Roman’s Baby (Seeking Closure at Cielo Drive)

Now is not a good time for Roman Polanski.  With somewhat grim, though also poetic, irony, this means it is a good time for me, to be sharing this new film I made, while finishing up a new book about the Hollywood superculture of organized abuse and the criminal underworld of which Polanski is just one of the more overtly guilty practitioners. (He is also the first film director I admired and emulated as a teenager, so it is perhaps inevitable he would land in my “net.”)

This is a summation of the new film’s content:

Polanski’s rise to prominence in Hollywood and proximity to the underground Hollywood S & M pornography scene; the many parallels with intelligence blackmail ops such as Jeffrey Epstein; & a shocking alternate theory of the motives behind the Cielo Drive murders. Includes Charles Manson’s coded admission from 1991, and eerie parallels with Rosemary’s Baby and Polanski oeuvre: like Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, the movies reveal what the idealized image of Hollywood conceals.

I did not choose the word shocking merely as click-bait; this truly is shocking to me, because for so many years I have admired Polanski, considered him a beguiling, fascinating, and charismatic “genius.” So it has been very hard for me to believe he could be involved in something that is easily as malevolent and destructive as anything depicted in his movies.

But awakening is never easy, and part of it does seem to require, for me at least, a disorienting period of transition, from unconsciousness to consciousness, during which the dream starts to turn to nightmare.

I am aware that this material will be disturbing, and even horrific, to some; it is really meant to be, not because I want to imitate Polanski and horrify people with my “art,” but because there are aspects of this case (the Cielo Drive murders & the Manson Family), even now, with the new (insider?) counter-myth of Chaos and the (definitely insider) doubling down of Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, that are being kept off the table & so preventing us from making sense of the grisly spectacle. So it behooves (some of) us to look again, and look more closely.

They say that the brain cannot file away an experience if it contains serious anomalies, like a tongue that keeps going back to the sore tooth and aggravating the infection. We are captured not only by the horror, but also by the glamour that conceals it, and the combination of the two is what traps us in endless reruns and remakes.

If only the truth sets us free, this is my attempt, forty years after my Polanski infatuation-fascination was first seeded by the images he projected into my soul, to make sense of this picture, and turn away from the screen.

 

8 thoughts on “Roman’s Baby (Seeking Closure at Cielo Drive)”

  1. Jasun,

    I just realized that the dream I had of you last month, which I had posted as a comment on October 27 on your Dave Oshana blogpost,
    https://auticulture.com/calling-all-nervous-systems-to-inter-planetary-tuning-dave-oshana-on-how-to-finally-get-some-satisfaction/#comment-53449

    really belongs in this comment section since the dream portends your present literary crusade against Hollywood as you explain to The Skrauss. Let me copy it here

    ===========================
    October 27, 2019

    Jasun,

    For the last few days, I’d been preparing to jump into the enlightening discussion here. However, I was inscrutably interrupted by having a dream last night involving you riding a horse through my San Fernando Valley neighborhood.

    Actually, you must have come to visit me because I gave you directions from my home here in Van Nuys to travel North, which may indicate that you were intending to go home to BC which lies due North from me in LA.

    I watched you ride to the corner intersection, take the right turn to go North, but then, you changed your mind and you started riding the dark brown horse in a circle, made one revolution and then started travelling South. I followed your progress somehow, perhaps I was watching you from a drone camera.

    You were riding South toward Sherman Oaks/Studio City, which means eventually, assuming you kept to your southerly direction, you would be going “over the hill” as we say here (over the transverse Santa Monica Mtn. range) to descend to Beverly Hills or West Hollywood.

    But I also noticed that you were not a lone cowboy, not a Clint Eastwood as High Plains Drifter, the only horseman traversing avenues filled with cars and trucks and no other horses. I realized that you were actually leading an entourage (or was it a posse?) of others, but they were all driving cars.

    I came to that realization because I recall feeling worried about you being struck by a car but then as I watched your progress, I saw that the cars behind you were part of your posse or entourage. So perhaps you were storming Hollywood. (You were definitely not being a tourist!)

    That’s where the dream ended. Later in the morning, I was trying to figure out why you were riding a horse. At first, I wondered if it was my cheeky autardic sensibilities making a rebus-like visual pun: “Hey look, Jasun is riding a Horse-ly!” Nyuk! Nyuk! Nyuk!

    But such autistic glee was fleeting and so I quickly gave up interpreting the dream. However, all of a sudden, a miracle happened! Or at least a great synchronicity which I believe will help you to interpret my dream instead.

    I was channel surfing on cable-TV and happened upon the ending of the 2011 film “Cowboys and Aliens”. And there you were, riding off into the cloudy sunset on your dark brown horse. You, being the Daniel Craig character who was the amnesiac outlaw saving the West from the aliens, but actually losing the girl because she sacrificed herself to blow up the aliens in the rocket ship.

    So, what was the name of this amnesiac outlaw character played by Daniel Craig? Jake Lonergan! (If that surname is a play on the name Lohengrin, then I must needs dub you as Jake Lohengrin, the son of Parsifal and a Grail Knight riding on your Horse-ly – which is so much cooler than being pulled by swans in a boat.)

    (Here is a pic I found from the movie. Pretty close to my dream image!)
    https://tinyurl.com/y6cr6f3g

    ===============

    November 22, 2019

    Looking at the map, I think it highly significant that I saw you riding your Jake Lohengrin Horse(ly) due South because the direct line from my house in Van Nuys to the Tate house at 10500 Cielo Drive is just under 8 miles at a heading within 2º of due South.

    And if I were driving to the Tate house, the shortest route would be Beverly Glen Drive uphill to Mulholland at the top, then nearby Benedict Canyon Road downhill to the Cielo house. What’s significant here is that just a mile and a half east at 12850 Mulholland Drive is the estate of Jack Nicholson where Roman Polanski bedded the 13-year old girl in 1977.

    At the time of the dream I had no clue you were writing a new book about the Hollywood super-culture, so perhaps the dream is a prophetic marker on your timeline. Assuming you came South from Vancouver to Los Angeles, your passing by my house means you have completed 99% of the journey, with the last 1% being your storming the “castle wall” represented by those Santa Monica Mountains.

    Finally, I will note that 20 years ago, there was a movement in the San Fernando Valley (my side of the hill North) to secede from the Los Angeles basin (the Hollywood side of the hill South). It didn’t get very much traction, but the significance for the dream is that the proposed name for the new seceded city would have been Camelot!

    And since I am writing this comment on November 22, 2019, on the 56th Anniversary of JFK’s death in Dallas, I leave you with his favorite lines from the Broadway musical and movie:

    Don’t let it be forgot,
    that once there was a spot,
    for one brief shining moment,
    that was known as Camelot.

    Reply
    • thanks for commenting, on Black Friday JFK death-day

      what did you think of the video & its thesis?

      I ask partially (besides being a praise-junky) because you have expressed views that suggest a low tolerance for conspiratorial viewpoints.

      Reply
      • Well, Jasun, you are very adept at putting people into double-binds, so how is that for some praise? In this case, if I praise you too much, it will feed your habit and I will feel like an enabler, not to mention insincere. But if I don’t praise you enough or at all, then I run the risk of being shunned by making your enemies’ list.

        But all decent double-binds allow the freedom for a feasible though precarious balancing point which is the dynamic you demand (I see myself straddling the see-saw fulcrum and working to keep my equipoise.) So thank you for that wider than average latitude to straddle.

        Maybe I can equalize it all by damning you with faint praise, which is my own insolent double-binding response. Rather than give you a hit of heroin, I will offer you some methadone.

        I have a low tolerance for conspiracy viewpoints that generalize or globalize too much too soon up the hierarchical chain of being/command that constitutes the structure of all conspiracy viewpoints. Actually, the reverse is true in that all bad conspiracy theories will start from the generalized top and work down to “vacuum up” the local details to fit into the paranoid schema. (I was trained in this from childhood since I grew up a devout Irish Catholic lad in NYC tenements, receiving 12 years of strict Catholic education, so I was steeped in hierarchy and conspiracy from Jesus on down and Satan on up.)

        Like the Tip O’Neill dictum that “all politics is local,” I maintain that all good conspiracy theories should be local and start from bottom up while all bad conspiracy theories from the top-down will, ipso facto, generalize or globalize too much too soon, ab ovo. My own physiological test for marking on the local-global spectrum is to note the intensity of my eye-roll when I delve into the viewpoint at hand.

        So when I read your conspiracy offerings, my eyes do not roll — with one exception I’ll get to later — and thus you stand out from the crowd of coarse conspiracy mongers by striving adroitly and assiduously to keep it local.

        As for the Manson theory you propose, it sounds quite plausible since you are moving bottom-up on the issue. The key point will be seeing where and how you merge the Bottom-Up data with the Top-Down projections, something none of us will be able to figure out until you publish the Hollywood book.

        So how about some divinely secular intercession here. I will begrudge you more praise if you will de-grudge me and offer your impressions, if not interpretation of my dream about you.

        Reply
        • Well, Tom, in fact this is much closer to the sort of feedback I like to get – which is not so much praise as acknowledgement that lets me know the message has been received (it’s called communication). Even Cedomir’s one line above about Manson comes as welcome validation that I am not alone in finding this material compelling and clarifying (I almost typed enlightening there).

          So thanks for dialling back the trickster in you and sharing a useful comparison between top-down and bottom-up conspiracy theory. I might add that, central to the bottom up, locally-situated version is the implicit acknowledgement of complicity-with as opposed to subject-victims-of; for if there is a local conspiracy afoot that encroaches all the way into our daily lives, then it can only end (and begin) inside our own skins.

          I didn’t know Parsifal had a son, a significant fact in itself, i.e., that he did & that I didn’t know it, being that Parsifal is the Fool (generally not seen as the marrying sort) and seeing as I have always wanted to have a child but never have. Jake is the name I went by until the age 41, 2008, the year I was officially to have given up my Hollywood dream save for a curious intervention that told me to keep on rolling. Lonergan suggests loner-again (or loner-gain), i.e., the resurrection of the isolate Hollywood fake (the One) Jake striving for success, the internal image generated by a combination of Hollywood spellcraft with my own missing-father-complex, the image being, of course, that of Clint Eastwood (later John de Ruiter), the Man with No Name (or home).

          In Beyond Dirt, the film I stated but never finished in 2009, with Indian Joe the gold panner, I described the two of us as the Cowboy and the Alien. I am an alien who dressed like a cowboy, though now more like a logger, which suggests again an external imagistic persona sourced in Hollywood, being only a disguise to allow me to infiltrate them thar Hills where there is a whole lotta dirt (so maybe there IS gold there?)

          Now the thing about dreams of course is that they speak of the dreamer more than the dreamed; so unless you wish to claim a Parsifal-like gift of prophecy then the real question is: what do I symbolize to you in your dream? And what does it signify to me that you have this dream of me? And how does it pertain to the dance of begrudge and degruding that has unfolded here over the years between us? Do you see me as a Shane-like loner, leading a posse of road warriors and storming the gates of the Holy wood to set you free from your cultural entrancement so you can become the autard (fool) you know you have it in you to be? & if so, is that what’s flickering behind the mixed messages of attention-seeking projections & provocations that caused me to toss you into the pit of moderation – until you sorted out your motives for being here? Which is an Hollywood insider who has my route mapped from the ground and so can give me some valuable directions?

          I guess you saw the title of the book, at the end of the video?

          Reply
  2. Very interesting clip of Manson at the end. He spewed so much nonsense over time that I honestly didn’t expect something as informative as this short clip.

    Reply
  3. Hi Jasun,that was a very interesting chat,and your right that Polanski is creepier than Mason, the irony! My thought’s for what there worth is Mason was always the actor, and was happy to play the part of the “Monster” That clip of him at the end was probably him telling the truth,there is another clip of him at the end of an interview where he says something very interesting to the film crew…Its the last few seconds of this short piece on Mason https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5t2yGPSNTg&lc=z22nxpyxhsreevdeeacdp4313uvjql2dzktfdbd0mutw03c010c&feature=em-comments
    Also Strange is category A prisoners in the states are only allowed to see there lawyer/family/or religious ministers,not give interviews to msm, of which Mason gave dozen’s, and in them he seems to be allowed to do what ever he please’s,wandering around the room,getting up close to the interviewers and camera crew, I thought he was supposed to be a dangerous killer? Look forward to your book..Mike

    Reply

Leave a Comment