{"id":1262,"date":"2008-01-12T13:46:14","date_gmt":"2008-01-12T12:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/archives\/2008\/01\/12\/8-and-2-in-magnolia\/"},"modified":"2010-01-29T01:48:49","modified_gmt":"2010-01-29T01:48:49","slug":"8-and-2-in-magnolia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/2008\/01\/12\/8-and-2-in-magnolia\/","title":{"rendered":"8 and 2 in Magnolia"},"content":{"rendered":"
The numbers 8 and 2 appear throughout the course of Paul Thomas Anderson’s\u00a0Magnolia<\/a> <\/strong>(1999). But why?<\/p>\n Rene Rodriguez<\/a> of the Miami Herald<\/a> has posted some screengrabs<\/a> of instances where the numbers appear.<\/p>\n ** By the way, if you haven’t seen the film, go away, watch it and come back because this post contains some spoilers<\/strong>.**<\/em><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n If you aren’t familiar with Paul Thomas Anderson’s classic 1999 film, it is a drama about several characters who’s lives intersect in an area of the San Fernando Valley<\/a>.<\/p>\n As Rene points out the 8 and 2 refers to the Biblical passage in Exodus 8:2<\/a> that is relevant to the film’s climax. But the film is riddled with many 8 and 2 references.<\/p>\n For example, here are all the main characters in the film and their relationships:<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n There are 10 characters, consisting of 8 <\/strong>children\/relatives and 2 <\/strong>fathers (Jimmy and Earl), which is possibly significant given that their particular relationship is central to the film.<\/p>\n It is also a major theme in other PTA works like Hard Eight<\/a>, Boogie Nights<\/a> and There Will Be Blood<\/a>.<\/p>\n The IMDb trivia section for the film<\/a> notes many other 8\/2 references:<\/p>\n PTA has said<\/a> this about the flim’s climax:<\/p>\n It truly came from a slightly gimmicky and exciting place. I’d read about rains of frogs in the works of Charles Fort<\/a> (His “Book of the Damned” is the genesis for the rain of frogs), who was a turn of the century writer who wrote mainly about odd phenomena.<\/p>\n So I just started writing it in to the script. It wasn’t until after I got through with the writing that I began to discover what it might mean, which is this: you get to a point in your life, and shit is happening, and everything’s out of your control, and suddenly, a rain of frogs just makes sense.<\/p>\n You’re staring at a doctor who is telling you something is wrong, and while we know what it is, we have no way of fixing it. And you just go: “So what you’re telling me, basically, is that it’s raining frogs from the sky.”<\/p>\n I’m not someone who’s ever had a special fascination with UFO’s or supernatural phenomena or anything but I guess I just found myself at a point in my life where I was going through some shitty stuff, and I was ready for some sort of weird religious experience, or as close as I could get to one.<\/p>\n So then I began to decipher things about frogs and history things like this notion that as far back as the Romans, people have been able to judge the health of a society by the health of its frogs: the health of a frog, the vibe of a frog, the texture of the frog, its looks, how much wetness is on it, everything.<\/p>\n The frogs are a barometer for who we are as a people. We’re polluting ourselves, we’re killing ourselves, and the frogs are telling us so, because they’re all getting sick and deformed. And I didn’t even know it was in the bible until Henry Gibson gave me a copy of it, bookmarked to the appropriate frog passage.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n According to the excellent PTA fansite Cigarettes and Red Vines<\/a>:<\/p>\n …it became a pasttime on set for Paul and the crew of Magnolia to hide as many references to the numbers 8 and 2 as they could in shots.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n If you see any more\u00a0, leave them in the comments below.<\/p>\n >\u00a0Rene Rodriguez on 82 in Magnolia<\/a> The numbers 8 and 2 appear throughout the course of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999). But why?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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> Trivia for the film at the IMDb
<\/a>> Magnolia reviews at Metacritic<\/a>
> Buy Magnolia at Amazon UK<\/a>
> More about the 8 and 2s in Magnolia at Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"