The Invisibles by Grant Morrision - study group and exegisis

luka

Well-known member
One of the things I like about pulp is that unabashed use of popular tropes, tropes which become archetypes and seem to stand for something eternal and inescapable. Episode one of The invisibles is full of them.
 

luka

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I remember seeing as a child the bit in planet of the apes where charlton Heston finds his friend in the cafe captured by apes and his friend is just... not there. His mind has been zapped. He doesn't recognise him, he can't talk. He's alive but he's been erased. Very horrifying, very disturbing for me to see that. A terrible fate.
 

luka

Well-known member
These dreams of erasing the personality which really pick up steam in the 20th century
 

luka

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The perverse individual who shatters the palace of crystal, just because he can.
 

luka

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the school system is the larger part of this. you could read this as a kind of dream version of the literal truth of school in which you are snatched away from home, tortured, experimented on and sorted into various streams which then determine your life outcomes.
 

luka

Well-known member
The Invisibles makes this explicit. Harmony House and school are the same thing. Indoctrination camps. Inhuman conformity factories. Dane blows up the school and kicks his teacher in the face (yeah!) only for King Mob to blow up Harmony House and shoot the director in the face.
 

luka

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Harmony House is school and Dane is King Mob. Dane has his gang. Gideon has his.
 

luka

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Dane sees through time to Lennon haunting to same stretch of docks as he is mooching in as Mob converses with Lennon the god form. Britpop haunts the cultural horizon.
 

luka

Well-known member
I remember seeing as a child the bit in planet of the apes where charlton Heston finds his friend in the cafe captured by apes and his friend is just... not there. His mind has been zapped. He doesn't recognise him, he can't talk. He's alive but he's been erased. Very horrifying, very disturbing for me to see that. A terrible fate.

You get the same thing in the Pullman children's books where the children are abducted and their daemons are surgically removed.
 

luka

Well-known member
Again, the invisibles is a far far better, smarter book than the Pullman stuff but it's working with the same myths.
 

luka

Well-known member
Mr Gelt tapping into the guilt debt tax gold money sin nexus of energies Stan has been tweaked by recently.
 
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