@jbminton.bsky.social
Consciousness Is All There Is
This was one of my first Substack essays, from way back in January, 2022.
There were some interesting similarities as well as a few key distinctions between the characters of Neo from The Matrix and Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks.
open.substack.com/pub/jbminton...
While others chased theories and cast interviews, I was chasing something else:
🌀 Consciousness.
🧠 Subtext.
🧘♂️ Stillness.
I learned Transcendental Meditation. I listened to Lynch—not just his words, but what was underneath them.
The director becomes celebrity.
The behind-the-scenes becomes gospel.
And the story of how something was made becomes more important than why it matters.
This is how Oral History became the vacant religion of film writing.
That’s where the real moral slippage happens.
We trade insight for idolization.
Critique for cult.
Ideas for anecdotes.
And suddenly, we’re no longer thinking, we’re stanning.
When we lose ourselves in a film, we often go looking for who cast the spell.
And we find the director.
Then we start to worship the magician instead of asking how the magic works, or what it means.
Film is a visual spell.
It doesn’t just show us something. It pulls us in.
Wipes out our sense of self.
Makes us forget we’re watching.
That’s the power of the image, and the danger.
A Consciousness-Based Appreciation for the Movie 'Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
open.substack.com/pub/jbminton...
But I never bought a Springsteen album until nine months after 9/11, when the Bruce Springsteen album came out called The Rising. I didn’t know anything about it and hadn’t heard a song from it.
22.10.2025 21:56 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0I heard those 80s somgs over and over again from the dozens of jukeboxes in the bars my parents kept dragging me into around the city. I love all those songs. I believed everybody had a hungry heart and it was bittersweet to be born in the U.S.A., free to dance in the dark.
22.10.2025 21:56 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
...when this four-eyed commie said the wrong thing at the wrong time, and our guy McTaggart hauls back with this beaver pelt blackjack full of metal shot, and he was going to let the guy have it so bad he wouldn’t get up again.
13.10.2025 18:45 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0McTaggart made his bones beating the s*** out of workers trying to unionize. Management paid him handsomely. Usually, he keeps his rage in check, but there was this one time…
13.10.2025 18:45 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0This reminds me of the old days, when we'd trade DFW quotes before we recorded our podcast.
I miss those times. That was good work.
It seems Wallace also viewed Lynch’s work as a cautionary case of becoming too famous too fast and having that out balance the work.
He clearly did not care for Wild At Heart.
This is from Lipsky’s book.
