unity vs separateness: variations

Heathers, with Winona Ryder and Christian Slater. A dark comedy curtesy of Ms Kim's impeccable taste - it's so very. My attention wanted to wander at a few points, but it was always sucked back in by the weight of meaning in the surreal and satirical threads running throughout. As much as one could look at it as one of those well-done classics and leave it at that, I think there are a number of interesting questions raised. Like, looking back to one's own high school experience, were there any parallels in the cliques, teachers, or even the suicides? Is high school really a microcosm of society, or is that idea flawed? Could this movie fly in present-day theatres without generating scandal and controversy? Isn't ironic how the person trying to bring unity to the separateness of the students (see below) is the most psychotic, dark character? Or is it not ironic? How badass is it to light a cigarette how Veronica does in the end? And how gross is it to do the same off of someone's burning flesh? And it's so very what?!
"Fuck me gently with a chainsaw."

"The mind, they said, observes the outside world and sees its own structure. It reports the world consists of a multiplicity of separate objects in a framework of time, space, and causality because these are the conditions of perception. In a word, the mind looks at unity and sees diversity; it looks at what is timeless and sees transience. And in fact the percepts of its experience are diverse and transient; on this level of experience, separateness is real. Our mistake is taking this for the ultimate reality, like the dreamer thinking that nothing is real except his dream....This does not mean, however, that the phenomenal world [what is sensed, perceived] is an illusion or unreal. The illusion is the sense of separateness." - from a foreward to the Bhagavad Gita
-
Not as bad as giving a kid a bucket of mercury to play T-1000 or Silver Surfer, but still...

I wonder what was going on behind the scenes of James Price's alchemy demonstrations - if they were just magic tricks, why would he go to such lengths to make such a claim, or resort to just doing magic tricks, if he'd really had such a brilliant career already?