I confess, again, that I have not seen KB or Pulp Fiction or Natural Born
Killers.  I also confess that I do not see horror films.  Why?  Their anti-
humanism and degradation is, I find, appalling and frightening.  I cannot
square that these are merely filmic representations of either our repressed
base urges (pace Hobbes etc) or our need to be reminded of life's outer edges.

I think that such films, with ironic discontent or not, merely play to deadened
and dissipated people who need jolting to remind themselves that they are
alive.  And the filmmakers?  Drenched as we are in a world of irony, anything
now can be overdone, made excessively ripe, and jetted into hollow fantasy.

I realize that this might come across as moralizing, yet I am merely trying to
be descriptive, not prescriptive.  Beyond style and posturing and a facile
application of "fear," what can such films offer?

If you want brutal, affecting psychological depth that truly poses questions,
go see Haneke's brilliant Le pianiste.

Andrew




Quoting Ron T <[log in to unmask]>:

> It would seem here that what is of great fascination to the normal viewer of
> Scorcese or Tarantino or Born Killers is the total otherness of violence and
> how alien it is from our normal routines. The behavior of these characters is
> very unlike the behavior of most films depicting "normal" everyday
> life--work, love, mother-daughter relationships, etc.. Playing now is also
> "Under the Tuscany Sky" which has its very normal experiences of love and
> hope and mere normalcy. Unlike these films, depicting the world we as
> bourgeosie "normal" people occupy, there is this other world of outrageous
> violence and abnormal pathological thinking where people kill each other for
> the slightest reason.  Its not the humanism that fascinates us, its this
> pathological unrepressed acting out of the most violent urges that we as sane
> theater-going ticket-paying date-taking pop-corn-eating bill-paying
> low-interest-rate-seeking alarm-clock-setting individuals find so
> fascinating.  We should in all reality deny any interest in this, as we would
> in a film that shows people shitting all over the place.  Its not the
> humanism that we find so appealing. Humanism would be a meaningless concept
> in this other  Darwinian world.  This world gains meaning only through our
> own sense of sublimation and normalcy. Ron
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>   From: Sarah Nichols
>   To: [log in to unmask]
>   Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2003 10:23 PM
>   Subject: Re: kill bill beyond humanization
>
>
>
>   I think when I started to articulate my thoughts on Kill Bill I was
> struggling to find the right words; "humanize" was probably the wrong one,
> but I couldn't think of a better one to replace it!
>
>   Mr. Martin is right when he says that the lens of humanization is often not
> the best way to get to a film. Think of Scorsese's films. If I tried to
> identify, or "get involved in the characters", I would be completely turned
> off by what he is trying to show. Casino is another film that goes beyond
> humanization, one that took me a long time to appreciate, and perhaps that is
> what will happen in my experience with Kill Bill. (And perhaps this is why
> Gangs of New York is not entirely successful: he wants to have us sympathize
> with Leonardo and Cameron, while Daniel Day Lewis makes no apologies for
> himself, just as no one in Casino or Goodfellas does).
>
>   For the moment, though, I am still digesting it. My feelings about it
> recall what I felt when I saw Weekend for the first time: exhilaration,
> revulsion, a certain amount of awe (because of the fact that he is leaving
> the need to humanize behind, just as Godard did). Is it another "film
> floating in the universe?" another film "found in a dump"? I don't know.
>
>   (and completely OT, the Nancy Sinatra song at the beginning is
> extraordinary).
>
>   Sarah Nichols
>
>
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Andrew Lesk

http://courses.ece.utoronto.ca/eng252yl0101
http://www.andrewlesk.com