Mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017)
"I want to make a paradise."
180 degree lines run through the thing like a stick of rock. Facing one direction, and then the other. The viewer, and the object of the gaze, whichever way round you interpret those things to be. We're dealing with hard lines here. And these elements of structure are hidden. Most people will come to it thinking that these structural elements simply don't exist. They'll see something else. Something they want to see. But then everyone is seeing something they want to see these days. Leaving us with the question: when did everyone get so stupid?
Possibly they've always been this stupid. I once watched a, well, let's just say 'friend,' fill a hollowed out chocolate egg with tea. They then proceeded to scratch at the bottom of the chocolate until they forced their finger through and tea began to pour out and onto the floor. They screamed in surprise. I asked what they thought was going to happen. They were hesitant, something, but not this.
I tell this story and everybody laughs. But everybody does this. You do this. I'm hesitant to say that I do this kind of thing too, but it's probably true. Something I'll say without equivocation is that over the past two years or so I've heard people say some of the most stupid and/or hateful things I've ever heard in my life. Even people I 'know' and/or 'respect' come out with things which are flagrantly untrue. Prior to Anders Bering Breivik doing what he did on Utøya I heard some dangerously racist comments from people in Scandinavia. In a post-Breivik environment I don't hear those comments anymore. But am I to believe that they simply went away? That everyone is now suddenly more tolerant? Of course not.
In Mark Cousins' The Story of Film he talks about how Italian Neo-Realism came about (partly, not entirely) because of a sudden emergence of faith in facts and figures. How suddenly a story could be told about a strike and it could be about the strike itself, rather than a human interest story of fictional characters being built up around the strike. People had so much faith in the unquestionable that they did not need a fiction around the strike in order to tell the story. Those days are long gone, and now everyone runs on feelings, on emotions. They eschew facts. Have no time for them. All they want is to have their own world view supported. Like some kind of animal.
Is this the fault of fiction? Of growing up surrounded by heroes and villains? Of the idea of being born and deserving something? Karl Ove Knausgaard is wary of pouring too much scorn onto fiction because now we live in a world which we make sense of and experience through fiction. But still, these are questions we should be asking ourselves.
Some people say I shouldn't say these things out loud. They say that if someone is going to take the time to say something, no matter what medium they choose to say it, that they should focus on making the world a nicer place to be in. They say that if you say something like this (and by 'this' I mean something that includes the space for that which we don't normally want to talk about) then all you're doing is making the world an uglier place. They think that maybe if they organise a cake event or something they'll be able to make the world a better place, be able to remove the image of their father lying in a hospital bed, dying, tugging at his throat as though there were something restricting it, when in fact there was nothing there, he simply couldn't breathe properly. They'll be able to replace these images with something else, something positive. Something that fills them with hope, rather than despair. Personally, I think that people like this *are* the problem: romantic dreamers who live with their head in the sand and think that if they paint rainbows on everything then everything will be okay. People who think that we need to push images of the inevitable out of our mind in order to progress. We don't. I once watched a man throw his hand into a dustbin. Everything won't be okay, it won't be just fine. Of that much we can all be certain. That's a promise.
So what's the answer? Perhaps everyone should just be burned to ashes and then maybe we could start again. As long as we find something in those embers that is of use to us. I mean... looking at how you behave now, you certainly don't behave responsibly. And, of course, when I say 'you' I mean 'all of you.' You don't treat each other with any degree of empathy or understanding. You talk about how much you want to find yourself or create ways of dealing with stress and empathy, but then this doesn't come to fruition in how you deal with people. You prize money over everything else, and always have. And, most heartbreakingly, you don't want to hear any of this. You want to be told how wonderful you are, even though you have a fetid stench about you that won't wash out no matter how hard you scrub, no matter how much you rub yourself with alum. You think you're special and important, even though you have nothing out of the ordinary to speak of, nothing to mark you out from any of the other faces, the other people, you're simply human. And that's something you don't like to consider. In order to quiet that voice inside you, you replace soul-searching with consumption. You want to consume things relentlessly, and then identify who you are as a human being via those things that you consume. Who you are inside has nothing to do with who you are inside, because there is nothing inside but an aching void that cries out for more and more to be thrown in: more objects, more experiences, more sensations. These things fall into a pit inside you, a pit without end, a pit that reeks of something dying and if you can just find the right things, the right sensations, then maybe that pit will suddenly be filled and you will experience a dizzying rush of the most wonderful feeling of satisfaction. But that hasn't happened yet, you haven't found it yet, and all the objects you have found so far which seemed like they would work have ended up being worthless, without value, only for show. Of course there are things that are precious and should be treated with respect, but all you do is break them, and misuse them, and take them for granted, without ever understanding their true worth, and then you run off into the night, screaming with delight.
One day you'll die, and that day can not come soon enough. Hopefully it'll be tomorrow. But if not, maybe the next day. Or the next. Or the next.
180 degree lines run through the thing like a stick of rock. Facing one direction, and then the other. The viewer, and the object of the gaze, whichever way round you interpret those things to be. We're dealing with hard lines here. And these elements of structure are hidden. Most people will come to it thinking that these structural elements simply don't exist. They'll see something else. Something they want to see. But then everyone is seeing something they want to see these days. Leaving us with the question: when did everyone get so stupid?
Possibly they've always been this stupid. I once watched a, well, let's just say 'friend,' fill a hollowed out chocolate egg with tea. They then proceeded to scratch at the bottom of the chocolate until they forced their finger through and tea began to pour out and onto the floor. They screamed in surprise. I asked what they thought was going to happen. They were hesitant, something, but not this.
I tell this story and everybody laughs. But everybody does this. You do this. I'm hesitant to say that I do this kind of thing too, but it's probably true. Something I'll say without equivocation is that over the past two years or so I've heard people say some of the most stupid and/or hateful things I've ever heard in my life. Even people I 'know' and/or 'respect' come out with things which are flagrantly untrue. Prior to Anders Bering Breivik doing what he did on Utøya I heard some dangerously racist comments from people in Scandinavia. In a post-Breivik environment I don't hear those comments anymore. But am I to believe that they simply went away? That everyone is now suddenly more tolerant? Of course not.
In Mark Cousins' The Story of Film he talks about how Italian Neo-Realism came about (partly, not entirely) because of a sudden emergence of faith in facts and figures. How suddenly a story could be told about a strike and it could be about the strike itself, rather than a human interest story of fictional characters being built up around the strike. People had so much faith in the unquestionable that they did not need a fiction around the strike in order to tell the story. Those days are long gone, and now everyone runs on feelings, on emotions. They eschew facts. Have no time for them. All they want is to have their own world view supported. Like some kind of animal.
Is this the fault of fiction? Of growing up surrounded by heroes and villains? Of the idea of being born and deserving something? Karl Ove Knausgaard is wary of pouring too much scorn onto fiction because now we live in a world which we make sense of and experience through fiction. But still, these are questions we should be asking ourselves.
Some people say I shouldn't say these things out loud. They say that if someone is going to take the time to say something, no matter what medium they choose to say it, that they should focus on making the world a nicer place to be in. They say that if you say something like this (and by 'this' I mean something that includes the space for that which we don't normally want to talk about) then all you're doing is making the world an uglier place. They think that maybe if they organise a cake event or something they'll be able to make the world a better place, be able to remove the image of their father lying in a hospital bed, dying, tugging at his throat as though there were something restricting it, when in fact there was nothing there, he simply couldn't breathe properly. They'll be able to replace these images with something else, something positive. Something that fills them with hope, rather than despair. Personally, I think that people like this *are* the problem: romantic dreamers who live with their head in the sand and think that if they paint rainbows on everything then everything will be okay. People who think that we need to push images of the inevitable out of our mind in order to progress. We don't. I once watched a man throw his hand into a dustbin. Everything won't be okay, it won't be just fine. Of that much we can all be certain. That's a promise.
So what's the answer? Perhaps everyone should just be burned to ashes and then maybe we could start again. As long as we find something in those embers that is of use to us. I mean... looking at how you behave now, you certainly don't behave responsibly. And, of course, when I say 'you' I mean 'all of you.' You don't treat each other with any degree of empathy or understanding. You talk about how much you want to find yourself or create ways of dealing with stress and empathy, but then this doesn't come to fruition in how you deal with people. You prize money over everything else, and always have. And, most heartbreakingly, you don't want to hear any of this. You want to be told how wonderful you are, even though you have a fetid stench about you that won't wash out no matter how hard you scrub, no matter how much you rub yourself with alum. You think you're special and important, even though you have nothing out of the ordinary to speak of, nothing to mark you out from any of the other faces, the other people, you're simply human. And that's something you don't like to consider. In order to quiet that voice inside you, you replace soul-searching with consumption. You want to consume things relentlessly, and then identify who you are as a human being via those things that you consume. Who you are inside has nothing to do with who you are inside, because there is nothing inside but an aching void that cries out for more and more to be thrown in: more objects, more experiences, more sensations. These things fall into a pit inside you, a pit without end, a pit that reeks of something dying and if you can just find the right things, the right sensations, then maybe that pit will suddenly be filled and you will experience a dizzying rush of the most wonderful feeling of satisfaction. But that hasn't happened yet, you haven't found it yet, and all the objects you have found so far which seemed like they would work have ended up being worthless, without value, only for show. Of course there are things that are precious and should be treated with respect, but all you do is break them, and misuse them, and take them for granted, without ever understanding their true worth, and then you run off into the night, screaming with delight.
One day you'll die, and that day can not come soon enough. Hopefully it'll be tomorrow. But if not, maybe the next day. Or the next. Or the next.