Kent and Wonder discuss the essay style documentary Power, about US policing and its historical roots using the untimed birth chart of director, Yance Ford. Emerging themes include racism, the worth of identifying systemic and ongoing harms, the value of an accurate diagnosis, and the way silence and turning away from issues makes those issues worse. Kent and Wonder discuss if racism can be described by mundane astrology, (the branch of astrology that describes politics, laws, and the weather) and if so, how. They also dive deep into the recent Saturn Pluto conjunction and the Saturn Pluto trine in Ford’s natal chart, as well as muse on the ways in which astrology very accurately and persistently describes harm through different metrics of invisibility.
Distribution: Streaming on Netflix
Director: Yance Ford
Run Time: 85 minutes
Astrological data: Yance Ford’s birthday is given here, and his birthplace noted here.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.476] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. Wonder Bright: And I'm Wonder Bright. Kent Bye: And welcome to the Story All the Way Down podcast, where we're diving into this year's selection of Sundance 2024, breaking down all the different archetypal dynamics that we're seeing in these stories. Today, we're diving into Power, which is a premiere at Sundance by Yance Ford, and is actually picked up by Netflix. And this is actually the start of our second category of deconstructing dominant power systems. So Wonder, I'll pass it over to you to read over the synopsis.
[00:00:45.049] Wonder Bright: Power. Driven to maintain social order, policing in the United States has exploded in scope and scale over hundreds of years. Now American policing embodies one word, power. A cogent essay film inviting conscious engagement and reflections on a system of control that has gone largely unquestioned. Power is a sweeping chronicle of the history and evolution of policing in the U.S. With assured precision and deep insight, filmmaker Yance Ford, who also directed Strong Island, U.S. documentary special jury award for storytelling, 2017 Sundance Film Festival, compellingly argues that the perceived danger of race to the status quo is central to the origins of policing and to its unchecked expansion. Asking pointed, uncomfortable questions about privilege and class, about who belongs to the social order and who is excluded, and about our collective responsibility in actively or tacitly permitting those in power to escape accountability, power confronts us with the prescient words of Frederick Douglass, Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. And that synopsis was written by Sundance programmer Basil Tsiokos.
[00:02:01.368] Kent Bye: Yeah, this is a film that we were both really looking forward to. And I think it really delivered in its deep dive into breaking down the history of policing in the United States, but also how if we were to design it from scratch, we would do it completely differently. But it's got all of these strands tying into the structures of racism within the country that is institutionalized within the police. And it's something that I'm not going to be able to articulate that as an argument as well as the film does, because it just goes into different chapters from property and social control, the counterinsurgency roots, the violence work, resistance, expansion, and the status quo. All these are the different chapters of this essay that We actually watched Strong Island over the break, which I think gave a lot of context for Yance's personal story of having his brother killed by the police, and it was this personal essay film of trying to investigate that. But now in this piece, Power, it's really breaking down the systems and structures and power in a way that It was less of a personal essay film and it felt like more of a historical, archaeological dig into the roots. And I was really impacted by the story that was being told here and something that I think is going to really stick with me. In fact, it was coming up a lot in the process of watching other films. Anytime there was interactions with the police, I just was like, wow, this is a story that is really adding a lot of deep context to the relationship between the police and our democracy. And this entity that doesn't have a lot of accountability, I think was a big takeaway, was that they're able to often act with impunity. And yeah, it just was something that I thought was a really brilliantly argued essay film.
[00:03:51.008] Wonder Bright: So when I was thinking about how I wanted to have conversations about these films, which in themselves are opportunities to have conversations about things, some of them are more like that than others. And this film is 100 percent a film that will be a touchstone for me in any conversation that I'm having about dominant systems of control and especially how that relates to democracies and countries and cultures around the world. And so that's why this film, Power, is the first in a category or chapter that I called Deconstructing Dominant Power Systems, which, you know, if you listen to the first episode, you'll know that I related to the Saturn-Pluto conjunction that we recently had in 2020 in Capricorn. And so there's been this real deep dive over the last like really like eight to 10 years post Ferguson, where in the United States, a lot of that conversation of deconstructing power systems, dominant power systems, has had to do with unpacking the origin of the United States, and how this country originally created itself, and the fundamental hypocrisy that it created itself with, when so many of the buildings in Washington, D.C. were built by enslaved peoples and all of the land, all of it, was taken from the peoples that actually lived here originally, the native tribes that called this place home. So white European settlers came to this country and claimed it as their own, taking it from one group of people and then using another group of people that they deprived of their home of origin to come in here and build all of the buildings that then these white settlers could call their own. So there's just these histories of extreme oppression and intentional and calculated ways of depriving people, removing them from their roots. And there's a lot of films that premiered at Sundance this year in the Documentary Film Festival that are dealing with those kinds of dominant power systems around the world, not just in the United States. And we can point to that Saturn-Pluto conjunction as a way of tracing a return point to reassessing whether or not what we've been doing is working. And I chose Power to be the first film in this particular section that's looking at those ideas really clearly because Power is doing it so clearly, so cogently, so comprehensively and lucidly that it is just a phenomenal piece of work. And I just feel really grateful to suddenly be aware of Yance Ford as a filmmaker and an artist and someone who is here to tell us the truth about where we're at in this time in the world. And he's new to me because I didn't know about him until his name popped up as, like, this film was going to be an option for us to watch. And one of the things that Kent and I did before Sundance was to try and watch as many of the previous films of filmmakers as we could. We weren't able to get a hold of many of them, but Strong Island, Yance Ford's first feature film, which came out in 2017, was a film that was available to us. And so we watched that over the Christmas break and I was just completely taken by him. He is such an extraordinary presence and that film is a really personal recounting of how he came into this story and why it matters to him so much because his family was impacted. As a black African-American family, his family was impacted firsthand by the police and the court systems in the United States. And he used that film as an essay on why it's so personal to him. So it was really kind of like an amazing thing to then watch this film. I mean, his personal story is not a part of this film. And yet, because I'm carrying Strong Island with me into the watching of this, I'm carrying his personal story into the watching of this piece, which is a really amazing opportunity to sit with a really still point reflection of where our country is at and how it got here and why it is not working and all the things that need to change. I just feel really grateful to have been able to watch this and sit with it. It's going to stay with me.
[00:08:50.515] Kent Bye: Yeah, that was a really beautiful setting in the context of this film and the experience of the film, which I think is contrasted to Strong Island. Like you said, it's got the rigor of having subject matter experts who have studied this, scholars and academics and people who are on the front lines as police officers speaking about their direct experiences. It's such a compelling argument that changes my idea of the police. And actually, even though I've never been someone who has walked around day-to-day being afraid of the police, of the police suddenly deciding to take my life, that's a reality for many people of color here in the United States. There's a piece by Roger Ross Williams called Traveling While Black that really dives into the experience of people of color. One of the things that this documentary does is it traces the roots of the police force origins as paramilitary counterinsurgency and cops that were trying to police the slave trade. So there’s, like, this whole racist roots and colonial roots that are feeding into the police force, but also they're above the law in a lot of ways in the sense that they are enforcing the law, but yet they're not the ones that are subject to the law in the same way that citizens are. And so there's this totalitarian structure that is within the police force, but it's in the context of a democracy. One thing that really stuck with me is that scholars who were saying, if we were to design something from scratch, we would design this completely differently. Maybe less of a paramilitary force and more of something that was trying to holistically think about this problem and have preventative measures that are in there. So I feel like this film is such a tour de force that you sit down and after you watch this film, you're like, if you think that's a ridiculous idea to defund the police, that could be some sort of viable option or at least something to, because I don't know if that would necessarily even be a good idea of just completely ripping out our existing systems. I think there has to be some sort of you know, going from these legacy systems that are existing there and having something completely new in green field, you have to have some sort of interim step to transition from what we've had into something that's new. So I don't know what that solution looks like, but I feel, like, this as a film really changed my perspective of how I am understanding the larger context of the roots of these systems and why they are the way that they are.
[00:11:20.350] Wonder Bright: Yeah, so a couple things come up to me in relation to what you've just said. The first thing that I want to say is that I think when we're aware that there’s, like, a quote, problem, we immediately jump into we have to fix it. We have to eradicate the problem. And the thing is that until we truly understand the problem, it's actually really hard to eradicate it because the problem is multilayered and multifaceted. So there is something really profound in just identifying what the issue actually is and trying to understand the problem better. You can't just jump to the solution right away, especially something that's as complex as this one with hundreds of years of history beneath it that has been unexamined for as long as it's been in place. So this process of examining it is really, in itself, already a part of the cure, already a part of the healing, just the act of identifying it. And the quote that Basil Tsiokos ends his synopsis with is one that Yance Ford uses to frame his film. And the quote is from Frederick Douglass. Again, “power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”. And I think Ford is pointing to the fact that Frederick Douglass was right. And in order for these systems, these dominant power systems to change, it's we the people that are going to have to demand that. And unfortunately, for better or worse, we the people are not a we right now. Not enough of us actually understand what the issue is and what is actually at stake. And, you know, you and I are two white cis people. Our bodies are not under threat in the same way that Fords body is under threat, in the way that black people and transgender people in this country are under threat. And Ford understands this. I don't know if we've mentioned this yet, but he is a transgender man and he's actually the first transgender man to ever be nominated for an Oscar for Strong Island. And he's coming from a place of really deeply understanding. It's not just that he's at the focal point of being in his body, a recipient of these dominant systems of power. But it's that he has a really unusual capacity to be able to see them and unpack them from both a personal and a collective level in a way that is really quite extraordinary. So even though this particular essay film, Power, is not coming from that personal place, it's coming from a place that is deeply rooted in a bodily perception and understanding of these things. And it comes across.
[00:14:30.046] Kent Bye: I just wanted to jump in to say that a big point that's made in the film is that the origins of the police force, the idea of the philosophy of policing and the structure of policing is coming from these racist institutions of slavery and the colonial institutions that are sending troops overseas and trying to bring more order to these counterinsurgency efforts. And so there's these paramilitary colonialist and racist origins. And so that the dynamics of power is that the police is working for those institutions of power. The people who are in power feel like that their interests and their needs are being protected. They don't feel the harms that are coming. You know, it's not an urgent issue for them to disrupt those systems of power. So in a lot of ways, with these calls for some sort of reform or change, people who may be resisting that are also potentially benefiting from those systems of power. And I think that's an important point.
[00:15:24.432] Wonder Bright: It's a critical point. A critical point. And goes back to what I was saying earlier, where like, not enough of us see that this is a problem yet. We're only just beginning to become alert to it. And we owe that to people like Yance Ford, who are making films like this and telling stories like this. I think about Ava DuVernay's film 13th that came out in 2016 and Netflix distributed it. So that's still available for people. If you haven't seen it, start there. It's a great place to start, to start unpacking how to understand that there is, inherent in our constitutional amendment, this clause that says the only enslaved labor can come from imprisoned populations. And this starts this, like, unraveling of this entire thread to understand that it's actually because of that 13th Amendment that slavery is legal if people are incarcerated. So if you watch that film and then you watch Power by Yance Ford, then you are going to have a fundamentally different understanding and insight into how this country operates in the way that it does. You know, there's a number of films this year, I'm thinking about Sugarcane, which was the first film that we talked about that could easily be slotted into this category as well, because indigenous people in this country have also been deprived of their rights and deprived of their land and deprived of their sovereignty and deprived of their connection to their children and their ancestors. And the terrifying thing about that for me as a white person is recognizing the extent to which my own capacity for empathy is hampered by the fact that I am surrounded by a culture that doesn't question the dominant power structure in a way that would lead to greater empathy and greater experience of connectivity to other people on this planet and that I'm sharing my life with as a person who's on the planet right now. And that is a loss for me personally. I have an invested interest in deconstructing these dominant systems of power because I'll be happier. I'll be a better person if everybody has the freedom and the privileges that I have. I won't be free until everyone's free.
[00:17:59.008] Kent Bye: Yeah. And another film that I would recommend is a documentary called True Justice, Bryan Stevenson's fight for equality, where he goes through a lot of the history from slavery and the laws that were put into place in slavery and the Jim Crow laws and then into the existing criminal justice system and that underlying reiterations of that same type of discrimination and racism that is going through these different phases of American history that the laws were reflecting it, but also these different institutions of power that were enforcing this and expanding out to both the criminal justice system and also what Yance Ford is covering in this piece of Power. You said that there was two things you wanted to respond to. Did you have a second thing or did you respond to it already?
[00:18:43.756] Wonder Bright: I always have a second thing! I don't remember what the second thing was but something else came up for me just now when I was listening to you because I think one of the things that I keep coming back to over and over again as I'm thinking about the way that we can deconstruct dominant power systems is that one of the main things that colonialism does is it deprives people of their roots. It rips them from their families and it makes it harder for them to connect with their ancestry and their past. And it's done through violence. And I look at the African diaspora and the innovative, brilliant ways that Afrofuturism, for instance, and other African storytellers and artists and creators are imaginatively reimagining a past and creating a sense of belonging for their culture. in the absence of being able to trace it directly. They're just leapfrogging and naming it for themselves anyway. And for me watching this film, Power, you really see the brunt force of it. You see the brutality of what it is to be on the receiving end of a police state and on the receiving end of a dominant culture, which wants to eradicate you, which wants to remove your power and put you in prison where your enslaved labor is legal again, so that you are only seen as, like, a utilitarian use. And the way that that deprives people of their lives. And it deprives all of us of our unity and our capacity to belong to one another as a species.
[00:20:49.807] Kent Bye: Well, as I'm listening to you speak, I'm reflecting on how we're diving into the deeper astrological significations of these stories. And I think one of the things that the astrological tradition has is, like, an evolution of meaning. And so when I think about things like racism, like how do you have a signature of racism? And I think I've settled upon both the Saturn-Pluto as a kind of systems of power, but also the 12th House that I'll get into in a second. But the meta point is that it's not in a lot of these books that has been assigned as a signification historically, like, there's not a lot of existing literature for other astrologers who've really talked about this. But I think it's a part of our reality that we're aware of. And so if that's true, then there should be some way to potentially have some astrological signature. Although that's not always true, because there's things like sexual preference, sexual orientation, that doesn't have an astrological signature in a natal chart, which means that there are things that are outside of the astrological system where the astrological system is not actually well-suited to be able to cover some of these things. So I feel like it kind of bumps up into the Gödel’s incompleteness aspect of, like, no formal system’s ever going to be complete. There's always going to be things outside of that system that you know are true, but you can't use the system to talk about. So there's limits of a system like astrology to be able to do that. So I feel like there are signatures of Saturn Pluto that I think talk about these systems of power and structures. But when you think about racism and looking for astrological signatures and a chart, it may be something that's so persistent across the culture that there may not be a clear thing to point to. So I just wanted to say that because as we start to turn the conversation towards those astrological significations, yeah, I'd love to hear any of your first thoughts about that.
[00:22:42.574] Wonder Bright: Well, I immediately think about what we were just talking about in terms of the first thing that we have to do when we identify that there is a problem is identify all the ways in which that problem manifests itself. And classically, traditionally, in astrology, we have ways of identifying what things are, quote, “bad”, right? And oftentimes it has to do with invisibility. So there are Houses that have to do with invisibility. And then there's also ways that the planets might be configured in a chart that would describe invisibility because everything's based on a system of light. So everything in astrology is based on whether or not it can be seen, whether or not it's visible - or because a signature which is visible causes harm to something else in the chart. So in that way, as could be expected, astrology actually is telling a story that is a direct reflection of how we experience the world as above, so below. So, you know, for instance, 12th House is always associated with imprisonment. It's associated with isolation, 6th House is associated with enslavement. So there are ways of speaking about this. And I agree with you that we need to develop a better language for that as astrologers moving forward, because we need to be able to speak about this in terms of mundane astrology and in terms of how we talk about systems of power and who gets to decide which bodies are valuable. And honestly, from my perspective, like, how I'm thinking about it is, like, if so much of what we're learning is that the truth actually really can set us free, first, it's going to try and kill us. But if we can actually start to name it, and then more of us, if we take the lesson from Sugarcane, and we bear witness, and we share what we've seen, and what we understand to be true, then once enough people start to really understand these things, then we will alter how we are about them. You know, I think about one of the things that we've done post my diagnosis for cancer is we've been studying it. And we discovered that, you know, as recently as 1950, 1960, they wouldn't even necessarily tell a patient that they had cancer. Like they wouldn't even tell them because they didn't see the point and that person was going to die. And then they would just treat them knowing they were going to die and never tell them what they had, which just seems bonkey kong to me, right? Because the relief of having doctors around me who are being honest with me about what this is and what we have to do and what they know they can do and what the limits are of what they know that they can do - like, my doctor literally said to me, “I'm not going to sugarcoat it for you. This is going to be a really rough year, but we will get you through it". That's what he said. And I'm really trusting that “we will get you through it” to, like, take me through the bits that are really, really rough. But I want that truth. You know, I don't want you to sugarcoat it. And we have to find a way as human beings to begin talking honestly and openly and clearly with one another. And that's one of the great gifts that Yance Ford is giving us with this work. It's one of the great gifts that Ava DuVernay gave us with 13th. And it's one of the great gifts that all of the filmmakers in this particular section are giving us. They're giving us the unvarnished truth of a situation and how they're working within it.
[00:26:29.625] Kent Bye: Yeah, when you were talking about the lights and the system of light, so it makes me think about how Saturn is the boundary of the planets that we can see with our naked eye, especially from the ancients and the traditional astrology. And they only would look at those seven different planetary archetypes and that the transpersonal planets of Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, the things that are beyond our sight are the things that are representing some of the deeper collective aspects of our culture rather than the personal planets. So there are transpersonal dimensions of those outer planets. And so when you have an interaction of Pluto with Saturn, I feel like it's bringing in the collective transpersonal archetypal energies into the personal manifestation. And so that's one point. The other point is that as I was looking at the different houses, I was thinking, well, you know, the 11th House is friends, but it's also community and group identity. Maybe there's an 11th House signature of racism or sexism in the 11th House, but then you pointed out that it's much more of a 12th House type of experience because The joy of the 11th is Jupiter, and that's much more about the good spirit, and the joy of the 12th House is Saturn. It's about the bad spirit. Demetra George, in her book, Ancient Astrology, In Theory and Practice, Volume 2, she says that “many of the painful experiences of life fall into the 12th House. These include sorrow, suffering, troubles, malice, disappointments, trials and tribulations, the cadence weakness of the house undermines the stability and support required for positive planetary outcomes and makes a person vulnerable to losses and subsequent sorrows and sufferings”. You know, as I was thinking about the house that I would look to for things like racism, it could be the 12th House or it could be more of the transpersonal Pluto intergenerational aspects and something that is a part of the collective culture and more of a planetary signature rather than a house signature. it's not necessarily a part of the tradition to look to specific things like this collective experience of racism. Because even if someone doesn't have a 12th House signature, they're going to be experiencing racism through their lives if they're a person of color living here in the United States. So it may be something that just doesn't have an individual natal chart signification or just something that may be outside of the system of astrology to kind of understand.
[00:28:49.545] Wonder Bright: Well, I think you're speaking to something that has long been a source of tension or disagreement or, like, to some astrologers, it's obvious that if you're looking at a natal chart, it's going to be very different whether you're looking at the chart of a baby, a human baby born in a hospital versus the chart of a frog that was born just outside the same hospital in that exact moment. You're going to have two completely different experiences. Even if you have twins born to the same mother, these are human beings with slightly different nuances, and they're going to have slightly different experiences of the world, let alone, like, you have a population of white people… their relationship to the 12th House is just always going to be different than the population of black people, their relationship to the 6th House of illness. Yance Ford did another documentary with Oprah a couple of years ago called The Color of Care, which breaks down how people of color receive different health care treatment in the United States. And it's really a problem. So any black person is going to have a different relationship with their 6th and 1st House than a white person does because of that, you know, and that doesn't have anything to do with astrology per se. But we know that we can still predict it as human beings, that that's the case. Women are going to have a harder time with their 5th House or anything to do with sex than men are, because we are seen as the object of sex rather than the protagonist of our own sexual adventure. So there's a whole different thing that we have to bring as human beings to an individual chart that is going to inform how we're speaking with someone about their life. And that's a totally separate thing. Natal astrology is just completely different from mundane astrology. So what we're really talking about here when we're describing racism is mundane astrology. Like, is that something that we can describe in a natal chart? And fortunately, for everybody, you and I are not going to be the arbiters of that, but I'm very interested in this conversation. And that's one of the things that we hope to create with this podcast is, like, a provocation for all of us to begin this collective conversation of being able to identify these things and to place them astrologically and to broaden the conversation about what these astrological signatures might mean and what the 12th House might mean if we don't just accept that, to that house belongs things we don't speak about. What happens if, instead of things belonging to houses where we don't name harm done, instead, we say, “oh, that's a house where somebody might see that harm has been done and therefore we need to name it. What happens then? You know, like, we're beginning to wake up to the idea that unspoken harm is the worst kind of harm, because now you've been harmed, and then on top of that, you have an additional harm. So what happens if, when we think about 12th House signatures, we think about the need to name the need to identify, and the need to explicate and explore? and to raise all of us as human beings into a realm where everyone is whole, regardless of harm done, and that we have a context for speaking about those things and a process whereby that happens. And so once again, I'm very grateful to filmmakers like Yance Ford, who are doing that work in real time in the world. You know, like, the astrology will catch up. But Yance is pioneering that space. He's giving us a way of thinking about it that will help us in that effort.
[00:32:45.356] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there's a couple of things that come to mind. One is that we're sort of bumping up into some of the potential limits of astrology. And I want to point out a couple of things. One is that when you look at a natal chart, you're not able to determine whether it's a male or female, what their sexual preference are. There's things that there are no astrological signatures in a chart to describe certain aspects or make a prediction about; someone’s race, or gender, or identity. There's certain aspects that are left to those broader cultural contexts that we're talking about here. And I think that the thing that I keep coming back to is this point that you made, which is that we can't rip something out without knowing some of the root causes. In medicine and healing, they often say you have to address the root of the disease rather than the symptom, because if you're just addressing symptoms, then the symptoms may be pointing towards something where it's trying to get to a root cause, but if you're just only getting rid of symptoms, you're not really changing the core of what the disease might be. And so in this metaphor of thinking about the police, if you defund and eradicate the police, they may not actually get to the core of the issue, which is the deeper structures of power that the police is representing. And if the police are gone, then there may be new structures and new entities that are reinforcing that power without actually making any deep systemic changes. And so I think it's important to look at some of these deep changes. And I think actually, in some ways, the astrological tradition may be able to help identify some of those deeper archetypal dynamics that we can deconstruct different aspects of those power. I wanted to turn to some of the things from Richard Tarnas, because I think looking at Saturn and Pluto, maybe one approach of trying to analyze the delineations of these two planets to understand both the positive manifestations of those that we want, but also the negative manifestations of the lack of that. So, I actually went through and curated some of the different significations of Saturn from Tarnas that I think is relevant to this question of power in the context of the police. First, I want to start with Pluto because it's a little bit shorter and also it gets to the influence of this more transpersonal impact. So Tarnas says, “the planet Pluto is associated with an archetypal principle whose character is Dionysian, elemental, instinctual, powerfully compelling, extreme in its intensity, arising from the depths, both libidinal and destructive, overwhelming and transformative, ever evolving. On the collective level, the archetypal principle associated with Pluto is regarded as possessing a prodigious, titanic dimension, empowering, intensifying, compelling, whatever it touches on a massive scale”. So sometimes I think about Pluto as a higher octave of Jupiter. There's a sense of expansion, but there's also a deep core elemental into the roots, into the ground, into these deep unconscious levels of power dynamics that were often associated with Pluto. And then when you look at the significations of Saturn, I'm going to go through a couple of different sections here. So it's “the principle of limit structure, contraction, constraint, tradition, the endings of things. It's also gravity and gravitas, weightiness, that which burdens, binds, and challenges. The tendency to confine and constrict, to separate, to divide, and define, to cut and shorten, to negate and oppose, to strengthen and forge, through tension and resistance, to rigidify, to repress, to maintain a conservative and strict authority. The weight of the past, the workings of fate, character, karma, the consequences of past action, error and guilt, punishment, retribution, and imprisonment. The impulse and capacity for discipline and duty, order, discrimination and objectivity, restraint and patience, endurance, responsibility, seriousness, authority, wisdom. And then finally, the conventional forms of structures, foundations, boundaries, solidity and stability, security and control, rational organization, efficiency, law, right and wrong, and judgment. So there are instances where a Saturnian principle could be law and order, but the institutions that are enforcing that are maybe corrupted by a deeper Pluto influence that has perverted it in a way that it becomes the opposite of it, it becomes more of a totalitarian entity rather than something that is enforcing the power. So it becomes a shadow projection of itself, like the police force, that is trying to enforce law and order, is, within itself, a totalitarian structure that is not commiserate with the underlying democracy of serving all people. Anyway, those are the deeper archetypal dynamics of the Saturn-Pluto that, when those two things are combining, then you tend to have these conservative reactionary forces that are more of a totalitarian or authoritarian perspective.
[00:37:39.272] Wonder Bright: I remembered what the second thing was that I wanted to say, which is that when we're looking at this problem, I think part of like the desire to create a solution is, like, the alternative to the police, when really what the alternative is, is not an alternative to the police, but it's an alternative to all of the ways in which we have systems of inequality in this culture. So it's not enough to transform the police force. The police force can only be transformed once all the other systems are in place as well. It all has to happen simultaneously. We have to change the way that we educate people, we have to change the way that we are giving care, medical care, for people in this country. And it's the part of the way in which we prevent ourselves from actually accomplishing anything around any of these tasks that we think of them as separate. But that is the opposite of actually transforming any of this. In order to identify the problem, we need to think of it as problems. So we have to be able to turn our attention to this issue, and this issue, and this issue, and this issue. But in order to comprehensively address any one of those things, we have to address the dominant system altogether. And so that's the value of being able to watch so many films at once that are addressing different heads of this hydra, is that we can see the body of the hydra. We're looking at the heads in each individual film, but truly they are connected to a body, I promise you. And so what is the quality about Pluto that has us think of it as being something that is potentially explosive, right? And you can see in that how this information that's contained in a film like Power has that kind of plutonic capacity, right? It's dealing with systems of oppression and power, which is a plutonic core. And it is directing us to think about how power never concedes anything, right? Power just doesn't do that. You have to demand it. You have to take it, right? So that's a very plutonic, explosive thing. This film is, in its own way, a small plutonic bomb that has the potential to be set off in the individuals who watch it. So the question that we have is, how can we think about plutonic power that is something that can be pointed and used more successfully? How to point it, how to be careful, how to be precise, how to be small, how to be measured. And I think that's part of what Yance Ford's real gift is, is that he's able to get really focused. This is what we're looking at. And what we want to be able to do is to use that precision to have explosive power, right? But we want to be able to contain it at the same time. But I just feel pretty clear that even though we can think about racism or climate change as a many headed hydra, that when we focus our attention on each head of the hydra, and remember that it's connected to a body, remember that it's connected to systemic dominant systems of power, that we can actually make some changes. It might not be in time to save all of us, but the actual effort and the attention paid to any one of those heads, it's worth it. It's worth the effort.
[00:41:28.366] Kent Bye: a philosopher named Timothy Morton, he’s got a concept called “hyperobject”. Things like capitalism is a hyperobject. Racism could be a hyperobject. So the hyperobject is something that is so complex that it's really transcending any reducing down to a single concept or something that's very much hyperlinked into many different relational dynamics in the history, this many headed hydra that you're talking about here. And because we are looking at the deeper signatures, I'm wondering if you wanted to elaborate on either some of the signatures that you see in this piece, or who would you prescribe this film for?
[00:42:04.386] Wonder Bright: Well, clearly, Saturn-Pluto conjunction, like, this massive collective effort that we're all undergoing now to identify systems of oppression and strategize how to vanquish them. And also, in honor of Yance Ford, who we don't have his birth time, but we do know that he was born April 13, 1972. And that gives him a Sun in Aries at 23 degrees, which is very close to the exaltation degree of the Sun in Aries at 19. And one of the things that I just find so reassuring in his work is his anger, and the fierce optimism that comes through that anger, the way that he is able to direct it, and to fight for what he really believes in - his work is just a powerful - the word that's coming to mind is aphrodisiac, actually. It's both calming, but it's enlivening. And it is a strong reminder of the power of the element of fire and the importance of being able to give voice to saying no, and to fighting for what's real, and what is valuable. And this film has real warrior energy. And anyone who needs a strong dose of Aries, anyone who needs a strong dose of the fire element, this is a good film to sit with because it will spark you in the way that we all need to be prepared to fight. And I guess that's really what I want to bear witness to in this film is Yance Ford's incredible fiery spirit and the way in which he was able to inspire so many people to collaborate with him in this effort and the way that he's inspired me to speak about it and to speak about my personal experience of watching his film and to stay in this fight until we're all free.
[00:44:12.010] Kent Bye: Yeah, and speaking of Saturn-Pluto, Yance has Saturn at four degrees Gemini and Pluto at zero degrees Libra. So there's a trine relationship there. Yeah, and this will be on Netflix. So I'm just glad that it'll be made available for people to watch just because I think it's such a powerful film. And for me, I take away this air element argument. There's just a lot of information in the way that it's kind of reasoned out and also presented in the film format. It feels like it's a really compelling contextualization of digging deep into the history and the evolution and seeing how the past is really influencing our present. So just a lot of really important points that we're starting to bring up here, you know, just even starting to think about some of these issues and whether or not they're within this system of astrology or outside of it. Either way, they're just really important and vital conversations to be had.
[00:45:04.014] Wonder Bright: So yeah, thank you for having it with me.
[00:45:07.398] Kent Bye: Yeah. And, uh, yeah, that's all that we have for today. And I just want to thank you for listening to the Story All The Way Down podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do, spread the word, tell your friends, and consider signing up for our newsletter at storyallthewaydown.com. Thanks for listening. Wonder Bright: Thank you.
