Why Wait Until Next Year To Post This?

I finally got around to observing my sacred New Year's Eve ritual of watching The Poseidon Adventure last night.  I know, I know, it's March!  But that's just another way of keeping things CHAOTIC around here, am I right?

I adore this movie.  It's so rich and complex that I get something new out of it every time I see it.  And this year the detail that popped out at me DIRECTLY CONCERNED THIS BLOG, so here I am reporting it to you, just as if it were something you needed to know.

Remember the scene right after the ship capsized, when Gene Hackman suggested using the Christmas tree as a ladder to escape the ballroom?  OF COURSE YOU DO.  Well, I've seen this movie and this Christmas tree many, many times but this is the first time it really registered on me that between the ropes of tinsel garland, you can see the other Christmas ornaments on there:

Row after row of these GOLD SATIN BALLS.  The kind you never see anymore in the stores.  They were nearly INESCAPABLE at Christmastime at the time this movie was made.

And -- VERY interestingly! -- those ornaments, resembling outsized GOLDEN APPLES, kept appearing and disappearing when you looked at the tree.  There were tons of them at the moment the tree toppled, sending injured partygoers scattering in all directions.  

It was such a nice image of DISORDER, symbolized by Golden Apples glittering on a tree in a room -- a world -- turned UPSIDE DOWN.

(Just an aside, here:  THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN was also supposed to be the 4th book in the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles by prominent Discordian author and Erisian saint Robert Anton Wilson, but he never got around to writing it.  Such a pity.)

Then a bunch of the men got together and stood the tree back up so they could use it as a ladder to escape the ballroom.  Suddenly, there was hardly a golden ball to be seen on the tree, as if the disorder were in retreat for a moment.  Undoubtedly because the survivors had made a plan and were now working together to achieve it.

And then the water poured in, and people started scrambling up the tree in terror, and hey, look at all the golden apples on the tree!  They appear at the moment CHAOS RE-ENTERS THE ROOM.

And then the tree was submerged and the moment passed.