D O L L A K I N

SOMEONE HAS MADE A STEAMPUNK “MATRIX” AND IT NEEDS TO BE KNOWN.

This is an odd little Victorian what-is-it from an unknown source that may have actually inspired the very idea of motion pictures to begin with.

Half the fun is you don’t know what the hell it’s about until it’s too late.

No one knows where the original story went, and the story we have is a re-creation, made much later, and only recently, from hearsay about the first work on the subject.

It is said that the Victorian tale, written in the earliest days of that era, inspired inventors to create a new version of the magic lantern (an early projector system), and motorized and beautiful zoetropes (slide images that, when put into motion, simulate real life in pictures).

Edison referred to the story, titled “Miraculous Light,” as a chief motive for thinking about motion pictures.

The Lumiere Brothers, whose French engineering of movie devices controversially coincides with Edison’s, also knew of “Miraculous Light,” and kept copies of the book, now lost to history, next to their bedsides.

It is said to have “entered their dreams,” though the French translation of their words may be inaccurate.

The weird Russian composer Scriabin–who had visions of creating an enormous visual spectacular to work with his orchestra–also read “Miraculous Light,” and was said to have been heavily influenced. Russian scholars say his music is all a set of variations on sound-images put into his head by the short story.

Rumor has it he was the one who destroyed all the copies of the story in its original form.

Charlie Chaplin was said to have spent a small fortune sending archivists out around the world, trying to find a copy, but with no luck.

The volume has been swallowed by time.

That’s the way he put it.

Thus, all we have is the new version below, attributed to Henry Gastle Nestin, but it really needs to get discussed because it is filled with possibilities for our own time.

It appears to suggest a universe somewhat like Inception, somewhat like Dune, and somewhat like The Matrix–but set in a Victorian time where heavy hangs the metaphor of the Opium Wars (the English and American wars to continue the drug trade in the 1800s using Chinese labor, forcing Asians into addiction to keep the industry active).

If anyone knows who Henry Gastle Nestin is–if he is still alive–he may have some very interesting remarks about where this fascinating story goes next. I would love to know how he re-created the original story and kept to its essential meaning. Did he add to what was known? The universe of DOLLAKIN suggests something very new, an investigation into the early entertainment prototype for all the visual splendor of the 20th Century and modern times.

What would people of yesteryear do for the power of stories?

Would they kill?

Would they start wars?

Imagine a world of no diversions or entertainment of the like we have, and then once it was found, someone or something threatening to take it all away…

This is the heart of the mystery here, as you’ll see.

As you read the story below, consider what Thomas Edison, the Lumieres, and Charlie Chaplin must have seen in the original story. This piece of fiction links all of the creators of early movie-making. According to Harry Houdini’s main biographer, the idea of this bewildering world transfixed him, and he began dangerous experiments he quietly paid for in which opium itself was given to film-watchers alongside a complex machine spouting strange lights and sounds, a creation that may have been a design of Scriabin’s.

No one actually knows what this machine was supposed to do.

No one knows what story it was intended to tell.

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Word is that Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola, oddly enough, have already joined forces as producers to translate this strange history into a feature film, while Christopher Nolan is believed to have completed directing nearly the entire thing. But, dissatisfied with the length, and wanting to expand his work even further, he is trying to take it to series for his first television foray. The studio prefers a single movie and thus the fate of the project is in limbo.

But rumors are rumors.

Until something comes to light, we have only these images supposedly taken from the half-finished Chris Nolan movie version, if it’s real. Take a look at this and let the theatre of your mind have a go at it…

At first there are a flurry of images and we have no idea what they mean. Those who cannot get hold of a lantern have to get by on hearsay about what it actually does…hearing all manner of crazy stories that can be wonderful, horrifying, romantic, but almost always enigmatic…

The device is, in various forms, a lantern machine that sends everyone around it into a deep sleep. The atmosphere of using it for those few people in possession of it is something like a seance, something like an opium den, and something like a motion picture nickolodeon…

Through the lantern’s opiate like qualities, a controlled narrative is unspooled for the viewer, and just like a film series or television series or game, people become addicted, dying to know what happens next…

And then people using the lantern begin to vanish in real life, and serious questions arise as to how, and what is really going on in the world…

This is only the start of complications. The lantern’s effects depend upon a material like wax that must be mined out of distant caves, and the work is hazardous. When the miners band together with the storyteller-artisans to strike, the result is further strife and terror in their society…

And then, something begins to change, the narratives being woven by the lantern begin to seem out of control, and while some question whether the lantern artisans are seeking revenge in this way, the more terrifying prospect is that something completely unknown and outside the society is taking control of people’s minds through the lantern-device, and what exactly this insidious thing could be, if it even exists, becomes a new threat…