The Hoffman Lens

Greetings, and welcome to The Hoffman Lens.

This blog is a collection of materials related to mass media, especially movies. Starting at some point in 2015, entries were first published here. Older entries are mostly material from 8sails.com, the media criticism web site I ran until it became too much of a pain in the butt to maintain it. So that explains why the blog dates back to before Blogger even existed.

I should further add that all the dates for the first four years are fake. I didn’t start including specific dates until 2002, so I used a random date generator to get specific enough for blog entries. The years are accurate, but the rest is made up.

Questions and comments are welcome at any time from anyone who isn’t a misogynist or white supremacist. If you’re an incel or a bigot, you are cordially invited to keep your opinions to yourself.

Before we get started, what exactly is a Hoffman Lens?

In They Live, a movie by famed horror-meister John Carpenter, evil space aliens have taken over the planet and are systematically using the Earth as a giant third-world economy. Trouble is, nobody knows what’s going on. The dastardly villains have managed to disguise themselves, hide their presence and keep earthlings in line via an elaborate barrage of brain-numbing broadcasts and subliminal print messages. The only way to see the bad guys in their true, less-than-attractive shape is by wearing sunglasses that have been treated with some kind of special, hypno-filtering chemical. In one scene these glasses are identified as Hoffman lenses. Hence the name of this column.