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 -----
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
