Jumpgate 2018
Written by Goro, January 10, 2018
Van Halen’s Fair Warning To the World
“Jump” is a key word. It implies interdimensional travel. You “jump” from one point in spacetime to another via hyperspace through a wormhole. In Babylon 5, for example, an interdimensional portal is called “Jumpgate” which is essentially another term for the “Stargate”.
Hence the use of Van Halen’s “Jump” in the latest movie trailer for Spielberg’s Ready Player One (Mar 30, 2018) which is about jumping into the alternate reality/dimension of virtual reality (VR) – a subtext underscored by the presence of the DeLorean time machine car from Back To the Future.
Van Halen and Back To the Future are both heavily Californian and are temporally overlapping with “Jump” topping the charts in 1984 and BTTF doing the same the following year (so we can assume BTTF was being filmed in 1984).
Season 3 of Mr. Robot on USA Network airing in late 2017 – the Force has always been strong with the show – is another key piece of the puzzle “designed” to solidify these association…
Time travel with direct references to Back To the Future was a consistent theme woven into the whole season, intensifying particularly towards the end. We’ve already discussed the November 29 episode (s03e08) prominently featuring Back To the Future, DeLorean, The Martian, and such…
But it was in the season finale airing on December 13th that the idea of “jumping” finally came to the fore, putting a big exclamation mark on the whole symbolic message. Key conversations during the closing sequence were all about a “jumping” episode of the main character Elliot when he was a little kid which he did not remember…
Elliot talking to sister Darlene:
Elliot: That was the day Dad pushed me out the window.
Darlene: What do you mean Dad pushed you out the window?
Elliot: He was mad that I told mom about his cancer and pushed me out the window? You were young. I guess I never told you.
Darlene: What are you talking about, Elliot? I was there. […] All of the sudden you, I don’t know, just snapped […]
Elliot: No, that’s not what happened.
Darlene: Trust me, I remember. You took your baseball bat, and smashed the window, and then you kept telling Dad you were gonna jump.
Darlene: Elliot, you weren’t pushed. You jumped.
Elliot: I don’t remember any of that.
Darlene: I’m here to remember it for you.
Elliot talking to Mr. Robot:
Elliot: I jumped. I wasn’t pushed. Did you know that?
[Followed by scenes with a TV showing Superman turning back time. Then…]
Mr. Robot: On the night of the hack, I transferred the keys from the arcade to a remote virtual machine on our box at home. I then burned it to a CD. You’ll find the seed data and the algorithm embedded in one of those pictures. You’ll know the one.
This coded picture Mr. Robot is talking about above, one that Elliot is supposed to be able to single out, turns out to be… What else? Back To the Future:
* * *
The following is a bit of a spoiler but one I feel I have to discuss anyway due to its multicontextual significance. So an obligatory “spoiler alert”.
Mr. Robot played by Christian Slater, who lives in Elliot’s head, is or looks like Elliot’s father who is already dead. He has generally been a rather “dark” character. Now combine “robot”, “father”, and “dark”… You get Darth Vader. (The name means “Dark Father”; Darth Vader isn’t a robot per se but at least partially a machine.)
In the Star Wars series the young Darth Vader – “Anakin Skywalker” – is played by Canadian actor Hayden Christensen who also happens to have played the main character in the 2008 movie… Jumper, a story literally about people capable of “interdimensional jumping”! (Hayden Christensen and Samuel L. Jackson are both in Jumper and the Star Wars prequels.)
The Great Sphinx figures quite prominently in the film as you can see in its poster…
…and this represents another major multicontextual “jumpgate”.
In H. G. Wells’ science fiction novella The Time Machine a time machine is placed inside a sphinx. Published in 1895, the work “is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposely and selectively forwards or backwards in time”. In fact that phrase “time machine” was coined by Wells.
In The Back To the Future we have “Lyon Estates” with two lion statues (sphinxes), where Marty McFly lived originally.
As I wrote back in 2008:
[House of Sokar in Rostau (Giza)]
A double-sphinx gate is ‘Aker‘, the ancient Egyptian god of the horizon guarding the ‘Gateway to the Otherworld’ or ‘Rostau’, the Tomb of Osiris, with which Giza was identified. The Great Sphinx at Giza would be a version of Aker […]
Once you realize that ‘Lyon Estates’ is obviously Aker, signifying Giza-Rostau, you should be able to decode with relative ease the picture of a house (‘house’ as in the ‘House of Sokar’ interchangeable with Giza-Rostau) standing right next to the gate where Marty decides to hide his time-machine car…
Notice that this ‘House of Sokar’ is comprised of three parts… just like the three Giza pyramids!
And now, to close the loop…
Both “Darth Vader” and Van Halen are directly mentioned, together, in Back To the Future! It’s in the scene where Marty sneaks into his young father’s bedroom and pretends to be an extraterrestrial named “Darth Vader”:
Guess which Van Halen song Marty plays very loud to scare his father? It’s called “Out The Window“. As in Elliot jumping out the window in Mr. Robot!
You can’t make this stuff up.
And finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t touch on the “Big One” allusions in all this…
First, during that scene in BTTF where the DeLorean time machine emerges from a truck, Doc literally says, “this is the big one”.
BTTF as noted earlier is set in California.
Secondly, Van Halen was the embodiment of the L.A. big-hair, loud, party rock music that spread like a wildfire in the ’80s. Their song “Jump” is from their album “1984” featuring a little baby angel smoking a cigarette on the cover.
Smoking angel… Smoking Los Angeles… 2017. Setting the stage?
In the Ready Player One trailer – filled with ’80s-related “Easter eggs” – we find this label “VH-4″…
If interpreted as “Van Halen 4”, it potentially alludes to the band’s 4th album titled… “Fair Warning”.
Fitting… and ominous.