grown a hundredfold in some areas off Japan”> Hmmmm…I fucking hate jellyfish..but am fond of the fluther.. http://tiny.cc/HHUg5