Dyer, welcome. Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

In your book, Esoteric Hollywood, Sex, Cults, and Symbols and Film,

you take a look at a variety of Hollywood films, including films by Stanley Kubrick,

Alfred Hitchcock, the James Bond series, among many others, and explore the secret messaging and symbology embodied in them.

Why do you use the term esoteric to describe many of these films?

That's a good question. I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to title the book, so I had a

bunch of different possible titles,

and that one sounded to me the most mysterious. But I think it's also fitting because esoteric,

of course, refers to something hidden or secret. And what I try to do in the book was kind of unveil those hidden secret aspects to film, be it the symbolism that you mentioned,

or be it the realities behind screenwriters and their connections at times to the CIA or the

Pentagon and espionage and lay it all out. I tried to come at film from a lot of different levels,

and so I felt like that was the most

appropriate title, and I think I'd already kind of been playing around with a podcast with a similar

title.

You write that Hollywood has been described as the new Babylon.

What does this analogy signify? That is to say, what are the parallels between

Hollywood and what is understood to have been Babylon, the ancient pagan empire? Right. Well, if we

think about the way that the book of Genesis, for example, describes the Tower of Babel, and then

eventually the Empire Babylon during the book of Genesis, for example, describes the Tower of Babel and then eventually

the Empire Babylon during the days of many of the prophets in the Old Testament. We have the

idea of an oppressive kind of super state that was deified or worshipped. One of the aspects that

was central to that power structure was the mythology behind those empires.

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