Robert Anton Wilson’s cultural influence
Jesse Walker writes from Reason Online that “We’re living in Robert Anton Wilson’s world.”
The co-author of the Illuminatus! triology, he says, is “the unacknowledged elephant in our cultural living room: a direct and indirect influence on popular books, movies, TV shows, music, games, comics, and commentary. (His late co-author has left less of a mark: Many of Wilson?s books have cult followings, while the only Shea effort to make a big splash was the trilogy he wrote with Wilson.) Allusions to Wilson?s work appear in places both classy and trashy: There?s a Wilsonian stamp on films as diverse as Magnolia, The Mothman Prophecies, and Sex and Lucia, and it?s because of Wilson and Shea that the Illuminati, a secret society that once lurked only in right-wing conspiracy tracts, became the villains of Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. Now Wilson?s the star of a lively documentary, Maybe Logic, that?s being screened at film festivals and distributed on DVD.”