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this may sound stupid, but the way it works for me i think sorry is that there is a continuous unconscious program of violence running in the back of my mind imprinted there by certain pieces of brain matter spattered about, or a human being twelve feet long after being cut surically in half by an m-60 machine gun. now i worked very hard for thrity years to repress all that using booze drugs sex but not movies rambo brought those programs out and put them on the screen for me so i could think the unthinkable kb does the same although it is not thinking far too gratuituous a word for me. much closer to some kind of visceal scream that stays constipated. every time i come out of a violent movie i feel more violent. and somehow safely manage to work it out without killing anybody or even harming a flea all those thirty years i repressed i took it out on myself and others in very destructive forms of behavior. for me, the work has been to make the unconscioius conscious. kb et does that graphically for me, as does the genre in general. but even more so...the patina of artistic sheen added to such works as quentins's...somehow allows me to honor the very vehicle....to value death...to free it from of the closet of western repression...and face the bare fact of my own worm ridden demise... and recognize that all our palty daily activities...are really mere efforts to deny the finality of our existence. the west works hard to cover death. the east to uncover it. and then integrate, culturally, the incubus, in a much more holistitic fashion, imho. i hope this helps. i had best shut up before my alligator mouth overloads my humming bird ass. ----- Original Message ----- From: Mike Frank To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Friday, October 17, 2003 2:05 PM Subject: Re: NAM VET thinking the unthinkable [was KILL BILL] i feel like one of those poe narrators who begins his story with the assertion "i am, as everyone knows, the most mild mannered of men" and then goes on to prove that he's a class A maniac i usually maintain an even keel in reading these responses and can see where a variety of opinions come from and what validity they might have . . . so i surprised myself by becoming really angry at martha's latest message, especially when i so much admire the quarter from which it comes then it occurred to me that perhaps what we have here is a failure to communicate on a simple lexical level . . . the specific question at hand is whether horror [or perhaps we should say "good" horror because presumably not all horror works this way] allows its audience to think the unthinkable . . . and it seems to me that we should reserve the word "think" in this context to that which takes place in what martha calls "cramped barriers of ordinary language and logic" . . . i have no doubt that there are important spaces that are not enclosed by these barriers --perhaps the most important spaces lie outside these barriers . . . but please, please let's save the word "think" for what goes on inside these barriers -- just so we can understand each other similarly, while i'm not at all sure that saying things obliquely is "the foundation principle of poetry and all art" i'm pretty well convinced that the issue here is not whether art expresses the unspeakable obliquely but whether that oblique expression allows most viewers to then think the unthinkable finally -- and here i think the argument is substantive rather than merely terminological -- i'm baffled by the claim that "David . . . Lynch's movies are certainly examples of a poet who permits us to keep our sanity by thinking the unthinkable in the largest sense" . . . i've been thinking, or trying to think about, and teaching lynch films since i first saw BLUE VELVET and more and more the only thing they allow me to conclude is that he's a self-indulgent poseur none of this is to deny the validity of what robert andrew says; if he claims that seeing KB allowed him to free himself of some dangerous demons i take that as a matter of fact . . . having never been trained to fight, much less in anything as nasty as nam, i cannot possibly know what such films do to him, or to other members of the audience for that matter but if films like these allow us to THINK the unthinkable then i would like someone to explain what this thinking is, and how it works mike PS-- i feel defensive enough to add that i remain someone who "enjoys" much horror -- if choosing to see something is some indication of "enjoyment" . . . it's not the value of horror that's being argued; it's the idea that horror allows a special kind of insight