Friday, June 05, 2009

The Nefarious Company's Many Tentacles

Mrs. Uneven and I were discussing the merits of the various Prison Break seasons the other day when I was brought up short by her comment that she had really enjoyed the show up until they were going after "The Company." She went on to complain that The Company had been showing up on more and more shows and that she found the whole thing boring. How many people do they have working for them that they're on a bunch of different shows.

She was jesting, but the concept of the "The Company" being behind several nefarious plots/operations has been an omnipresent and mutating meme in the collective unconscious for decades. Until that conversation it had never occurred to me that The Company in Burn Notice could be the same as the one in Prison Break. Does Carla work for the General too, and is he only one part of MANAGEMENT? What other shows and characters does the Company manipulate and harass? Are they the shadowy group leading and misleading Fox Mulder too? How deep is their reach?

Is this the way the Illuminati reveal themselves in the Information Age? They take control of all mass media and then produce entertainment which blatantly depicts hidden power manipulating events to its own ends? Isn't that what the conspiracy memes tell us? What better way than for the hidden group to call itself by one name repeated over and over in many different fictional tales. The fact they keep referring to themselves as "The Companay" simply produces the same ironic enjoyment of James Garner's dog named Dog and horse named Horse. BTW The Company as shadow government meme originally started out at the CIA before moving to FEMA. Presumably this movement of the meme's signifier was due to exposure of the CIA's utter incompetence during Congressional hearings in the 1970s. This of course begs the question of where The Company moves to now.