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Yes, Dominic, that is a terrible film, but so disturbing, not just gruesome, spiritually gruesome and it's weird, in trying to remember it, I remember almost nothing except the unsettling feeling it generated, though your description conveys it pretty well. I don't blame you for not wanting to go to Gitmo, and there's some disturbing stuff in that link, but the part I was thinking of in connection with nonsense was the use of music in interrogation. The man who has since been one of the few released was put in a room, someone would come in and set up a boombox and tell him to listen and leave him in there for a time. But the music wasn't some techno chaos, but just stuff, like 20 Music Hits, Fleetwood Mac, innocuous, nothing but top 10 stuff, so that the last half of the article was given over to the author wondering 'what all that was about?" The author begins to speculate that the music might have had subliminal messages or that it was generating a low frequency tone, or an experiment in the use of those things. But it seemed like such a nonsense event, and perhaps just that, a psychological use of the non-sequitor, best, Rebecca ---- Original message ---- >Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 22:36:49 +0000 >From: Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]> >Subject: Re: Cluckability >To: [log in to unmask] > >There's a terrible film called _Event Horizon_, in which a space ship >sent through a hole in reality to get to the other side of the galaxy >disappears completely, then reappears years later haunted by an >unspeakable demonic presence. In that film, the realm of the ab-surd - >outside conventional physics, normal space and time - is quite >definitely a realm of PURE CHAOS AND EVIL, as the scary techno music >soundtrack reminds us at every turn when we're not actually being >confronted with characters clawing their own eyes out in horror. It's >an awful movie, and I don't recommend actually watching it, but for >some reason it stuck in my mind. Possibly Joely Richardson. She seems >quite intelligent, but my goodness she's been in some stinkers. > >How could a realm of PURE CHAOS be EVIL, you ask? At least, you do if >you're used to magic systems in which CHAOS is orthogonal to GOOD and >EVIL and a mage can as easily be CHAOTIC GOOD as LAWFUL EVIL. Rest >assured that the film does not in any way attempt to resolve this >conundrum. But Sam Neill is pretty good as the demonically possessed >Doctor Weir. > >I don't really want to go to Gitmo, but since it came up I would >comment that nonsense can be an assault on sense - on the senses - and >that both malicious and benevolent uses of the non sequitur to shock >and destabilize are documented. Zen koans are I suppose benevolent >examples. Most of the nonsensical opinion pieces I read in the >Guardian nowadays strike me as malevolent, in a castrated sort of way. > >Edward Lear? Harmless, charming, also ever so slightly subversive >although it's hard to say just how or why. In a way it's the >harmlessness that's so subversive: the Pobble Who Had No Toes has also >no axe to grind. Compare Spike Milligan, whom I've never found >terribly funny (this would be a generational thing, I guess: Chris >Morris is more to my taste) but who emits a distinct *hwaet!* of >grinding axes even at his silliest. > >Dominic