Shooting the Ghost

A Podcast About Men

Shooting the Ghost# 13: Angel and the Badman

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August 15, 2009 11:41 AM PDT

A girl locked in a room, the prisoner of love.

An ex-stripper. She was desperate to take her child away from “the life.”

A Sicilian mobster. He would do anything to prevent his son from being taken away from him.

The son: an innocent pawn caught by an unfathomable design, in a tug of war between the forces of Light and Darkness!

(How dysfunctional can one family get?!)

The driver: he brought her food; he tried to mind his own business.

Just leave the food and go. Don’t talk to her. Don’t listen to her. Don’t look into her eyes.

“Help me,” she said. Two words were all it took.

He was a sociopath. A man without a conscience. When she turned to him for help, he couldn’t turn away.

He risked everything to help her.

He’s been on the run ever since.

Opening song, "Snake-Eyed" and closing song: "Devil Do," by Holly Golightly.

Podcast Summary

Movies are collective dreams. The current focus of the podcast is on filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, the legendary, scabrous, & self-destructive director, and by extension the themes of masculinity, mythology, initiation, generational wounding, male bonding, ritual space, misfit culture, the rebel instinct, shamanism, addiction, creative expression, self-destructive urges, storytelling and the function of myth, both for survival and for gnosis, the mutation of the species through sharing of knowledge and experience - and such like!

About Jason

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Writer, independent scholar, world traveler and misadventurer, if Horsley had a mission statement to describe the trajectory of his life, it would have to include the words “heroic” and “pathological.” Horsley's hung his hat and poncho in London, New York, Edinburgh, New Mexico, Morocco, Spain, Paris, Amsterdam, Portugal, Mexico, Guatemala, and Canada. Quests ever inward to the core of his wounded psyche with an almost maniacal vigor. Not satisfied with a shallow participation in life (or able to find a day job), Horsley applies a unique fusion-philosophy to himself that combines Jungian psychology with the sorcery of don Juan Matus and the practical animism he learned as a shaman’s apprentice in Guatemala. Horsley has also found time to write countless books and scripts, a few of which have been published: a two-part treatise on film violence, The Blood Poets: A Cinema of Savagery, 1958-1999 (Scarecrow Press, 1999), Matrix Warrior: Being the One, (Orion, 2003), Dogville Vs. Hollywood (Marion Boyars, 2005) and The Secret Life of Movies: Schizophrenic and Shamanic Journeys in American Movies (McFarlane, 2009). He also produced a six-part digital documentary, The God Game, a digital feature, Beauty Fool, and a semi-autobiographical documentary, Being the One: Document of a Delusion, currently viewable on Youtube. Horsley would like it be known that he is no longer the One, being content finally to be the Other.

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