MAVERICK CITY CINEMA PRESENTS:SECOND SIGHT-Prophets, Frauds & People Who Saw Too Much

A Film Program by Dax Silver

There is a particular kind of person who has always frightened civilization more than the murderer, the thief, or the revolutionary.

The person who says:

I know something you don't.

Not because they read the report first. Not because they bribed the right clerk or crawled through the appropriate air duct. They know because they saw. Dreamed. Felt. Received. Divined. Heard a voice from the wallpaper. Looked into your hand and discovered Tuesday.

Civilization hates this person.

Civilization also pays this person extremely well.

Thus we get the medium, the oracle, the carnival mentalist, the prophet, the debunker, the mesmerist, the fraudulent widow-whisperer and, inevitably, the professional skeptic who has made disbelief into an occupation and therefore has almost as much financially riding on the universe remaining orderly as the psychic has riding on it becoming strange.

Welcome to SECOND SIGHT, six films about people who claim access to information unavailable through approved channels.

Some are lying.

Some are not.

Some begin lying and encounter the profoundly inconvenient possibility that the cosmos has decided to cooperate.

That last category is where things get interesting.

Because fraud does not disprove mystery.

Fraud proves there is a market for mystery.

And where there is a market, someone will eventually rent a tuxedo.

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THE MIND READER

Roy Del Ruth, 1933

The Depression produced many great American businessmen.

Warren William plays one of them.

His Chandra the Great is a carnival clairvoyant who realizes that prophecy need not be accurate so long as it is professionally delivered. Give a man the right robes, sufficiently mysterious lighting and a stenographer hidden somewhere behind the curtain and suddenly capitalism has invented omniscience.

The Mind Reader understands something unpleasantly modern: people do not merely want information.

They want certainty performed for them.

The psychic sells tomorrow in convenient portions.

William's character isn't simply conning rubes. He is manufacturing narrative. He takes random events, private anxieties and ordinary coincidence and rearranges them until they resemble destiny.

Which makes him less distant from the modern influencer, pundit, guru or algorithmic prophet than anyone should find comfortable.

The great horror of The Mind Reader is not that clairvoyance might be false.

It's that clairvoyance might be unnecessary.

Human beings will provide most of the machinery themselves.

Tell somebody you can see their future and watch how quickly they begin writing it for you.

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THE UNINVITED

Lewis Allen, 1944

Eleven years later, the fraud has disappeared.

Now the house knows something.

The Uninvited belongs to that exquisite strain of supernatural cinema in which ghosts are not merely frightening presences but historical evidence.

Something happened here.

Someone suffered.

Someone lied.

The architecture remembers.

This is where clairvoyance begins changing shape.

There is no carnival pitchman promising revelation. Knowledge arrives through sensations, séances, emotional disturbance and those inexplicable moments when one room in an otherwise ordinary house develops the atmospheric pressure of a confession.

Noir is usually obsessed with buried crimes.

The Uninvited merely allows the dead to participate in the investigation.

Its supernaturalism feels almost forensic. The ghosts are evidence that refuses proper filing.

And that is perhaps the most elegant proposition in the entire series:

what if haunting is simply memory without a body?

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BURNT OFFERINGS

Dan Curtis, 1976

By the 1970s, the séance table is no longer sufficient.

The entire environment has become psychic.

Burnt Offerings gives us a house that seems to operate according to a logic its inhabitants can feel long before they can articulate it. Knowledge arrives as discomfort, recognition, repetition and image.

Nobody receives a telegram from the beyond.

They simply begin knowing things incorrectly.

Or knowing them too early.

Or realizing that they have already participated in something they believed had not yet happened.

This is clairvoyance without a clairvoyant.

The supernatural has escaped the medium and entered architecture.

The house behaves less like a haunted location than an organism performing some obscure digestive process upon the people inside it.

And here SECOND SIGHT makes an important turn.

The first two films ask whether people can perceive hidden realities.

Burnt Offerings asks whether hidden reality might be perceiving them.

Suddenly the observer is being observed.

The telescope blinks.

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THE PSYCHIC

Lucio Fulci, 1977

Seven Notes in Black

Cinema has always been clairvoyant.

It shows us things before characters know them.

It rearranges time.

It cuts from one place to another without crossing the distance between.

It gives us faces, rooms, objects, gestures.

Then it asks us to assemble meaning.

Lucio Fulci simply makes this process lethal.

The great brilliance of The Psychic is that its protagonist possesses genuine information and remains endangered precisely because information is not the same thing as understanding.

She sees fragments.

A room.

A wall.

A body.

An object.

A sound.

The images are accurate.

Their interpretation is catastrophic.

Most stories about prophecy assume the problem is whether the vision is true.

Fulci asks the better question:

What if the vision is completely true and you misunderstand what you saw?

Now clairvoyance becomes editing.

The psychic is a film editor working with footage delivered by an unknown director who has neglected to provide continuity notes.

She has the shots.

She does not have the sequence.

And somewhere between those two things is death.

Of all six films, The Psychic may provide the purest expression of second sight as curse.

Not because seeing the future is terrible.

Because seeing is not comprehension.

Every idiot with eyes already knows that.

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THE BROOD

David Cronenberg, 1979

At this point David Cronenberg enters carrying several extremely upsetting medical diagrams.

We have progressed from fraudulent knowledge to supernatural knowledge to fragmented knowledge.

Cronenberg is no longer interested in knowledge.

He wants anatomy.

The Brood takes the hidden life of the psyche and commits the unforgivable act of making it physical.

Emotion becomes tissue.

Trauma develops metabolism.

Rage acquires hands.

This is where the old spiritualist dream finally mutates into body horror.

For centuries mystics insisted that invisible forces acted upon the material world.

Cronenberg replies:

Fine.

Show me the tissue sample.

The results are unfortunate.

The psychic no longer sees beyond ordinary reality.

Psychic reality begins reproducing itself inside ordinary reality.

Suddenly metaphor has organs.

This is one of Cronenberg's recurring obscenities against good taste and philosophical tidiness: he refuses to allow mind and body to remain polite neighbors.

Thought contaminates flesh.

Flesh reorganizes thought.

Nothing stays symbolic for long.

By the end of the 1970s, second sight has undergone its strangest transformation yet.

The invisible no longer needs someone to perceive it.

It has learned how to grow teeth.

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RED LIGHTS

Rodrigo Cortés, 2012

And so, after eighty years, civilization calls in the professionals.

Enough curtains.

Enough ectoplasm.

Enough haunted real estate and prenatal metaphysics.

Bring instruments.

Bring methodology.

Bring people who know how the trick works.

Red Lights gives us investigators whose profession depends upon exposing fraudulent psychic phenomena. They know the techniques. Cold reading. Stagecraft. Manipulation. Suggestion.

They have seen behind the curtain.

Then someone arrives who makes the curtain problematic.

This is the necessary ending for SECOND SIGHT because the series cannot conclude by announcing that mysticism is true.

Nor can it conclude by declaring the whole thing nonsense.

Those are terribly boring endings.

Instead we return to the original problem.

Someone claims to know something.

Someone else says prove it.

Between them sits an audience.

Us.

Waiting.

Watching.

Wanting desperately for one of them to be right.

Perhaps both.

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THE PROPHET AND THE PICKPOCKET

There is an understandable belief that skepticism and mysticism are natural enemies.

They are not.

They are twins arguing over inheritance.

The genuine seeker and the competent skeptic are both irritated by the same person:

the fraud.

Because the fraud cheapens mystery while exploiting belief.

But here is the wrinkle.

Charlatans flourish precisely because human beings suspect there may be something behind the curtain.

The fake medium exists because grief wishes the dead could speak.

The false prophet exists because uncertainty is unbearable.

The carnival clairvoyant exists because tomorrow refuses to publish a schedule.

The debunker exists because somebody must occasionally inspect the table for wires.

None of this tells us whether the universe contains mysteries.

It merely tells us that wherever human beings encounter uncertainty, somebody will eventually print business cards.

Across these six films, clairvoyance evolves:

THE MIND READER
Knowledge manufactured.

THE UNINVITED
Knowledge buried.

BURNT OFFERINGS
Knowledge intuited.

THE PSYCHIC
Knowledge fragmented.

THE BROOD
Knowledge embodied.

RED LIGHTS
Knowledge contested.

Eighty years.

Same question.

If someone tells you they can perceive something you cannot, what evidence would satisfy you?

And perhaps the nastier question:

How badly do you want to believe them?

The séance room is dark.

Someone has locked the door.

A glass moves across the table.

It may be a spirit.

It may be a wire.

It may be the person sitting beside you.

You lean closer anyway.

Of course you do.

You bought a ticket.

DAX SILVER
Maverick City Cinema