This week's penultimate episode of what has become a show renewed for next season situates the discourse of doomsday prepper culture in the continuing articulation of the interpersonal relationships among the program's main characters. The title indicates how demonic possession and the cinematic stereotype of exorcism might be more than old wine in new bottles. or rather old bodies in new finery, as Crane opines that the end of civilization may be signified by skinny jeans. Reconciliation and social learning are the key elements in this episode although the use of guilt and disclosure are typical as we discover that the main characters have multiple issues based on trust and reciprocity. As always, our main narrative agent, Ichabod Crane, is the human instrument to move the story forward by centering on, as always, our nation's Founding Fathers(sic). The physical agent for the closing episodes are hidden elements in George Washington's Bible, interred with Crane in the 18th Century.
St. John's Lodge No. 1, Ancient York Masons, is the owner of what is now known as the George Washington Inaugural Bible. On April 30, 1789 it was upon this Bible that George Washington took his oath of office as the first President of the United States....The Bible is the King James Version, complete with the Apocrypha and elaborately supplemented with the historical, astronomical and legal data of that period....However, there is currently debate as to whether or not he added the phrase "So help me God" to his oath. The only contemporaneous account of Washington's oath is from French consul Comte de Moustier who reported the constitutional oath with no mention of "So help me God". The earliest known source indicating Washington did add "So help me God" is attributed to Washington Irving, aged six at the time of the inauguration, and first appears 60 years after the event.
So many of television's ideological texts are apocryphal where channel sectors are dedicated to various pastoral interpreters sitting at desks telling us what lies within sacred text no differently than priests from the pulpit to the illiterate congregations in the Middle Ages. As with digital video review of plays by sports referees, judgement is a waking dream as you can see below the fold.
Aside from being a play on Hunter's diary, much of contemporary television is to dream a sleepless dream: where capitalist schizophrenia and radical social change become remediated in genre narratives. Peretti contrasts Jameson with Deleuze and Guattari as follows:
My central contention is that late capitalism not only accelerates the flow of capital, but also accelerates the rate at which subjects assume identities. Identity formation is inextricably linked to the urge to consume, and therefore the acceleration of capitalism necessitates an increase in the rate at which individuals assume and shed identities. The internet is one of many late capitalist phenomena that allow for more flexible, rapid, and profitable mechanisms of identity formation.... Advertising has successfully used both these (translational) strategies to accelerate identity formation/dissolution and, by extension, consumer capitalism. There is no reason that radical groups could not use similar methods to challenge capitalism and develop alternative collective identities
Sleepy Hollow has become not only a new vessel for the various genre sub-categories in a sour mash of possession, exorcism, tweener vampirism, reanimation (what is Deputy Andy doing throughout all this?), and Founder Freemasonry in Franklin's French Lanterns, but also a means to study the identities of the characters' development where Crane, despite the availability of dry cleaning, will never change his original clothing, those signifiers of alternative identities. This dilemma is not only about the vestments but about what demons represent, thanatos or eros, and whether the reference to Ruby Ridge (Mr. Weaver) and the Second Amendment is about the supplies for the End Times or the surprises of the closing two hour season finale this coming Monday.
FOX411: Well he (Ichabod) has been keeping the coat, what do you think of all the discussion over his wardrobe?
Tom Mison: It's nice that lots of people are spending lots of time discussing my costume. It's an iconic image already which grabs people's attention, and I'm not surprised people are discussing it because you don't often see on television someone wearing the same clothes for however many weeks the show is on. I like it and I'm determined to keep it. And I don't care if it does look filthy.