Invocation of My Demon Brother by Jarett Kobek
Invocation of My Demon Brother by Jarett Kobek
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Clocking in at under 12 minutes, Kenneth Anger’s 1969 film Invocation of My Demon Brother is a terrifying journey into the rotten underbelly of the 1960s. Featuring a host of notorious San Francisco denizens—such as Bobby Beausoleil, later convicted for his involvement with the Manson Family murders, and Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey—Invocation has been the source of much speculation and misinformation. And while this unforgettable screed of existential dread gives viewers a peek into both Anger’s own personal demons and the horrors lurking beneath the counterculture, it has never been explored within the context of the horror genre—until now.
Drawing on original interviews (including a new, in-depth interview with Beausoleil), unpublished archival research, a shot-by-shot analysis of the film, and the author’s personal relationship with the late director, Jarett Kobek’s Invocation of My Demon Brother illuminates the cultural significance—and unique horrors—of Anger’s seminal film and traces the myriad events leading up to one of the most notorious murders in American history.
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— Thom Anderson, director of Los Angeles Plays Itself
"Insanely thorough research with Kobek’s customary iconoclasm. One of the most idiosyncratic, in-your-face, and provocative biographies of a filmmaker."
Excerpt from Invocation of My Demon Brother by Jarett Kobek
THEREFORE
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The oldest and strongest emotion is fear, and the oldest and strongest fear is that of the unknown.
People do not change. Human nature is immutable. Forever driven by an unseen monster in the darkness. Hot breath sounding in the woods. Glass bottle shattering in abandoned hotel lobby. A ghost around every corner.
The most merciful thing in the world is the human mind’s inability to correlate its contents.
Less quoted, less t-shirtable. Suggesting a thing worse than the unknown.
The person who sees is cursed with dead clarity.
Vision rips away the delusion that life is greater, better, more than its cheap actuality.
The shimmering around the edges, the sparkle that imbues random chaos with the illusion of meaning, the hormonal flush that transforms a lump of flesh, bursting with blemish, into a not-so-obscure object of desire.
When it dissipates? When the mind correlates its contents?
When someone sees?
That’s how we get the poolside drunk spinning Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?”
Treating the lyrics like Mt. Sinai tablets, like gospel story truth of their own stymied life.
I know what you must be saying to yourselves.
If that’s the way she feels about it, why doesn’t she just end it all?
Oh, no, not me.
I’m not ready for that final disappointment.
Pity the one who knows it’s coming. Who looks in the mirror and sees sagging flesh and scars from the damage. Who’s old enough to know that their best qualities are also their worst, that what gets them noticed by the world is also what prevents them from being loved.
Pity the twink who turns 40.
Jarett Kobek is an internationally bestselling Turkish-American writer living in California. His previous books have been translated into eleven languages and include ATTA, Do Every Thing Wrong!: XXXTentacion Against the World, and Motor Spirit.