“I was determined not merely to suffer, but to respect the original form of my suffering as it had suddenly come upon me unawares, and I wanted to continue to feel it…” -Marcel Proust
Good. I was thinking about periods of writing; look at a certain piece, song or book, and if you’ve been doing your job, it distinguishes a particular paralysis you were experiencing at the time of its creation. Then there are those mystery spots that don’t immediately conjure a sensation and are easily forgotten… those are my favorites.
I would rather watch Salo than Funny Games (either version). I would opt for Irreversible over Trouble Every Day, and I would rather watch Last House on the Left than I Spit on Your Grave. I guess Halloween came early this year. According to what I assume are the most basic precepts of highbrow film theory Salo is the most defensible, Trouble Every Day the most elegant, and Funny Games the most post-modern and sterile; so sterile, in fact, that it’s freeze-dried.
I’m sorry but I prefer my Michael Pitt emaciated and scoring dope from Harmony Korine.
My unconscious has been fixated on David Lynch, so much so, that for the last few nights I’ve dreamt exclusively about his films. The most important dream took place at the end of Twin Peaks when Agent Cooper is possessed and Bob (the demon?) is on the loose. The whole town is plunged into horror and I’m there watching and participating in the objective/subjective way only dreams allow.
At some point, the hero for our doomed scenario became overwhelmingly apparent: Ol’ Dirty Bastard. And near the end of the dream either ODB was arriving or I was metamorphosing into him.
As I awoke I knew that this continuation of Twin Peaks was how I would have to begin my next review, but while writing this I realized that the Agent ODB scenario was a card I should play when the review was getting out of hand; like when consulting the high-brow precepts of film theory that justify the viewing of simulated torture: it’s okay if it means something, even better if it doesn’t.
Michael Haneke is willing to comment on ‘media and violence’ within a transgressive film medium.
“The secret is to oppose to the order of the real an absolutely imaginary realm, completely ineffectual at the level of reality, but whose implosive energy absorbs everything real and all the violence of real power which founders there” -Jean Baudrillard
I would counter that the only transgressive act Funny Games could have perpetrated would be if Haneke shot a faux documentary about how he tried to do a shot by shot remake of Funny Games but had his whole cast, crew and financing hijacked.
The documentary would follow his attempts to find out where and when shooting would begin for what used to be his movie. Maybe the reason David Lynch is so thoroughly entrenched in my unconscious is that, in a sense, I have fully integrated the sensibility of his work in a way that I’ve tried to do with other artists… and failed.
I say this because it’s been years since I could admit to being a David Lynch fan. At the age of 19 I saw Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet and said: “I see…” When the poet walked through the mirror and wound up in a hotel I found myself demystified with what I found so idiosyncratic in Lynch’s work –the innate connection between the supernatural and the banal.
But as Klossowski said: “we demystify in order to mystify better” hence Lynch is back and running the show in my downtime. Dreams stem from the unconscious and the unconscious has no sense of time. It only stores drives and images, the former are ceaseless, the latter static. It is in this area of simultaneous, contradictory activity that Lynch trumps Cocteau and regains his hold of my psyche.
There is also the dimension of transgressive terror crouching within the absurd, or the absurdly banal (kitsch) that separates it from the grainy terror lurking within the bourgeois comfort (Funny Games) leading Lost Highway into the realm of the truly haunting.
The use of silence in the films of David Lynch.
In order for this piece to work it must be raining. The sound of rain gives an entryway to the somnambulate state just before falling asleep.
“His gesture on the cover –coy, knowing smile, raised eyebrows, finger pressed to lips – shows him for what he really is: a silencer, a guardian of the silence at the heart of all the noise. It also hints that, paradoxically, he is an enabler of all economies as well. Silencing, he allows the spectacle to continue…” -Tom McCarthy
The first 7 or 8 episodes are amazing in their unspoken depth. There is a whole world of uncertainty to discover and ponder.
Originally this review was supposed to be for My Bloody Valentine (in 3D). I figured the producers of that film would release it the Friday before Valentine’s Day. Instead, they picked the dramatically unromantic date of January 16th.
All that was left for me was Friday the 13th –un-numbered. Who’s counting anymore? Jason is seen drinking coffee on screen for the whole film. New Line is stoked though, they’ve given the billboards an air of prestige the last 18 movies didn’t have. And maybe this sophistication will rub off on the audience…
Maybe it’s almost as if Bergman directed Friday the 13th –almost.
From the very first scene, where an anonymous motorist tries talking his way out of a speeding ticket by reciting Jimi Hendrix’s Crosstown Traffic, to the end of this review when I discuss the last 7 or 8 episodes of Twin Peaks, there is a vanishing point of silence where Audrey dies, Bob possesses Agent Cooper and the town is left looking back on the tracks of their fates ala Fire Walk With me.
I just wish ODB was here to experience it all firsthand. He is, after all, the only person I know of to create a concept album about crack cocaine; and if he’s unavailable I guess we’ll just have to dig up D’Angelo and see what he’s up to these days.
D’Angelo staged an avant-garde coup that only he was aware of when he recreated one of ODB’s famous mugshots. This was not simulacra; it was performance art.
Jason is an icon, he will return elliptically until the end of the world.
It used to be true, what Proust said…
People never cease to change place in relation to ourselves. In the imperceptible but eternal march of the world, we regard them as motionless…
But we have only to select in our memory two pictures taken of them at different moments, close enough together however for them not to have altered – and the difference between the two pictures is a measure of the displacement that they have undergone in relation to us.’
We are left wondering why everyone is so static when we are so close to the apocalypse. Wouldn’t you expect radical change, or at least entropy? Troy has an excellent idea regarding this –no, it does not involve cloning. Yes, it involves time machines.
He speculates that the future is even worse than the present, and that those of us who are still alive there, are using time machines to relive the past. The time we live in right now is very popular in the future and these people, as they exist here, now, are essentially ghosts.
Nehalem
This sort of disaster can spill outside the bounds of writing. Say you’ve already written all there is to write on a subject –and you come to this conclusion in the midst of a depression you experienced the exact dimensions of almost three years ago. A specific depression that makes familiar objects seem to accentuate your alienation from life and the world.
It was springtime and I was working a series of graveyard shifts, feeling a ceaseless loneliness that I had projected onto one person who didn’t care (see the pick-up artist: a film re: ‘true love’). Well the times have changed and so have some of the particulars, nonetheless, I thoughtlessly stopped into a 7-11 I don’t usually go to and who should I see?
Steve, the mentally challenged guy I worked with at Blockbuster Video about 11 years ago. He is wearing a Rite Aid uniform. Not only am I unspeakably traumatized I am also consciously configuring the possibility of using this situation in my review.
Looking at Steve’s dim light-bulb face I can tell he hasn’t learned anything in the last 11 years.
Friday the 13th: a sequel
Yeah, I know, it’s been done; and what’s the point of rewriting history when there’s the whole future waiting to be written? Remember, Troy said the time we are living in (08, 09, 10) is halcyon times for people in the future –hence the massive influx of time-travelers.
But what about parallel travelers like Steve (Friday the 13th part 1) who elliptically rotate through our lives on a track constructed out of failure and grief? And how does a figure of alienation arrive at a time of profound personal alienation? The chances of it happening are less likely than seeing a shooting star, but more probable than getting struck by lightning.
Sam Skow proposed, a few years back, that the dystopian future would be controlled by regional recycling centers –like Frank Herbert’s Dune but with aluminum instead of spice.
When I think of Dune I think of vast expanses. The prospect of a recycling based future is the inverse of that thought and basically projects images of graffiti covered facilities into the minds eye.
Adding to this claustrophobia, I put forth a theory I saw presented on Nightline 20 years ago: A future society where citizens are required to carry HIV identification cards; effectively transmuting a medical affliction into a bureaucratic tagging system, homogenizing the particular tragic nature of individual cases.
I guess the 90’s had to come along to neutralize this 1980’s type view of the future; just watch Watchmen or an episode of L.A. Law for a more distinct glimpse of this vantage point. The 80’s were a very forward thinking decade. The people that thrived during them would have scoffed at government mandates declaring that wet laundry be used instead of hand sanitizer (thank you Burning Man!)
Looking back we can say that it was the idea of the monsters (Freddy, Jason etc.) that scared us more than the production values allowed. Because just like now, people who made movies in the 80’s thought their films would hold up to a modern sense of scrutiny –indefinitely.
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Join us next time in “I Love You Man: a film”
Or go back to last time in “The Pick-Up Artist: a film”
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WHAT TO DO NOW?