| Author | Message | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
Anyone seen this? I saw it last night. Uber-Lynch: three hours of it. Great stuff. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
It gets to Oxford in two weeks!  But - can't wait. Rabbits and all. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
But.. that means I can't talk about it here for two weeks! Not fair! | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
No - it just means either a) I'll have a will of iron and not read the thread; or b) I won't have a clue what anyone's talking about. What's new? But I don't think it's one of those films that deserves a Wikipedia "plot spoiler follows." So: a cursed movie, N. Watts voicing suburban rabbits, L. Dern getting fugue-ish ... and that's just the YouTube trailers. Tell us more! | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Like: http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp? ID=2557 | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
Pretty sound review. You can't really spoil the plot - I mean, Lisa and I both came out of the cinema with different ideas about what had happened. It's a film about a David Lynch film in a lot of ways; then it's a film about films. Laura Dern is indeed fantastic, and Harry Dean Stanton has some lovely moments. But what I came away with more than anything was: what's so scary about *rooms* and how does David Lynch know how to show me what's scary about rooms? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
They're here before us; they'll be here when we've gone. They're waiting for something, but - what? And it's what could be waiting for you inside them: Bluebeard theory. You might open the door and discover a picture you've never seen before on the wall, showing someone you loved ten years ago laughing with a complete stranger. Or you might find that baby from "Eraserhead" gasping on the bed, and then someone hands you a feeding spoon and a bottle and says: "Go on - you try it." | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
*Goes and sees it* *Sits stunned* You dissolve POV into anima (animus?) psychosis of the first order, with Freudian symbolism; mix in the Polish element (a nod to Polanski and "Repulsion"? A hint of "the east" and all the strangeness that represents in stories ? Or just a wink to US audiences that this is all "just another Polish joke"? ); seem to end the film at least twice before its finale (if, in fact, it ever does "end"); add the very Lynchian touch of that logman in the closing minutes, under the titles - and you get: I'm not sure what. As I watched, though, and found one story/character folding into another like mashed potato, I thought: could anyone write a book like this? The only one that jumped to mind was Irwin's "Arabian Nightmare." And then, strangely, the film ended on exactly the same note as Irwin's tale, with that damned monkey (or is it really an ape ..?) in 'Pomona.' Who's really got the tale (tail?) around here ..? | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
Anyone mind if we discuss this in greater depth? Zali - perhaps you could put a spoilers warning in the thread title? Mind you, I'm not sure if any discussion could truly 'spoil' the film - any ideas would be pure conjecture. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Inserted, dude. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Spoilers? Oh, my. Once you get past Lynch's description, that it's "about a woman in trouble, and it's a mystery, and that's all I want to say about it," there's not a lot more to "reveal": which is a bit like describing "Eraserhead" as a film which features a baby. Anyone who hates Lynch will ignore this thread; and anyone who loves him won't be put off by our exagmination round his factification, I think. But if you want to post a "spoiler alert," Zali, let us know. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
The Dudes have been warned, so - It might be some, all, or none of these: *An LA actress having a nervous breakdown because of the son she never had *A Polish actress projecting her ideal self into Hollywood *The projection of the Polish actress having a nervous breakdown *The Hollywood actress's self in breakdown seeking refuge in the idea of being Polish like her husband - if her husband actually exists, and isn't just a murderous ghost summoned up at a seance *The true contents of room 47 *A story ( "the longest running serial in the world," as a voice says at the beginning - or words to that effect) that the rabbits dream up to pass an idle few hours *"Something to do with the telling of time" Far too much to think about in one go - but I did find myself laughing out loud at Dern's monologues, where she hospitalises one murderous idiot after another - "That's the kind of shit I'm talkin' about." Mind you, I was the only person in the audience who seemed to find this remotely funny. No accounting for taste, etc. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
Kewl! All wrong, of course, Martin ;) It's actually a version of the Sophia myth, in which Nikki Grace (groan!) falls from herself into a succession of innapropriate relationships before ending up in prostitution. Finally she confronts herself, asks for help ("it won't be long now") and achieves reconcilation. Or maybe it isn't. The rabbits are the same as the polish men at the seance - guardians of *something* (the pleroma?) that room 47 is the gate to (the Phantom is looking for an opening). They provide the means for her 'husband' (Christ?) to help her destroy the Phamtom, thereby releasing the 'lost girl' (who has been sitting waiting at the end of the downward spiral she herself entered during filming of the original Polish film, waiting to be reunited with her 'husband') with who she is reconciled. At the end, the enter the place where all the (David Lynch's) lost people are finally reconciled with themselves. Did you notice the girl from Mulholland Drive there? Then again, it's also just a film about how David Lynch makes films. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
*Sulks* No point in buying the dvd now... Ho, ho. No, *actually* it's a highly coded account of US history - 4/7 = 4 July = Independence Day, the rabbits as the Kennedy clan, "Pomona" as that unreachable "city on a hill" - No, really it's a re-told Elusinian mystery, confronting your worst fears in dark places - Er *gathers wits* - at one point Dern shows us a tattoo or a biroed design on her hand. Any thoughts on that? It looked like "KB" or "KL" ..? | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
I think it was L.B. Could have been a badly-drawn 47 though. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
I saw L. Herring from "Mulholland" - but missed Nastassja Kinski (sigh) who was somewhere in there, too. Love the Sophia reading (but then, most of us on here would, wouldn't we?) - which just leaves all the Polish stuff, obvious screwdrivers, rabbit rituals with lightbulbs, and the repeated time references and tears to fathom. *Pokes lighted cigarette into shirt* *Discovers through resultant hole* *Finds "other" eye peering back* | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
*Discovers* should be *Peers,* of course ... *Shudders at thinking them one and the same ...* | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
You know, this Sophia reading is getting a bit spooky. The folk tale related by Nikki's visitor at the start: "A little boy went out to play. As he stepped out the door, he caused a reflection. Evil was born." The Demiurge, Sophia's little boy, created the world (went outto play) which was an unconscious reflection of the divine model. Evil was born. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
I like it a lot - "Nikki Grace" underlines it in bold. Then the little girl went out to play and found - was it the palace behind the market, behind the eye? You could say: Sophia finds redemptive truth beyond the whores, beyond "I" as the greedy, "reading" ego. Equally, of course, you soon get lost in interpretations as abstruse as anything "Nikki" stumbles into behind the sets (obvious Gnosticism, if ever I saw it). By that light, the film may offer up a sequence of its own intrepretations: or it might just be our accidental reading of semi-organised phenomena. But clearly, we're not dealing with an allegory that you can simply unlock like the box in "Mulholland Dr." (and look where that led ...)but with a kind of fractal rorscharch that throws up all manner of shapes, hints, and dead ends. It echoes everything from "Eraserhead" (an in-film spectator of the action) to Lynch's songs (Nikki is surely the same woman he thought of years ago in "Rockin' Back Inside Your Heart" - she'll never go "to" Hollywood): and it makes you wonder what (if anything) he can do next. Obsessives on other forums have already seen the thing 5 or 6 times. I'm not sure I would - or could - do that. But a second time, soon: absolutely. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
And further to Sophia/little boy: that whole strand about "her" son, and the husband who can't conceive. An inconceivable male force? Now who could that be..?  | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
And ... CUT! PRINT! Alex, Martin - super stuff. Now, everybody, if we can turn to page 35 - | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Has anyone been struck by the similarity of the violent seduction scene in Blue Velvet, possibly its best scene, with the way that Shakespeare's Richard iii sucessively seduces two women in a very similar way, through sheer panache even though both women know he has cold-bloodedly murdered their children, their husbands, their fathers? Richard dismisses their foolishness ... | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Maybe it's not Blue Velvet. It's the scene where I think Willem Dafoe fast talks his way into having sex with a very unwilling and unhappy party. That's all I remember. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
"Wild at Heart," I think - Dafoe = Bobby Peru. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKnMuTuTI70 | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
That scene is very striking. Full of ambiguities. Very frank and violent. Is it emotional? Or clinically cold ultimately? I watched the BBC Richard iii production. Those scenes where Richard verbally outpaces the two women, being inwardly contemptuous of them, takes everything from them, but makes them complicit, there is a strange aching sadness to that. Very resonant. Does it contain something of the truth of male-female relations, symbolically? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Could well be! Also the subject of Luna's haunting lament for a failed slacker relationship: http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=116901 "My thoughts kept turning to Bobby Peru/ How would he handle this one?" No prizes for guessing. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Shakespeare always seems to be one step ahead. How the hell did he manage to work out so much so quickly? The Duke in Measure for Measure gets married to the 'nun' - he pretty much enforces her compliance. Dubious; ambiguous; comedic. There is a kind of self-portrait in that. The older man revisting his younger self in Angelo. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
The theme of being able to know oneself only through corruption. That knowledge is available to us, gettable only by despoilation. Imagine a snow-scene of perfect virgin whiteness. And a set of muddy footprints trailing across it. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Hell hound. Bottled spider. Toad. Who can put his hand on his heart and say: "I am not a bottled spider?" At bay; and visible in the shiny glass? Poisonous. Emotionally crippled? As ugly as sin? If you take yourself seriously - beware! The wildest curses wont describe your fate. Like that Korean student. Everyone is corrupt but him. Destitute in the white snow. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Who indeed? We've all had days when we've thought - "The bastids! I'll show 'em -" Fortunately, friends to talk to, a good drink, lack of access to automatic weapons and a basically non-psychopathic personality mean: no harm was done. RIII: I wonder how much of our perception is down to A. Sher's interpretation back in the '80s, leaping across the stage on those amazing crutches. Difficult to see round that interpretatiuon, I think: even Olivier's pales. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Martin, I take a different view. I have what I suppose should be regarded as a psychopathic personality, looking out from the inside. I know what I mean. Demons rule me. The first thing people want to do with a person who intrudes on their normalcy is to normalise him. "He is completely different from me; he is an antisocial weirdo but I am nice." As in a nice robot built by television for example. Or as in millions of them. How is anybody nice? I have never seen Sher's interpretation. The words "bottled spider" are enough for me. Shakespeare has me nailed and it makes me smile. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
One sells oneself short if one believes in niceness. It's a form of collective insanity. Nice! Nice! Are chickens nice? People aren't nice. Relationships are built from the transparency of one's nastiness. You can't build a world from niceness. It's true. A fact. Trust me; as Tony Blair would say. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
>>>antisocial personality disorder, manifested in aggressive, perverted, criminal, or amoral behavior without empathy or remorse (Dict def psychopath) It describes our politics. I don't think this too wild a generalisation. Now suppose this, that I take myself seriously in this perception. The perception may be true; but does it mean that I should take myself seriously? Does it make me moral, that I can see how things are? No, it makes me helpless, impotent, Hamlet-like. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
The more I think about that the more I think it's right. We have a politics of goods. Of rights. But it is fundamentally heartless. Deceptional. The more that people get what they want the more that this condition goes unexamined. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
No sign of Sher on youTube - though he wrote a diary of the production: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Year-King-Antony-Sher/dp/1 854597531/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/026-4924400-2348454?ie=U TF8&s=books&qid=1176909990&sr=8-1 I think, if you've sufficient insight to describe yourself as "psychopathic," you're almost certainly not. As for those demons - everyone I know has some, one way or the other. Pesky critters: one minute telling us to commit unspeakable acts of violence; the next, dress up in women's clothes and see what's happening on the night bus. But we can't be ruled by our enthusiasms, can we? Unlike Cho Seung-hui. As for normalising, I remember someone once told me they thought "Anna Karenina" the most evil book in the world, because of the legitimacy it leant that process. The "morality" of it (whose? when?) we could argue till the cows come home, of course: but I don't think being quietist in the face of public madness is the same thing as ethical impotence. You may not defeat the bastards, but you needn't applaud them, either. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Martin, I have sometimes been in psychopathic states, I should amend that. I don't think it is unusual - a dissociated state in which indifference to others is defining. Shakespeare understood it. Cho Seung - the bottled spider - thought he was Hamlet: he was more Richard III; but at the bottom of the heap, no king. The real Richard IIIs continue to sit at the top of the heap. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I think Shakespeare probably served in some capacity as a soldier. Hamlet is as good a riposte as any I can think of to the concept of normality. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
MJP: you're not the only one, by miles. In my experience, though, those episodes are still a long way from this kind of thing: "You have vandalised my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy's life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenceless people." Persecution mania, extreme feelings of worthlessness, delusions of grandeur, glorious fantasies of revenge - we can only sympathise. Even so, despite our lapses into sometimes unmentionable states of mind, we're (hopefully) nowhere near this embattled and bristling paranoia. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
"hard-to-follow... disturbing, very disturbing - very angry, profanity-laced," It's the bad language which really shocks you, doesn't it? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
All of this is the language of distance, isn't it? "He certainly wasn't like *us* - *I* never have disturbing thoughts, get angry, or - heaven forbid - express myself in a way which is not lucid, reasonable, and an exemplar of my class/ethnic background! Altogether, now - 'Doe - a deer, a female deer, Reh, a drop of golden sun' - " It's not far from offensive cliche, either: 'We never knew what Cho was thinking, they all look alike anyway, they're - inscrutable! *That's* the word - !' What I don't understand, though, is if the poor boy hated the place and the people so much, why stay? I've always found people I dislike a waste of time and energy, and it's far easier to shut the door on them and find others I get on with. But, sadly, that's mental illness: you no longer see there's an alternative. The wood is the trees, and ( I'm told) the subject the object. As one of my oldest friends, who is schizophrenic, tells me, it's indescribably terrifying. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
I'm wondering if that's the problem: he couldn't escape the place. It had got under his skin, it was inside his head... "never get out of this blues alive!" Before I got out of the old flat I was having similar feelings about the place. The people who had violated not only the flat, but also what it represented, had somehow secreted their essence in the place. If it hadn't been for the recent spate of letterbombings to companies, I would have been doing something similar to a cabal of maintenance firms. I don't think I'm actually exaggerating very much about that: I wanted to see these people injured, horrifically, and their families and loved ones too. The fact that this pushed me out of that situation, is probably testimony to some sort of survival instinct rather than necessarily any developed sense of conscience. What happened in Virginia was of course greater in scale and intensity. This man couldn't escape the anger that he felt towards the place, he wasn't afraid anymore, and he was going to take it out with him when he exploded. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
The Virginia man's words imply that he thought he was responding in a 'moral' way to the world he found himself in. Listening to that English teacher - a remarkable woman - I think one of the main problems was extreme lonliness where the pain that had for him fed on itself. I have only a very sketchy idea of the background but there seems to have been jelousy about a girl combined with admiration for terroristic virtues of killing - as in the Columbine event. A lone soldier fighting for his world. Almost simultaneously 170 murdered in Bagdad. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
io, sorry to hear about the troubles you have been having by the way. Getting the rug pulled out from under me - it has put me in some pretty strange moods myself, as I say, so I see no clear line at all between me and this Virginia shooter in terms of mood - or with others - I have watched my nephew being driven nuts by my sister talking to him by the hour on the need to be polite and then eventually 'bugging out' completely. Running off into a nowhere land in a near psychotic state. This is what human beings are like! | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
>>>"The world has endured a view of life that few of us would or should ever have to endure," Flaherty told a news conference. "I'm sorry you all were exposed to these images." Flaherty, state police chief on the killer's highly disturbing video. The attitude this describes is a 'normative' one. It has nothing to do with the world that is inhabited by the greater proportion of the world's population: in the superslums of South America or of places in Africa for example. We blank out the true horror of the human condition being too busy with our immediate private concerns. The pathway to a greater hell - probably. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
It is a discussion with both sides speaking through the end of a gun. Cho has lost the argument; but he will have his many admirers waiting in the wings for their chance. She may be gentle She may be kind She may not know what's on her mind But YOU better know - the one you love Randy Newman (Hate being the converse side of love, the admission of failure and defeat and self-pity.) She may be hungry, SHE wont say But you better get a burger or sumpin in her right way - the one you love ... | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>> We blank out the true horror of the human condition being too busy with our immediate private concerns. Selfish, self-obsessed, self-pitying... perhaps it's the very construction of the self, the isolation of the individual, which brings about these sorts of massacres. Conversely, in the Baghdad bombings we see the abnegation of the self, surrender of the self to a greater political or religious cause. The violence is there whichever way you play it, as collective fanaticism or personal emptiness. But the flipside of the coin is meaningful collective action and individual genius - rare as they are. Are they enough to balance the books? | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
>>>But the flipside of the coin is meaningful collective action and individual genius - rare as they are. Are they enough to balance the books? None of us can really tell what we would be like if we were caught up in a war, especially a war as domestic and personal as that in Iraq. These are some of the thoughts I have had on it. After all your friends get killed, after you have got nothing to lose, after the grief, or in the middle of it, your personality changes. Violence is inevitable. You feel detached, prepared for death, everything sweet, pure, loving, has gone. So you fight to revenge that; you fight to destroy the enemy. Events take over. You are no longer in charge of your life. After days of staring at blank walls you choose your side, arm yourself and fight. It is inevitable. Civilised life is held in place by law. The law makes us real. In war the law vanishes. Reality also vanishes thus. There are no limits. You could say that a soldier has gone psychotic because after days of fighting he finds the coughing of a farmer so annoying that he shoots him dead for it. But that is from the perspective of the law. That soldier might still return from the war and again take up his old civilised polite life, bring his children up well, etc. Be a pillar of the community. I think we, as a society, have a deeply unrealistic view of human nature and of what we are capable of - in spite of the bloody 20thC. I am a total pessimist in these terms. I think that we are all irredeemably heartless and selfish and that we collectively conspire to maintain this reality (through law). But I include myself in that estimation! I am utterly self-important and helpless to do anything whatever about it. I live under the tyrrany of myself. I can't even change my haircut without being tyrranised by a sense of self. Suicide bombers I think are no different. They equally are driven by a sense of their own importance - just like Cho too; full of himself. The flip side of this, or the chink of light, is that it can be dealt with pragmatically by simply recognising it. For example, in my own case, I know that I am slightly deranged, that I am capable of psychotic episodes of anger, for whatever reason, but I also have a pragmatic approach to this, for they occur only when I take myself seriously. When I make me important. If I don't do that then I generally avoid most of the consequences. One thing I don't do is believe that I am a pretty regular sort of guy or any of that crap. .. I think van Vogt must have been a soldier, the inevitability of human violence is a constant preoccupation. I wonder to what degree Cho played video games. | ||
| robp Username: robp Registered: 10-2006 |
If we are all irredeemably heartless and selfish yet still capable of conspiring together to overcome this to create even brief episodes (let alone long epochs) of reality or sanity or stability, then that is quite some achievement for a lowly ape and there hope remains. Rob |