Deconstructing December's Dismemberment PT3

Last month, Michael from Gosporn sent me this photo in an email with the message "coffee + circumpunct = smiley face"

He was inspired by the coffee cup next to the "tear in the fabric of space" we looked at in the K2 SyncStrom Goes POP! post.

I ended PT1 of this series with the note that I've been caught in a pattern where smiley faces keep coming up as connected to stargates or wormholes.

In Part2 of this series, we looked at some of Terry Gilliam's films as they connect to stargates and revisited the idea of Heath Ledger as the Hanged Man.

Recall that, in Gilliam's Dr. Parnassus, Ledger is found with a rope around his neck and a Hanged Man Tarot card in his pocket:

Ledger is found by Parnassus' crew, which includes Verne Troyer, the ever-present microcosm or MiniMe.

Recalling TheSyncWhole's Severed Fist post, Gilliam had two films produced by George Harrison's film company, HAND Made Films, which even has a dismembered Hand as its logo.

One of these films was Life of Brian, which we looked at in Pt2.

The other is Time Bandits - and it stars a bunch of MiniWe's, including Kenny Baker, who played R2D2. Aside from the obvious hand-severing StarWars sync, there's a personal connection here for me. Years ago I did a comic with the uber-talented Jeff Plotkin where Kenny Baker is a bad-guy that teleports me, Alan, into a farflung future. In the story, Kenny Baker was the source of my time-travel (getting me lost in the time stream, actually). In the end, he is defeated by my ex-girlfriend, Rosa (herself an awesome artist - go check out her out). Weirder still, her birthday is the same day as the Winter Solstice and Lunar Eclipse.

Here's two pages from the comic just for kicks. I had to dig them out so I hope you enjoy em.

Anyway, I decided to rewatch Time Bandits last week and I had my mind sufficiently blown.

If you've never seen it, Imdb gives us this summary:

Kevin, an imaginative child, goes on a time-travelling adventure with a bunch of treasure-hunting dwarves, who have "borrowed" a map to the Universe's time holes from The Supreme Being.

About 5-10 minutes in, this scene gives us a shot of the television with a nice double-sync, where a Hanged Man has one of his limbs highlighted by a cast on his leg. So we know something important is about to happen.

Kevin turns away from the TV show his parents are watching and goes up into his room to await more high weirdness. What do I spy on the wall next to his bed? A smiley face! There is even something red dangling in front of the smiley face, giving us the bloodstained smile that was so iconic from the Watchmen comics. That'll be important later so keep that in mind.

Of course, confirming the smile=stargate pattern, right after we see the smiley face, a "tear in the fabric of space" opens up and brings all the MiniWe's into Kevin's room. He gets pushed up against the wall and we see a picture of a knight, just like the one that appeared in his room the evening prior. The knight is what first suggested that there was a "time hole" in his room . This syncs with Michael's look at the time-traveling Mark Twain book, A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court.

That last shot is (perhaps intentionally) in direct resonance with the Scott Pilgrim stargate that Eleleth examined on his blog.

But okay, maybe there's only so many ways to draw a stargate. But, if you want weird, as soon as the Time Bandits pass through the StarGate, the very next thing we see is a freaking goose and duck!

...See TheSyncWhole's Goose is Loose and my New York Duck posts as well as Eleleth's Donald Duck obsession - and I use that word affectionately :)

To make it sync-in, the falling Time Bandits actually land directly on our feathered friends.

So now they start explaining about how the map they have shows the locations of all the stargates or time holes or tears in the fabric of space or whatever term fits you best.

Something about all the map talk reminded me of a film I hadn't seen since it first came out, The Blair Witch Project. One of the few things I remember about that movie was when one of the guys intentionally throws their map into a river. Though it kills them in the end, the tossing away of the map actually allows the Blair Witch filmmakers to find the object of their original search. I forget all about Time Bandits, which is still playing on my TV, and get lost in a metaphysical question.

Something I keep thinking that all our synchronicity studies may be doing is mapping out the fractal nature of time and space. It's as if we are drawing up a map, perhaps even the one the Time Bandits hold. Yet, we have also come to understand that there is a natural flow to the universe. So, I start wondering if we should be following our fractal-maps or if we should just let the river carry us to our destination.

BAM! One of the Time Bandits says:

We all have those friends who "want to meet somebody" and wonder why they never find love. Isn't it true that one only finds love when they're not looking for it? Maybe that applies to everything. Maybe us grail searchers, if I may use that term poetically, can learn a lesson from that. I don't know what that means to any of you or how we can apply that in a practical fashion, I'm just cluing you in to the answer the universe gave me when I asked it something.

Just to quickly log the sync, the characters follow the river and it takes them to where they meet Napoleon. He's watching a puppet show (which ties in nicely with the hand-puppet as severed-hand connection made at TheSyncWhole). He also makes a point of telling them how tall he is, which is 5 feet 1 inch - giving us the 51 (3x17) we find associated with Osiris, Egypt's green-skinned dismembered god.

They next travel to where they meet another Green Man, Robin Hood - and the sync is cemented as they give Robin Hood the treasure they stole from the 5'1" Napoleon.

Robin Hood's thieves catch the Time Bandits in a snare trap (It's A Trap!) and all the MiniWe's are hanging upside down, bringing us back to the Hanged Man.

The Time Bandits try to convince the thieves that they are ruthless, and so are asked a few questions to prove their ruthlessness. Question number one: Would you...

Question number two: "Pick teeth from blind old ladies?"

You may recall that teeth were mentioned in the other post where I posted some of Jeff Plotkin's artwork.

Teeth are also brought up in connection with Smiley Faces in Steve Wilner's Cracks In The Wall #7. I highly recommend this podcast.

Question number three:

Ah, here we go. Dwarves hanging upside down being asked about children's toys. Not only did I do a post about "Toys" directly after getting that photo from Michael, but the SyncWhole team connected these two movie posters to the Decemberment theme:

And yes, that's Leslie Nielsen as Santa, who we already connected to George Harrison and their strange Stargate attraction. Remember, Harrison produced Time Bandits and recording music for it.

33 and 1/3: Reflection over face? Check. Baby bump? Check. Hey! You sunk my monolith.

But, let's back up a second. Gnomeo and Juliet?

In TheSyncWhole's most recent post, a connection is made between Shakespeare and crashing through windows. Specifically, they make reference to a Woody Allen film where Charlize Theron distracts the driver of a car (by making sexual passes at him while he's driving) and causes him to crash.

I remembered that the same thing happens in The Man Who Wasn't There, when Scarlett Johansson distracts Billy Bob Thorton. (Let's also note that they connect Theron to the Norse god Thor and Billy Bob's name actually is THORton.)

But, as to the Shakespeare-Broken Window thing, in Man Who Wasn't There, Thorton sits in front of a window talking to the man who he will later kill by spearing him through the neck! The character's name is Big Dave (Dave Bowman?) and he offers Thorton a cigar. He calls the cigars "Romeo and Juliet."

Now, let's examine that shot, cause there's a lot in there.

The first thing I noticed is that the light fixtures on the ceiling look a lot like the BatMan: Dark Knight logo. Remember, they are sitting in front of a glass window.

He's saying "Romeo and Juliet," echoing our hanged man...

...And of course we already know who he is.

Then I notice that the "N" in the circle, here it is again:

Is reminiscent of the perfume bottle showcased in Watchmen.

It's explained that the Thorton's wife, who Big Dave is sleeping with, works at this highlighted "N" department store so that she can get a discount on the perfume she likes.

Many of us have been toying with the Mars/Arms wordplay. Well, in Watchmen, that perfume bottle heralds a teleportation to Mars by a man with a circumpunct on his forehead, Dr Manhattan.

"coffee + circumpunct = smiley face"

Now, once Big Dave and Thorton get into a fight, Thorton is pressed up against that window they were smoking in front of earlier. The glass cracks (echoing the Charlize Theron broken window).

This also echoes the opening scene to Watchmen, where a man wearing a smiley face button gets thrown through a window...

...getting that red mark over the smile which became Watchmen's trademark.

Although, it seems someone beat Alan Moore to the punch. That red mark over the smiley face was hiding in the corner of Kevin's room in Time Bandits. And it appeared just before he was taken through a "tear in the fabric of space."

The question is, are we witnessing a window being opened right now? What kind of future can we see on the other side? I, for one, see a bright tomorrow. I'm just hoping it doesn't take a crash to carry us across.