Sitting through movies has always been especially hard for me. Now that I’ve conquered that obstacle thanks to prescription medication, I’m faced with another difficulty: deciding what the hell to watch.

After all these years of aimlessly scrolling Netflix, a new strategy occurred to me. Between the self-help books I read in 2022 and through general cultural osmosis, the concept of “healing one’s inner child” is a phrase that seems to be recurring around me. Let me tell you: my inner child is still pissed off that all of the movies at Blockbuster looked cool as shit, but I wasn’t allowed to watch any. My parents were pretty strict about what I could and couldn’t watch, so while my peers were renting the cool PG stuff, I was stuck in the kid’s section renting every consecutive Land Before Time. And so my strategy was born: I decided to watch all of the weird and shitty movies that I wanted to rent as a kid, but wasn’t allowed to.

So, what was on an eye-level shelf for a 4-foot-tall 10 year old at Blockbuster in the late 90s? What were these forbidden, tantalizing fruits of Hollywood craftsmanship, these highest expressions of the cinematic arts that until now, were locked away behind PG+ ratings? Well, in 1997, there was a horror movie called Jack Frost, which had a freaky 3D shapeshifting cover depicting a snowman with fangs. This of course, is not to be confused with 1998’s Jack Frost starring Michael Keaton, which I thought was the same movie until about three minutes ago. Next was Scary Movie, which to continue the theme, I thought was the same movie as Scream until I was in my mid-20s. In the drama section, I really wanted to watch Where the Heart Is, Anywhere But Here, and Autumn in New York, since I was convinced that I’d grow up to marry either Natalie Portman or Winona Ryder. Turns out I dodged a bullet, since all three of these movies have pretty rancid ratings on IMDB, and obviously these women are way too old for me.

Winona Ryder couldn’t save Autumn in New York, and she couldn’t save 1999’s Girl Interrupted either, but that didn’t stop me from fantasizing about renting it. What could a movie called Girl, Interrupted be about, I wondered? At the time I assumed it was a sort of Fight-Club-for-girls movie with a shoegaze soundtrack and at least one scene with girls interrupting their heterosexuality for one another — how disappointed I ended up being. The real Fight Club came out in 1999 as well, but because the cover only showed a very badly photoshopped Brad Pitt holding a bar of soap, my imagination had no idea what to do with that info. Were they washing a lot of cars or something? American Beauty was another 1999 arrival, not to be confused with American Psycho which hit the shelves in 2000: both wholly inappropriate a 10 year old for completely different reasons.

But of all the Blockbuster movies whose covers I remember with vivid clarity and which piqued my imagination the most, Almost Famous comes in at #1. Oh yes, what an iconic cover. I’d say that American Beauty has the true iconic movie cover from the era, but for some reason, Almost Famous was the one that stuck with me. I find it interesting that just as with Girl, Interrupted, my imagination was creating a detailed assumption of what the movie was about, what kind of soundtrack it would have, who that girl was, and what did it all mean? Strangely, I always thought it was Alicia Silverstone on the cover. Add that to my stack of assumptions, I guess.

If I look at the cover of Almost Famous again now, after having watching the real movie as it actually exists, I can still get the essence of what I assumed back then: a movie about a woman, maybe it’s a road trip movie. She’s mysterious, probably in her mid-30s. There’s at least one scene in a desert, and one in a diner. Is she like the Mona Lisa? Does she have a secret that she’s about to tell you? Whatever the secret is, it’s ultimately very tragic and depressing and she’s probably going to die in the end.

As a blow-by-blow list of plot points, sans desert and age-range, I wasn’t too far off as a kid. However, the problem with having such a longstanding fantasy about a movie is that real, human people already wrote it, and sadly, they didn’t consult with me in order to make it to my specifications. A list of plot points is pretty meaningless without any consideration for tone, pacing, soundtrack, or cast. Imagine Almost Famous, directed by David Lynch, or Stanley Kubrick. Both of those movies would be bizarre as hell, and potentially delightful. The thing about those directors, however, is that they’re both interested in showing hidden, subconscious truths at the edges of what passes for reality. Cameron Crowe is…not. He’s not interested in that at all, which makes the Almost Famous that exists even more bizarre.

Almost Famous is a movie about a child prostitute/groupie that overdoses on quaaludes after she’s traded to another band for $50. That’s it. That’s the main gist of the movie. If you’ve never seen it, you might think, “wow, that’s really dark,” and you’d be right. “Rock and roll” is a phenomenon which exists in the public imagination specifically because it was dark, subversive and frankly frightening to the people who encountered it for the first time. The movie doesn’t seem to be interested in reckoning with that though, and the whole thing comes off like a Disney Channel Original Movie about how aces and neato it is to tour with a real-life jamboree posse groovy RockTM band!

I guess, at the end of the day, it would be pretty neato, but there’s something alarming about the overwhelming schmaltzy positivity of this movie. Really. Nothing bad happens to ANYONE in this movie. Everyone gets a completely happy ending, just like real life! There’s almost no mention or conversation about rock’s troubled relationship with drugs or alcohol: the band members are constantly seen with beer and whiskey in hand, but on only one occasion is a band-member depicted in a drunken/drugged state and even then, it’s comedic and cool. Then, there’s the tacit acknowledgement that sleeping with groupies is bad — not because they’re children, but because the bandmates have other girlfriends (hopefully adults?). Later, the band dumps their old manager for more money, which turns out awesome for them and they get a sweet deal, no hard feelings to that other dude. They almost die in a plane crash, but they don’t. The guitarist gets shocked in an ungrounded mic incident — it’s cool, he gets up and walks it off. Even the mysterious young woman on the cover wakes up slightly worse for the wear after having her stomach pumped in a hotel bathroom — all good here, no party foul! It was all for the best because if she hadn’t almost died, the main character child couldn’t have kissed her, since he had to do it when she was passed out.

I’m sort of at a loss for words with this movie, which isn’t great, considering that I’ve chosen to write about it. But still though, there is actually something compelling about it in a morbid way which makes me want to write about it, particularly because it isn’t morbid at all. If I were to be charitable to this movie, one could easily interpret the events as being witnessed through the lens of real naiveté. The main character is a grade-skipping 15 year old boy suffering under the excessive authority of his presumably narcissistic mother, and his Golden Retriever personality isn’t capable of seeing anything dark or negative about the situation at all. The drunk people don’t act drunk because he doesn’t understand anything about drugs and alcohol besides “woo, acid is wacky!” and the groupies seem like consenting adults because everyone older than him looks the same age. (As a person who watched Reality Bites in high school and thought Winona Ryder’s character was a really whiny 35 year old, I fully understand that phenomenon). Crowe even alludes to this in an interview, saying “…I never really felt there was some kind of predatory experience going on. Maybe that’s because I was 15 and 16, and people just knew that I had some rose-colored glasses on because I just loved music.”

Even then, it doesn’t change the fact that adult Cameron Crowe wrote this movie. It doesn’t do to make assumptions, but I would say that most of us make some general strides in maturity between the ages of 15 and 43, which is Crowe’s age at the time of the 2000 release. Yup, a man in his 40s wrote and directed this movie, unironically. It seems that somewhere along the way, he might have taken the time to reflect on the difference that 30 years’ hindsight can make, and used this to craft a nuanced account of an immature young man thrust into an explicitly mature situation, reckoning with the realities of rock-almost-stardom with all of the seedy danger and questionable conduct that entails in three dimensions. Instead, he writes a movie that says: “dear rock-metal music, you are so cool that I could almost crap my pants! When we were on tour, there were a lot of hot, weird chicks hanging around which was cool, and I promised my mom I wouldn’t smoke pot, so I didn’t.”

After about the first 20 minutes, I found myself thinking, “Gee, I’m glad they didn’t bother to lie about this movie being based on a true story,” since obviously the premise is so silly that it could never happen. Here I was, stunned again. Not only is this based on a true(-ish) story, but Cameron Crowe himself really did write for Rolling Stone as a 15 year old and tour with The Allman Brothers and their real-life child-groupies. I think it’s a testament to the sugary tone of the plot that even when this guy is writing a true story about his own, real life, it feels so fake and unbelievable that I assumed it was fiction.

There are some parts of this movie that work well, actually astoundingly well. The problem with them is that they almost seem yanked out of another movie, and all feature Kate Hudson. Wait, Kate Hudson? The girl who makes all of those horrible rom-coms with Matthew McConaughey? Yes, that was my only experience of her before this movie – I didn’t even know she could really act. And wait, how old is she in this movie, 12? Well, luckily for Cameron Crowe, she was “of age” at the time of filming, so he could do a ton of extra, super excessive wide angle shots of her staring into the camera like Alex Borstein’s Mad-TV Bjork or spinning around on the floor so that you can tell that he–I mean–his write-in, William, is falling in love with her. Before I did my double feature and watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High, I actually found these sequences kind of sweet and endearing. I mean, who hasn’t fallen in love with a somewhat eccentric, blonde, Piscean woman with a substance abuse problem and low-self esteem? Anyone? I’ll explain later how this was spoiled, but I do think he accurately captures what it feels like to be drawn to someone, whether a healthy attraction or not is debatable.

I’m going to make one defense of this movie in an otherwise rude review, and it’s a defense that I’m surprised to find myself making. The interview I linked above features a question I knew would appear if I Googled this movie: “Is Penny Lane from Almost Famous the dreaded manic-pixie-dreamgirl?” I think not actually, and I was sort of pre-figuring this as I watched the movie. Crowe is able to skate cleanly out of this criticism because this is a character based on a real person. Yup, apparently there was a real Penny Lane, who chose to spell her version Pennie Lane for bonus originality points. I think it’s fair to say that there are real human beings who fall (or fling themselves) into the manic-pixie-dreamgirl mode without having it done to them by wistful male writers. I have certainly met a few, ranging from downright delightful to tolerable in small doses. I think his explanation does stand though, since the character and her motivations do feel real and plausible in an otherwise un-real and un-plausible movie. I feel that if one were to experience this era, there would be groupies who behaved and dressed and polarized people the way that this character does. This in contrast to other manic-pixie-dreamgirls who seem to show up in plots and situations where they’ve clearly been written in to make a statement. Besides, I don’t find the Penny Lane character to be too manic. Just…you know. Childish, since she’s a child.

That’s all I have to say about this one. My rating is “Crank it up to a 4 out of 11 because I thought it was crap, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it”. I’ll round off the double feature by explaining how Fast Times at Ridgemont High makes Almost Famous an even shittier movie in hindsight.

In the Harry Potter series, JK Rowling attempts to work in a few bland, gormless cultural critiques along the path to the final battle with Voldemort. Classism is bad, she says, since it produces such stinky and unredeemable people as Draco Malfoy and the rest of his Slytherin pals (so, roughly one quarter of the Hogwarts population). Prejudice is bad too, and bucktoothed Hermione Granger proves that despite one’s lowly birth, one can succeed through a little old-fashioned elbow grease. There’s the throwaway, and much maligned bit about Kreacher, Winky and the rest of the wretched house elves, who despite being offered the chance at freedom, fling themselves back onto the wheel (and into the bottle) because being a slave is simply what they prefer, thank you very much.

What is even more interesting though, is the blaring cultural critique in what Harry Potter doesn’t say. The books are strung through with endless references to the wizarding community being present, everywhere, but just out of sight. Our bleary Muggle eyes glaze over and slide across houses that aren’t meant for them to see. Sometimes, we notice people who look a little funny, but their mismatched raincoat and bowling shoes are their inept attempt at Muggle disguises. There is an entire wing of the Ministry of Magic devoted to making sure that wizards DO NOT, under any circumstances, do magic in front of the witless lay-people, under pain of going to a very weird prison where monsters will aggressively kiss their souls out of their mouths. There’s never any real appraisal of what that means, in a greater sense, to have a parallel society of powerful magicians living next door, everywhere. Why do they still hide? What if they didn’t? Is there a world in which things could be different? What does it all mean? 

Well, what should it mean? We can forgive Rowling just a smidge, on the grounds that this is a series of children’s books (which is a controversial opinion, apparently), and she’s not out here trying to do deep philosophical work on the futility of life, or man’s cruelty towards his own race. Still, if there really were a secret parallel society of wizards running around, which was still engaged enough to have its own cabinet minister that meets with the Muggle government each year, wouldn’t that warrant even a moment of reflection somewhere in the series? We’re told that St. Mungo’s hospital can cure the incurable and bizarre diseases from all corners of the globe. Broomsticks and cars can fly, so presumably, they require no fuel besides the imagination of a wizard skilled in charms. One can even hop from one chimney to the next with a bit of powder (hopefully fair trade). Even the lowliest family presented in the book, the Weasleys, have a magical pair of knitting needles to make and mend their clothes, and magical spoons that stir their pots, meaning that manual labor is broadly unnecessary (which is ironic considering that despite this, the wizards still prefer slavery. Maybe it’s just a British thing?) Regardless, the wizarding world, it would seem, could lift the entire world out of poverty, illness and hunger, even going so far as to end wars of scarcity by reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. Wow!

It’s amusing that Rowling doesn’t even try to write her way out of this nuclear-bomb-blast sized plot hole. It would have been easy for Harry to say, “Gee, why don’t we use our powers to end wars of scarcity by reducing the Muggles’ reliance on fossil fuels?” Dumbledore or Cornelius Fudge could simply tut him, and refer to an earlier attempt to do such a thing, which ended up causing a greater war of some other kind. No, it seems that the wizards and witches of the Potterverse are more preoccupied with hiding the Wizarding World Cup from prying provincial eyes and opening candy shops where people can buy chocolates that make them shit their pants, than stopping the aforementioned nuclear bombs from dropping, keeping millions of people in the British Empire from starving to death, or curing cancer or HIV/AIDs. Maybe the STDs are the reason why it’s frowned upon for wizards to date muggles? 

Of course, in order to bypass all of this bleeding-heart humanitarian nonsense, Rowling can lean into that ever-present invisibility cloak: the plot device of secrecy. If the wizards were found out, the book implies, bad things would happen. The many knowledgeable Potterheads can of course correct me, but I don’t seem to remember there really being an explanation of what bad things, exactly, would happen. I think there was a scant reference to witch burnings, or mass hysteria, and the world falling over on its side. It’s true that even the arrival of pleasant, peaceful aliens would probably propel our world into the same chaos as the arrival of the ones from Mars Attacks, but it seems to me that the real subtext is about more than just “the muggles will freak out, so don’t turn into a cat in front of them, okay?” 

The most obvious evidence of this is seen in the mind bending speed with which the Ministry of Magic can cite a wizard for waving their wand in front of Muggles: something around 30 seconds, even for an accident, in Harry Potter’s case. Rowling may have been writing this, either consciously or unconsciously as a nod to the British public’s concern with increasing public surveillance under the Blairites in that very same era, but Rowling makes it clear that this is a net benefit to society, or at least a necessary evil. If the Ministry of Magic can’t see you magically evaporate your poo in a public restroom, the whole of wizarding society may crumble!

All of the wizards in the Harry Potter universe seem to happily go about their lives, without ever thinking about any of the wiggly plot points I’ve mentioned above. They wake up, their magical toothbrush brushes their teeth for them, and then they go off to work. After work, they can go to the pub and talk shit until the wee hours of the morning, since all of their children go to a free private school. Wait, what exactly do they do for work? Well, we can’t really say, can we? Approximately ½ of the adults in the series work for Hogwarts (although they’re often sacked after a year or two, or work the job until they are literally so old that they die and still teach as ghosts), while the rest are either shut ins (Sirius Black), home-makers (Mrs. Weasly) or do random odd-jobs like dragon taming or “washing dishes at the Leaky Cauldron.” It’s not even really clear why they have to work, since slaves cook the food, and magic can be used to do basically everything, including conjuring raw materials. Still, Harry Potter comes of age and trundles off to work, following in the footsteps of a teacher he had for one year, who he thought was actually a sort of cool, old curmudgeon, but turned out to a be an evil, psycho killer pretending to be the evil curmudgeon guy, to become a wizard cop. 

It’s as if Harry might suddenly turn to the camera and give a monologue in the style of High-Fidelity (it helps that John Cusack could play a passible, mopey adult Harry): “Helping Muggles would be dangerous. Why? Well, the last time we tried that, they fainted. Stupid morons. I know, I used to live with some. A couple of them died during this whole Voldemort thing. That was pretty sad, sure, but they were just Muggles, after all. They’re not like us. No, even the stupidest and poorest among us is worth a thousand of those small, thoughtless little people. We wash dishes at the Leaky Cauldron, thank you, not filthy Pret À Manger. Sure, we could put some more beds in St. Mungo’s, do a whole “save the children” bit. But if we let in Muggles, where does it end? Goblins? Giants? French people? French giants?? No, that won’t do. They’ve got to solve their own problems. It’s not as if their lives are inextricably linked with ours or anything. Let the whole of London burn. Our buildings are all insured by Gringotts, and then we can go build somewhere nicer, maybe Beaconsfield, if those hook-nosed goblins ever pay out. Oh, I forgot. Every year, a few muggles manage to pop out future Hogwarts students, but we just bully them once they get to school so they don’t get too uppity. You see? Things here just work. Does our wizarding world have its own problems? Yeah, sure. We can’t vote, there’s manufactured scarcity, the Ministry of Magic is always watching, and I accidentally threw my wife’s knickers to the house-slave, so now she has to do all of the laundry! But solving the world’s problems is a fantasy. It would be really hard, and I might have to miss the Chudley Cannons game tonight, or take time off from throwing people into the creepy soul prison for minor civil infractions — the same one my god-father almost went crazy in. What, you thought this was a book about magic??”

As every franchise ages, we see it more clearly as the era that produced it becomes subject to our clearer hindsight. Harry Potter is a thoroughly Neo-Liberal fantasy, in which the thought of improving the world becomes a silly and unrealistic endeavor: so silly, in fact, that the characters never even stop to think of it at all, which says more about JK Rowling that it does about Harry Potter and company. Is it really a surprise that in her elder years, JK Rowling has outed herself as a thoughtless reactionary, lacking any real ability to empathize with some of the most vulnerable members of society? It seems a shame that American Republicans reacted with mass hysteria to Harry Potter on the basis of witchcraft being scary, since these represent a perfect metaphor for their Ayn Randian politics of selfishness. 

  “Helping the muggles is too dangerous,” the adult Hermione thinks to herself as she bursts through the fireplace into her luxurious office. It’s been a long five years, tending to her duties as the Minister of Magic. She sits down at her desk, brushing a few stray cinders from her velvet robe. Her assistant is late with her tea, as usual. 

“It’s a shame they can’t improve their lot by themselves,” she thinks. “After all, I did it. Why can’t they?”

I picked up this book looking for a very basic primer on the history of Western occultism, and I got what I wanted in about half a book’s worth.

The opening chapter gives an introduction to the precursors of the Western tradition: Kabbalah, Alchemy and Tarot (later linked by Eliphas Levi, etc). These are two subjects that I could probably read about forever and never feel as if I’d gotten a real grasp of the entire subject. These are included in the book less as a comprehensive overview and more as a setup for some of the practices of later, household-name occultists, but still provide a pretty good baseline. Not something I’d ever reference again probably, but a good stepping off point to know what I ought to read about later.

The second chapter is similar to the first: setting up some of the motifs of Freemasonry and the Rose Cross to be found in the western occult tradition without really going into too much depth. I guess I’ve never been the sort of person who was too much interested in “secret societies,” and reading briefly about them makes me even less interested, considering that, at least per this book, the original Rosicrucian documents may be the work of a couple of anonymous randoms and not constitute any real confraternity at all. Still, the Golden Dawn and the French Belle Époque Rose Croix groups are based heavily off of the symbolism and tradition of these two groups.

Chapters three and four deal with The Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley, which were the two most interesting chapters for me — not because I find either the original Golden Dawn or it’s Crowleyan branches to be super interesting, but because they are names I’ve heard repetitively for years and wanted a way to situate them historically in broad brushstrokes. This book 100% did the trick and I got exactly what I needed out of these two chapters, with some pleasant spotlights on the women of the Golden Dawn, which the group famously and kindly allowed to participate. Crowley is of course…I would say unpleasantly portrayed here. I want to avoid spending a lot of time on him, because he seems to attract a lot of cringelords, and maybe to be a prototypical cringelord himself, though I think that may be a bit unfair. I’ll probably read another book about him at some point, but he’s not really my style.

The fifth chapter was unexpectedly nice, and dealt with Dion Fortune, Austin Osman Spare and Rosaleen Norton. I’m not familiar with Norton, and I’m not particularly sure if I find her method and practice compelling, though her personality runs directly counter to whatever Capricornian impulse I have to stay within the lines at all cost. I find Spare to be very compelling, and his art style is almost the most interesting thing about him, though Norton’s style is sort of lackluster so I think that’s why I’m also not as interested in her work.

The sixth chapter is about Wiccanism and other goddess religions as originally fostered by Garner and later Buckland, though I’ve been clear before about finding these practices to be perfectly good for the people who like them, but not necessarily for me. Gardner comes off as a bit dodgy to me, though you could say the same for a lot of occultists generally, and a bit of a self promoter at the expense of any authenticity. I remember of course reading that groups which fracture and splinter and are beset by a bunch of infighting generally have a specific sort of malady that could be remedied by some common garden wisdom, but of course never is. This rings true for both Crowley and Gardner at certain points.

Seventh was sort of interesting to me as I’ve always been curious about whatever the hell Anton Lavey was up to. Turns out it’s more post-psychedelic 60s riffing on organized religion, presumably without much substance. Of course, this book is less kind to Lavey than it is to Crowley, so of course my judgement may be skewed, but Lavey always seemed to me to split the balance between a Donald Trump and a Marilyn Manson figure; some mixture of freak-em-out and soulless showmanship. Like Elvira but not funny or cool. Of course, Temple of Set seems more rigorous, and is a direct offshoot of the Church of Satan, but then again, I’m not sure what kind of mark it leaves or what it is intending to really do. Temple of Satan being a whole different gig entirely, just to make things more confusing.

Chapter 8 treats Jung, Carlos Casteneda (who seems to go down some kind of rabbithole way to esoteric for me to follow, though his acolytes seem to like him), another post Castaneda white shaman named Dr. Michael Harner, and a practitioner of a Scandinavian shamanism called Seidr. Then there’s this bizarre romp through the life of yet another white guy, practicing Voudon, who apparently lived/lives not too far from me in Chicago. Some more research into this Michael Bertiaux, who I’m assuming is not alive, brought me to a blog where one of his former students accuses him of what essentially amounts to sexual assault and plain creepiness, which again, welcome to Western occultism.

There’s a last gasp of a chapter which treats Terrence McKenna, and then a dated section about what it would be like if in the future, pagans can hang out in internet chat rooms. Well, we all see how that turned out.

All in all, a solid book that gave me what I wanted: a very brief, broad introduction to some of the names I’ve been hearing forever, with a good setup of Medieval precursors. Again, I don’t know if I’d use it, or need it for reference, but it’s a great jumping off point to read about some of the figures he mentions.