THANK YOU for making the summer pilot program a success! This week is the last time to apply for a summer reading. I’ll be returning in September with a more intimate fall offering—so if you’re curious about working with me, this is your chance to get a reading at a reduced pilot program rate.
Email zeitvillemedia@protonmail.com for a little PDF about these one-hour recorded readings. These are designed to give you clarity on any choices you may be facing this summer between two or more options. Using your astrological natal chart, plus an understanding of current economic and social trends, I give you a game plan for the weeks ahead.
You can find my ebooks here.
For the February 25 newsletter this year, I wrote about Dennis Hopper’s neo-noir film, “The Hot Spot.” I had never seen the film before, and was riveted by it. In particular, the ending shocked me: Harry, the nomadic anti-hero, ended up with his tormentor Dolly, instead of his redeemer Gloria.
It was an illuminating portrayal of how individuality will break the mold of conformity in uncomfortable, even mysterious ways—leaving us with inconclusive endings and questions without answers.
This was a period of time leading up to the late March/early April eclipses. I was quite preoccupied with things happening in the retail market. Diminished quality control but also unrest among employees. Those predictions turned out to be true during eclipse season, and we saw disruptions hit big brands, from Target to Taco Bell.
Echoing this spring passage, we are now about a month away from fall eclipse season.
Similarly, my focus for today’s newsletter is on disruptive individuality. In your own life, you might want to review anything that happened in late February for clues about right now.
But perhaps more importantly, this point in August represents the climax of our summer story, so we’re deeply investigating how we’ve confronted the limits of sense making lately.
Of course, what’s been happening with Biden and Trump has been Exhibit A in this summer’s unraveling of sense making. But there’s more arriving on our plates.
Jagged events that fracture reality are practically guaranteed to happen locally and on a macro level. No doubt political disturbances will play a large role, but so will any news of markets going haywire. Transportation and infrastructure—especially electricity and the internet—may be affected by glitches, to the point that it triggers a cascade of unexpected events.
I’ve already anticipated that Kamala might be a core focus in August, in the newsletter previous to this one, discussing the potential chaos about to be unleashed by the Democratic National Convention.
But as you all know, I am more interested in what will happen to us locally—at the level of our hearts, bodies and minds.
So I look to another neo-noir, released in 2006, titled “Down In The Valley.” Ed Norton plays our anti-hero this time, and Evan Rachel Wood is our heroine. Warning: spoilers ahead.
In “The Hot Spot,” Harry was pulled in two directions—Gloria the Pure and Dolly the Spoiled. It was two ways to look at the feminine, but it also represented Harry’s reality as a drifter. He was in search of a pure home to start over in, but in the end, he chose the dusty path again by getting hitched with Dolly.
Somehow when it seems we’re doing the same thing over again, we’ve really split off in a new direction. This is how disruptive individuality expresses itself during a time of endings and full circles in our wasted culture. You find freedom through revisiting old ideas with fresh eyes.
“Yes, indeed, I’ve found my level,” Harry says as he and Dolly ride off into the sunset in the final shot. “And I’m livin it.”
“Down In The Valley” goes even deeper into this theme of people experiencing a fragmentation of their consciousness—with an ending just as shocking.
Let’s dive in.
Good Cop, Bad Cop
Instead of a man standing between two women, this film is about a woman standing between two men.
Ed Norton’s character goes by Harlan Fairfax Carruthers—a name straight out of a western pulp novel. We can guess that’s probably not his real name, and as he drifts around a modern metropolis in cowboy gear, we wonder if his accent is real, too.
Everything seems make-believe around Harlan, but that’s part of his magic.
Evan Rachel Wood is October—she goes by Tobe, for short.
We wonder if that’s her real name, too—it sounds like a name given to a hippie “love child.”
She’s a rebellious young woman who feels cutoff from her own authenticity. She’s bored. Stuck.
She and Harlan meet at a gas station during spring break—she’s with friends on the way to the beach.
Harlan says he’s never been to the beach, because he doesn’t have a car. This modern Don Quixote literally prefers to get around on horseback.
The attraction is instant and the two strike up an unconventional relationship—much to the disapproval of Wade Summers, the father.
Or, we should say, stepfather. Or not even that. Legal guardian.
It turns out that Tobe and her younger brother Lonnie were adopted by Wade, who is a corrections officer. It’s a real sly move by the director, because at first we’re led to believe that Tobe and Wade fight because she’s upset about her parents’ divorce.
But Wade is not her biological father, and he doesn’t have a wife, preferring to cruise bars with a woman we see only a couple times. We’re not sure what to make of it. Did he adopt two kids in their teen years out of some sense of duty? The film does talk about how hard it is for teen orphans to be adopted, so maybe Wade saved the day. Or is he a widower?
Or is there something darker, perhaps—a need for control? Wade always appears in black, the classic black knight/bad cop trope in westerns. He slaps Tobe during fights and breaks her stuff. Lonnie watches in horror.
So of course, Harlan opens the way for Tobe and Lonnie to see their surroundings in new ways. They go for burgers, shoot glass bottles, dance until the late hours.
Wade watches the relationship with his typical grumpy demeanor, but when Harlan steals a horse for a day to take Tobe for a ride, they’re picked up by local police—and now Wade wants to lock down Tobe even more.
We come to learn that Harlan’s real name is Marty. He’s an orphan, too. In a couple scenes, we watch him monologuing from his motel room to a man named Joe.
At first, we imagine it’s his old employer on a ranch. But then we learn that Joe is his dad, who we never see. There are some hints that his father might’ve been a priest, but the film suggests the priest also could’ve been his stepdad—a Wade-like figure.
Harlan is a tragic character. He brings a sense of wonder and love to everyone he meets. He simply wants a sense of heroism in a world turned dusty and dead.
“You’re a nobody who wishes he was a somebody,” Wade tells him in one vicious fight leading to the climax.
In many ways, Harlan is extremely capable. He’s good with horses, guns and people who feel outcasted. One of the most beautiful scenes in the film is when he and Tobe go partying on the town with her friends. He’s dressed in white. The horse he rides is white. Everybody seems so happy and liberated.
But Harlan becomes increasingly volatile, and his smooth talking ways often get the better of him.
Wade catches him taking Lonnie out, and threatens to kill him. There can be only one father figure. Is it the good cop—or the bad cop?
Now Harlan is desperate because his lover Tobe says it’ll be difficult for them to see each other. We see Harlan pacing his motel room, toying with his gun, seething, ruminating.
He concocts a plan to run away with Tobe and Lonnie. When he brings the plan to her, she freaks out. Rattled by her reaction, he shoots her in the stomach before even realizing what he’s even done.
He’d been practicing a confrontation with Wade for hours, so that he’d become blind to the freedom he represents.
Likewise, the need for a scripted escape is how you’ll see many people, including political figures, caught in a situation that falls apart by the second. Something unruly breaks through, scattering the practiced plan to the winds.
Narratives run away, like a wild horse. Freedom turns to imprisonment.
Plotting a way to decide between two choices—Kamala vs Biden, for example—groups may unexpectedly force an ending that precipitates a chain reaction.
In your own life, this could feel like a whirlwind whipped up in the face of an urgent decision.
Hair Trigger Decision
It’s a terrifying scene as Harlan then runs to the side of the highway and shoots himself in the leg, so he can lie to Lonnie that he and Wade had a shootout.
The young boy rides off with Harlan into the wilderness, and a search and rescue team is unleashed.
Harlan kills a couple of cops during the pursuit. He and Lonnie stumble on the set of an old Wild West town, but when the bullet wounds become real, the reenactment actors flee the scene.
The old world as Harlan knew it is gone—and as much as he honors it, not even he can live in it, by virtue of his own actions.
This is the critical distinction of our time: so many utopians and cultists exist in our cultural landscape, but it’s those who truly act on their passions and values that are nomads without a home.
To love utopia these days is in some ways to destroy it.
Only those who live smugly in the mind believe they can have their cake and eat it, too. Utopia exists for them because they dare not act in an attempt to truly build it. Their values have no gunpowder. Their values are for show, like an old Wild West set.
So Harlan and Lonnie ride further to the frontier—they go so far into the wilderness that they end up at the cusp of a developing suburb.
They hide in a half finished house that, while modern, looks like an old adobe mansion at the same time. It’s the old world, seen through new eyes.
In a dramatic shootout, Wade kills Harlan. Many reviewers write that they were dismayed and angry at this ending. It certainly feels heartbreaking—like a kind of dark conclusion that romance cannot survive in the modern world.
Suddenly, we’re aware that it isn’t a game anymore. This is a very realistic portrayal of a man who pushed boundaries and ended up on the wrong side of a gun. Despite the film’s impressionistic moments, you could actually see this being a true story.
But the more that I thought about it, the more I realized that this was actually a transcendent, utopian outcome for Harlan.
He was a man who practiced gunfighting and expressed love for his queen—he made his dream a reality. And so for him to die in a such a way—well, it was like a testament to the authenticity he sought. Would he wanted it any different?
We see Tobe scattering his ashes at the end, as Wade looks on. Tobe may have recovered from her bullet wound, but is she better off staying with this controlling man?
It’s all very hard to say, and each element of this film truly sums up our summer.
Many of us have felt pulled between two choices or paths, like Wade (a controlling path) and Harlan (wild and unexpected).
Each path also has been riddled with deception. Is Harlan really a sociopath? And is Wade actually an abuser?
That’s the thing, we could start to think that none of our choices are any good, because there are too many unknowns. Or we could think that, at bottom, they’re essentially the same, even though we can’t decide which is the lesser of two evils.
There are just so many questions, and yet within this state of intrigue, we find hope and magic.
Director David Jacobson does an excellent job of conveying this with his smoky monochromatic landscapes: everything feels like a blank canvas even though it’s riddled with doubt and uncertainty.
Riding Off Into The Sunset
Right now, you may be feeling a bit like Tobe: hearing the call of adventure and freedom, but choosing to stay in a “home” that gives you certainty, however cold, however controlling or stagnant.
This is what our summer has brought you to, this moment.
It’s not about being forced to choose now, though. I would honestly suggest that you take your time and not rush things right now.
Revisit those hot spots in your memory—look back over the summer and see how much you’ve learned. Shifting back and forth between security and the unknown, it may seem like an ending is forever slipping out of your grasp, prolonging what you hoped would be some kind of clean break.
But much like the characters in this movie, there is always a blank slate hanging around a jumbled, confusing mess.
It’s right there in front of them. In fact, it beams out from their eyes, onto the landscape.
What “Down In The Valley” teaches us is that our perception shapes the world, and perception emits from the flame of individuality that we carry within us.
Yes, it may be a shifting flame, and so the promise of possibility one moment becomes a feeling of certain doom the next.
This is the alchemical crucible through which the characters learn about themselves.
That’s a scary thing to experience. Reality is so kaleidoscopic right now, as the Trump assassination attempt showed us. Is it a conspiracy? A miracle? Both?
Likewise, is the goal or the relationship we’re trying to attain right now a smoky fantasy or a hope that we can turn into a concrete reality?
Where’s the stage for a hero, when all is a wasteland?
Our former Public Square is now a cacophony of perspectives trying to crowd into a territory that’s no longer stable.
And yet, I think we will look back on summer 2024 as a beautiful adventure.
It has brought us to the point where we realize that the wasteland will give birth to something new.
It taught us that there are new horizons to ride off into, even though we may have initially set off for someplace specific, and found that it doesn’t exist.
Life turns non-linear soon as we realize that our choices aren’t “one and done.”
Choices don’t happen in a vacuum. They mutate our world, just as the world presses back upon us.
Choices aren’t badges, lifestyle tokens or other talismans we parade on social media for acceptance and clout.
Choices are the crack of the gun at high noon—a trigger pulled with raw instinct, wired into the call of adventure.
Paradoxical choices can leave us with more questions than answers, sure.
But somehow they split our brain open, they give us MORE of life, they give us new perspectives about what’s possible, opening up the horizon.
Onward.
THANK YOU for making the summer pilot program a success! This week is the last time to apply for a summer reading. I’ll be returning in September with a more intimate fall program—so if you’re curious about working with me, this is your chance to get a reading at a reduced pilot project rate.
Email zeitvillemedia@protonmail.com for a little PDF about these one-hour recorded readings. These are designed to give you clarity on any choices you may be facing this summer between two or more options. Using your astrological natal chart, plus an understanding of current economic and social trends, I give you a game plan for the weeks ahead.
You can find my ebooks here.