A Midsummer Night's DreamWorks: Daveigh and the Drowning Man

I've been telling you that Daveigh Chases's tragic and terrible death feels like the pivotal piece of the puzzle I've been struggling with for more than twenty years, and it's looking more and more to be the case. 

NOTE: Due to its overly large size, this post was split off from an article originally posted yesterday on DreamWorks and Elliott Smith.

Click Here for that Post.

A preternaturally gifted actress and singer, Daveigh died a miserable and prolonged death on LA's hellish Skid Row:

Former child actress Daveigh Chase died of AIDS on June 16, 2026, at the age of 35. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's Office officially confirmed the cause of death, noting that chronic polysubstance use was a significant contributing factor.

Chase was initially hospitalized for severe malnutrition. She subsequently contracted bacterial meningitis and multiple serious bloodstream infections, which ultimately caused her body to experience septic shock.

Reading this brought back a flood of memories of all the old Peter Duesberg interviews I'd hear on Gary Null's old radio program, Natural Living. If you get my meaning. If not, we'll get into it later.

While digging into the Buckley/Chase nexus, a reader pointed out the fact that the notorious Rolling Stone article that first disseminated the scientifically and logistically impossible official account of Jeff Buckley's death had none other than the sex-pestilent Diddy Daddy on the cover.

Like I say, Synchronicity often answers questions we have no conventional way of answering ourselves.

Case in point, this scene from The Firm -- released 33 years ago this week -- being filmed right over the same exact spot that Buckley allegedly drowned four years later.

Other case in point: Actress Jeanne Tripplehorn played Cruise's aggrieved wife in The Firm, and would later co-star with Daveigh Chase in the HBO series, Big Love.

Go figure, right?

Aside from her large and growing pile of Fraserology connections, Daveigh's role as Samantha Morton "Samara Morgan" in The Ring was central to a wave of early DreamWorks films that folded in drowning and water symbolism not found in their source material, for reasons never fully explained. 

The Ring also took considerable liberties with its source material (the 1998 Japanese thriller Ringu), adding adoptive parents and a psychiatric hospitalization. 

For reasons never fully explained.

But The Ring was practically a Gus Van Sant-tier shot-for-shot remake compared to what Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire) did to the source material in his 1999 stinker, In Dreams. 

In Dreams was actually the first of DreamWorks' drowning cycle films; not only does it include a number of highly Frase-centric plot points (the psi, the cheating partner, the trauma haircut, the psychiatric hospitalizations, Robert Downey Jr. as a dream-logic Jeff Buckley/Heath Ledger-Joker analog, etc etc), it also has the Sibyl herself cooing the film's closing theme.

Not even close to a coincidence here, folks. Not even in the same galaxy as a coincidence.

And here is wisdom: that scene up there opens with what is essentially an up-budgeted take on a crucial scene from the Mighty X, a name-game connection very much central to this psychodrama.

BONUS FACTOID: Neil Jordan and Stanley Kubrick apparently had a number of heated phone calls while Jordan was making In Dreams. 

The Kubester's bone of contention was that Jordan had cast Madison Egington as the lost daughter, and she was apparently needed for Eyes Wide Shut reshoots. Jordan would eventually cast Katie Segona for the role.

BONUS BONUS FACTOID: According to Jordan, the Annette Bening character drowning plot-point came from upstairs at DreamWorks (of course).

The next entry after In Dreams was What Lies Beneath, another exercise in source-material fuckery. 

The original treatment bore little resemblance to the final shooting script, the rewrite of which was credited to Clark Gregg, better known as the MCU's Agent Coulson. One of Gregg's innovations was the vengeful drowning victim, "Madison Elizabeth Frank." 

Yeah, file that one with "Samara Morgan." 

Then we had 2001's Spielberg/Kubrick collab, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, extremely loosely based on a Brian Aldiss short story.

And no, there's nothing about water or drowning in that extraordinarily-moist DreamWorks film's source material either.

BONUS FACTOID: Daveigh also appears in A.I., but her scenes got cut.

A.I. star Haley Joel Osment has had his own former child-star struggles, although obviously not nearly as catastrophic as Daveigh Chase's. 

Still, his issues made him a perfect choice for "Kitten," the Mighty X's take on Jacob's Ladder, which centers on the real MK-NAOMI program.

And then there's Minority Report in 2002, in which the film's mother/ daughter duo are done up to resemble the Shepherd Boy and the Sibyl, for whatever reason.

And just so there's no confusion as to intent here, Minority Report was originally slated to be released on what would have been Jeff Buckley's 34th birthday, and A.I. was released on the 26th anniversary of Tim Buckley's death by OD.

DREAMWORKS AND THE DEAD ICON

DreamWorks wasn't just injecting Buckley symbolism into their films, their record division was also deeply involved with Buckley's management, going so far as to sign the NYC-based singer that said-management was setting up as Buckley's replacement shortly after that fatal swim to the Siren.

Wait: I meant setting up his replacement shortly before Buckley's death.

Sorry.

Now, the original idea behind DreamWorks was that Spielberg would oversee feature films, Katzenberg would handle animation, and David Geffen would handle the music end. 

The project got a huge infusion of cash for this nascent empire from a banking syndicate led by American firms like Chase, Fleet and Bear Stearns and British giants like Barclays and NatWest. It didn't come without strings, apparently.

Even so, Geffen's first two DreamWorks Records signings were George Michael and Rufus Wainwright, both of whom tie directly into our grand mythic overture...

Michael was fresh off a long and bruising battle with Sony, and his DreamWorks debut Older was a huge international seller, but quite a bit less so in the US (it did go platinum, but 1987's Faith had sold ten times as much). 

That said, there's yet another example of a visual motif we've seen time and time and time again in this work. 

In case you're new to all this and still think that kind of thing is just a coincidence, do note that Michael would often perform a live cover of "Song to the Siren."

Not a cover of Tim Buckley's folky "Siren," mind you, but an uncanny mimicry of Elizabeth Fraser's haunted, elegiac, melismatic rendering.

Throwing in with the requisite synchery, Michael's DreamWorks debut was released on Samantha Morton's 19th birthday. 

So I guess you know how his story ends:

George Michael died in his sleep at his home in Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, on Christmas Day, December 25, 2016, at the age of 53. A British coroner officially determined that he died of natural causes from heart disease (dilated cardiomyopathy with myocarditis) and a fatty liver.

Myocarditis? The man was ahead of his time until the very end.

Rufus Wainwright was actually DreamWorks Records' first signing, a commercially-dubious move which didn't exactly electrify the industry. 

The son of Canadian folk singers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, Rufus has never troubled the upper reaches of the charts in any country. However, he did weigh in with a Jeff Buckley tribute:

"Memphis Skyline" explicitly addresses Buckley's drowning in the Wolf River Harbor. Wainwright juxtaposes his own experiences with the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, casting himself as Orpheus trying to cast a glance at Buckley's doomed Eurydice. 

Kind of weird and narcissistic of him, but let's take a closer look at producer Marius de Vries, who is closely connected to the overmyth here...

... not only through his work with Massive Attack, but with Mad Madge and PJ Harvey.

There's a must-read piece up on the Secret History of Rock on how Massive Attack's biggest hit - which the Sibyl first recorded the night of Buckley's disappearance - was originally meant to be sung by the chlamydiac Kabbalist:

"So her manager called Massive Attack's manager, and I was working on a Sunday when I got the call from Mark (the manager) saying, ‘I've spoken to Madonna's manager, and he's got this track called Teardrop, and he wants to know whether it's for real’. This was the first I or any of the other members of the band had heard about it.

"When I heard that, my first thought was, ‘Okay, so if Mushroom’s going to give that particular version to Madonna, I'm going to pull together a different version of the track’ – which is what I did. So literally that Sunday, I'm like, ‘Okay, so if we don't have the elements that Mushroom brought to the track, what are we left with?’ We had the harpsichord part that I'd written, and Liz's vocals. 

"I said, ‘Let's just just get rid of everything else, pretty much’."

As you'd expect from a raging sociopath like the Material Girl, this slight was not taken lying down. 

I mean, an album produced by two figures plucked straight from the Cocteau/Massive orbit? 

A tartan-themed tour called "Drowned World?" 

Come on, folks: a no-brainer there.

Then there's satanic witch Harvey, who'd been eliciting kompromat corresponding with Buckley towards the end there, and had already taken some nasty swipes at the Sibyl on her 1995 set, To Bring You My Love. Allegedly.

Harvey's 1998 single "A Perfect Day Elise," off the de Vries co-produced album Is This Desire?, was even more blatant, at least to the initiates. 

The song takes its inspiration from this:

J.D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" follows Seymour Glass, a traumatized WWII veteran, vacationing in Florida with his materialistic wife, Muriel. After Muriel has a concerning phone call about Seymour's erratic behavior, Seymour meets a young girl, Sybil, on the beach. 

So the young girl "Sybil" here becomes a big-blue-eyed, pixie-cut woman named "Elise?" I mean, what are we even doing here, people?

And "bananafish?" Subtle.

Harvey emerged from the same circles as her one-way rival -- 4AD head Ivo Watts-Russell put up the dosh for PJ's 1992 debut Dry -- so this sickening slab of musical necromancy "tribute" to Buckley might be seen by some as one last taunt at a woman whose only crime was being far more talented than her:

Untimely, you were taken away

Unlikely, out of time

When you still got so much to say

I'll write it; a song for you

But oh, what a way to go

So peaceful, you're smiling 

Oh, what a way to go

I'm with you, I'm singing

A very, very sick woman for sure.