Harry Redmond was a special effects artist in Hollywood when cut and paste was not a metaphor for a keyboard click. He was famous for his work on the film King Kong. 1930s audiences were thrilled and moved to the edge of their seats by the effects of stop-motion spiritual awakening movies photography and live action projected on to the cinema screen, as Harry and his team convinced them that a 25 foot-tall gorilla could climb the Empire State Building — the world’s tallest building — single-handed while holding a wailing actress in the other hand.
A little lower down the totem pole Harry, who died recently aged 101, created the famous transition scene in the film The woman in the Window. A film noir and famously perhaps the film that originated the genre, The woman in the Window is a Faustian drama of an aging man’s obsession with a femme fatal who effectively materializes out of a picture and seemingly lures the protagonist into the deepest debasement of human tendencies — murder, crime, deception, treachery and animal passion.
Hollywood at this time was infatuated with psychoanalysis and flaunted psychological conditions like paranoia and repression with risqué abandon, fixating audiences who alternated contempt and fascination towards its own transferred desires. An audience could live out its deepest-held unconscious obsessions via identification with actors and celebrities who acted as scapegoats — as they arguably still do — for their shameful sins. We don’t have to suffer. All that we have to do is be in the present moment.
It’s actually very beautiful and freeing. Right now, whatever we’re doing, we’re doing that 100%. Yes, our minds will continue to drift back to wanting to worry and create stories about past events, but we’ll realize that the only thing we can do and the only thing that’s real is right here and right now, and we can be the witness to that. We’re being present with what is, whether it’s time with our friends, a walk, or watching a sunset. Once we’re 100% present with what is, life can flow well. We will have new adventures and experiences, but what we won’t have are all the mental stories that cause us to suffer. We won’t attach to anything because we realize that it isn’t real.
All that is real is right here and right now. When our mind, which causes all our suffering, continues to push stories into our head, we say, “You’re not really real. The only thing that’s real is right here and right now. ” If we get back to the here and now, and realize that everything in our heads we’re creating isn’t ultimately even real, then we know that it’s pointless to participate in it. Why believe in it? If we reach this point, then perhaps all that we identify with can disappear and we realize that we just are. Pure awareness and spiritual enlightenment is about freedom from everything we think we are and living in pure being-ness. It’s about being free. I read “The Lovely Bones” and then immediately went out and rented the DVD. I was curious to see how the murder of Suzie Salmon would be depicted in the movie, as it didn’t make sense to me in the book. The movie just made it even more unconvincing for me.
Suzie Salmon is a normal fourteen year old girl. She is walking home from school one afternoon through a harvested cornfield (that piece of information is paramount to my issue) when she is approached by a known neighbor. George Harvey convinces Suzie to have a look at something he has built in the cornfield, and against her better judgment, she agrees. Mr. Harvey has constructed an underground room in the middle of this cornfield, which is in viewing distance of the town’s suburbs and fairly close to the school Suzie and other students attend. Once lured into this underground room, Suzie is raped and murdered by Mr. Harvey. He “collapses” the room and disposes of Suzie’s body, leaving very little evidence. The police find some lumber and a significant amount of blood in the earth. Her hat is found by the police, and a neighbourhood dog finds Suzie’s elbow (she was dismembered). This is the only proof that she has been murdered as her body is never found.
This is a spiritual fiction book, similar to “Ghost” with less violence and a less sinister plot. Unlike “Ghost” which begins with Patrick Swayze being murdered in an armed robbery (believable), Suzie Salmon is murdered in an underground room in a field of corn. It is the beginning of December and the corn has been harvested. This means that the room would have to have been started in September after the harvest, or the combine would have collapsed the whole thing. The hole would have to be dug and the earth removed and hidden a sufficient distance away to leave no evidence that it was there. Lumber would have to have been brought in for the roof (ceiling) and support walls without the benefit of heavy machinery. All of this was done by ONE man in the middle of the night over a maximum of three months’ time! He would have to have left no tracks and left no great disturbance of the surrounding area EVERY NIGHT (to the point of replacing the corn rows above ground which would have been visible). In the movie, it even shows him digging at night using the lights from his car shining on him as he works.