Bonus Sample: Swan Song Series 6 | Michelle Remembers: Literal Symbols
The homestretch of our study of Michelle Remembers zeroes in on the literal symbols—and symbols gone literal—of the Satanic Panic. Archetypes, gore, anxieties about sex and babies and filth: Lawrence Pazder mined it all, using modes of abstraction and dehumanization as old as religion itself to weave a story he claimed was all about Michelle—but was really an exercise of his own fetishes.Michelle Smith could have received proper care for her understandable stresses. She could have offered up her feelings and sensations and images from dreams for discussion and contemplation, and an actual therapist would have held that material safely for her to explore. But in Pazder, Smith found someone who wasn’t interested in common human complexity. He was interested in cosmic warfare, and the role he could LARP within it.But Pazder was so blind to his craven narcissism that he couldn’t help but tell on himself. In the final passage we analyze, Pazder records Smith demanding to end therapy. “If I could tear out my tongue,” she says, “I would never have to speak again.” But in the very next paragraph, the man who is forcing her to “remember” symbolically tears out her tongue, rejecting her plea to end the sessions, interpreting her demand as though it were coming from Satan himself.She imagines herself getting in a car and driving and driving, anywhere. Away from this psychiatrist who wanted to be an exorcist, away from his story, perhaps to find her own. Show NotesHIGHEST GAME IN TOWN ‘I See His Blood Upon the Rose’ | Franciscan Media How to Lose Weight (Weight Loss and Obesity) - Teal SwanThe Cause of Obesity - Teal Swan Articles
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This bonus sample comes to you from our Early Access Patreon collection called Swan Song Series, in which we examine the historical and cultural roots that inform and fuel the teal swan spectacle.
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Okay, so I said I had headings.
First heading, thesis, moral panics turn people into abstractions.
Okay, so our focus today is on the fact that from Sybil to Lawrence Pazder to the McMartin trial to the Martinsville trial to Barbara Snow to Teal Swan, We are moving through testimony and literature that takes the reality of power and sex abuse and twists it into exaggerated fantasies that generate emotional contagion, moral panickery, and a lot of lucrative media.
And my sense is that on a social level, it's a way of pretending to address a painful problem while really only kind of guiltily enjoying its spectacle.
And when I say pretending, I'm not implying intentional lying, but rather like feeling as if one is doing a thing.
Because I think that we can be sure that the moral panickery is a pretense that can't solve the problem because the problem always comes back in new but familiar forms.
So on one level, this arc from Sybil to Lawrence Pazder to McMartin to Martinsville to Barbara Snow to Teal Swan describes the ongoing suffering of a culture plagued by domestic, intimate forms of partner and child abuse.
But on another level, That same arc describes a perennial inability to actually dig in and face the very common tragedies in our own backyards, the things we have to overlook so the lights stay on.
Now, a few episodes ago, we contrasted the Catholic horror film genre with the rise of the 1970s slasher film, and I think the point that we batted back and forth was that the Catholic horror film is built on the idea of metaphysical warfare
Whilst the slasher genre seems to capitalize on this pure existential dread, but those slashers were also a deflection in a sense because they emerged during a period of intense disillusionment with the American dream and post-war promises
And they come from a country that knows that its boys, its boys from the neighborhood, boys that they knew, are on kind of a Joseph Campbell, or no, the other one, Joseph Conrad, yeah, Joseph Conrad type mission in Vietnam, shooting civilians in villages.
So, how much easier it is to offload that guilt into, or onto, the psychotic Michael Myers, who cuts down innocents in the suburbs.
So, it seems that both the slasher and the satanic panic attempt to expiate guilt, but in so doing, they kind of kick the can down the road.
Now, this is interesting, Matthew, because you've used this word slasher several times, and I feel like in terms of the evolution of the horror genre during this period, right, you have You have the films that we've mostly referenced, which they're possession films, right?
They're films about the child who is possessed by a demon.
They're films about the Reactionary, old school, more fundamentalist, more initiated into the ways of the supernatural priest coming along to do battle with Satan.
And then there's the next turning of the wheel in terms of this religious preoccupation and how it shows up in horror movies where you now have these slashers like Michael Myers that you're referring to.
It's interesting, because then you have, it's not just the child who has been corrupted by a demon, the innocent child, usually a girl who is possessed, now you have these usually more male Young men who are turned into sort of demonic serial killers.
It's like the demon-possessed child grows up and somehow switches genders, right?
Well, or that the boy that you knew comes home from war and he doesn't have a face.
There you go.
And instead of admitting that you sent him there to kill people, you pretend that he's killing people in your neighborhood.
It's a very convenient kind of expiation effort.
Yeah.
And then the next turn of that wheel is going to be that all of the teenagers who are engaging in, you know, illicit sex and having parties while the parents are out of town, they're going to be the victims in the slasher film that ends up having more of this kind of postmodern sort of self, you know, it's like tongue-in-cheek in a certain way, but it's very, very gory.
There was something else just a little further back here, too.
Oh, I just wanted to say, you drew this line from Sybil to Pazder to McMartin to Martinsville to Barbara Snow to Teal Swan.
Somewhere in that mix, too, are the West Memphis Three, right?
Who are sent to jail, accused of being satanic murderers, accused of killing these three young boys.
In a satanic ritual, when most likely it seems like one of the boy's stepfathers, to your point, right?
That the domestic, the ugliness of just the normal, banal, horrific domestic abuse and violence is projected onto this gory fantasy.
Right.
I mean, whether it involves Satan or the neighborhood psychotic, I think we're always looking at forms of mass transference and bypassing.
I think we're looking at distractions, convenient fictions, and I think in relation to our overall project here at the podcast, it's a core dynamic we run up against over and over again.
That the culture knows something is amiss with government, with healthcare, with education, with capitalism, with consumerism.
And the culture is not wrong, but it has this amazing talent for inventing solutions that offload guilt and perpetuate tragedy.
You know, it's kind of fascinating because we've spent a lot of time looping back to think about, okay, what has made like yoga and wellness or the new age, however we want to refer to this demographic, what has made them susceptible to getting red-pilled?
And to turning into these conspiritualist influencers and acolytes that we've covered.
And I think there's an interesting potential aspect of spiritual bypass here where if we're bypassing the ordinary suffering of being human...
If we're bypassing the reality that bad things do happen to good people and that you can't control your reality through the power of your thoughts and that actually you might have to deal with your grief and face your trauma in very real and unglamorous ways and do the gradual work of like, you know, making peace with the difficulties of your life, perhaps in sort of a psychotherapeutic process or just a maturing process that I think a lot of new age spiritual bypassing
Tendencies really limit, they really prevent that process from happening.
And I think it's actually what, you know, individually and collectively a lot of people are longing for without realizing it.
The deeper you go into that, I feel like at some point all of the disowned material has to go somewhere.
And so that's also part of the vulnerability.
QAnon-style stuff, and to the sort of thing that we see Teal Swan getting swept up in as a remixing of the Satanic Panic.
And doesn't it make sense that if it's all buried or compressed in similar ways within a similar demographic, that a particular story will begin to grasp the fascination and lead people out of that kind of pressure?
Yeah, and you know what, I'm having a realization right now that's actually very helpful.
So in terms of the stuff I shared about being in Anna Forrest's orbit and the process I went through around my family and around sort of false memory syndrome.
I'm realizing right now that I saw entering into a spirituality that had this component of like dealing with your repressed memories, dealing with your disowned shadow.
I saw it as an antidote to New Age spiritual bypass, which I had been caught up in in my early 20s.
But really, it's sort of the next, it's the next stage of this kind of dynamic.
And it's now like, The way to become a heroic enlightened spiritual seeker is to confront this gruesome fantastical story that we can all share in collectively within a sort of cultish mentality.
