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| I dont think I can detach and/or translate my emotions the same way you can Scrypt. And I remember because you saw bodies falling (and hitting) on 9/11 no? I'm guessing if I saw such things it would permanently scar the part of me that enjoys convincing violence/blood in film. Thats a peace time quirk. |
Make no mistake, seeing those people fall had a lasting and permanent effect. But because I chose to stand there and witness those deaths -- to memorize the interrelationship and disposition of every falling person -- I have the kind of closure I wouldn't had I run.
Seeing all that has changed my previous habit of dividing the publishing world into failures and successes, because, in the material sense, everybody fails. Therefore there's little point in Darwinian despair.
Gurdjieff once said that what most people think of as morality is a primitive reaction, rather like vomiting. ("I would never treat my best friend like that! You people are sick for wanting to screw your cousins!") Court shows and talk shows cater to that idea of morality. But true morality is on a different level. To access it, you have to step outside yourself, your own phobias and weaknesses as a person.
On the morning of 9/11, I took off toward the burning tower not to hover like some carrion specter but because I had just helped someone to breathe with my inhaler and wanted to do the same for other people. Once there, I felt it my duty to record the event so that I could remember it accurately long after the media's self-congratulatory litanies.
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| I dont think I can detach and/or translate my emotions the same way you can Scrypt. And I remember because you saw bodies falling (and hitting) on 9/11 no? I'm guessing if I saw such things it would permanently scar the part of me that enjoys convincing violence/blood in film. Thats a peace time quirk. |
(I'm using your quote as a refrain stanza because it has many implications.)
Violence in a film has nothing to do with violence in real life, any more than *death*, the Elizabethan euphemism for orgasm, has to do with actual dying.
Violence in fiction is theater, is metaphor, and stands apart from literal death. You don't find people weeping over the coyote in Roadrunner cartoons because they know that nothing brutal has happened in real life.
Children cry most often over the death of a character who has been made real for them. But in a book by Dostoyevsky like The Idiot, every character is real. And it isn't that I disapprove of shallower books than The Idiot a priori. Dostoyevsky's gift for empathy is in the seeing, not the preaching. The depth is in the various characters' interaction, not the saintly prince's sermons.
In fiction, violence can drive home humane ideas. Often, if a novel is easy to read, then it hasn't used violence deeply, it hasn't made you feel the awful consequence of life being taken, it hasn't made you see through the victims' eyes nor trace the intricate choreography of merciless Nature acting through thoughtless men. American Psycho is a book on that easy level. Dennis Cooper's _Closer_ and _Frisk_ are not. As cold as Cooper's books can seem, he shows you the depth and complexity his homicidal characters feel compelled to ignore or miscomprehend until they can't.
Eurotrash movies and horror films are theater. Their chief merits as art are: (1) aesthetic attention to detail; (2) writing and plotting that is so out of the Hollywood mainstream as to be fecund with ideas; (3) conspicuous and conscious lapses of taste, which remove the possibility of Merchant and Ivory banality from the artistic palette (Haneke's _The Piano Teacher_ does this as well); and (4) they teach us to face violence metaphorically, not in the sense of being immune to feeling compassion, but rather to question our knee-jerk reactions, which are usually sentimentalized, fearful or mimetic in the ultimate sense: the reflection of someone else's hatred. One doesn't want one's humanity to be reducible to the iconography of corporations and nations who choose to manipulate us. One wishes to be awake to the difference between real and metaphorical violence.
Great samurais were trained to know the difference. So are monks. Tibetan Red Hat Buddhists often meditate on corpses left to decay on the hard stone ground (one can't be buried in rock). And always the question is the same: What is the nature of suffering? We ask it of ourselves, not only of the dead or dying.
