The Innocents (1961) goes well beyond the original source material. This is not merely a case of sexual repression. It is sexual projection, a mapping of desire and repulsion onto the possession delusion made concrete and real. A desire so powerful it broke through the surface of reality. A hideous self-loathing becomes entwined by a foreboding religious terror. She is tormented by the very demons which possess and consume her. She is nightly ravished by her tormented dreams. The paranoid mind must seek out clues from the barest of facts drawing the most far reaching assumptions, weaving out of whole cloth the unholy presence of this sickness. The explanation becomes its expiation. She seeks out in Ms. Grose an ally for her paranoid delusion. Every minor detail must be made to conform; every behavior that deviates in the slightest manner is evidence of a foul crime. Capote is at his masterful best and Clayton’s pacing and direction are chilling. The use of deep focus, a somewhat lost art form, and minimalist lighting force us to endure the unrelenting grip of her self-possession.
Category: Culture
Exhausted
55 feels a bit too long, no? Where do we go from here? Nowhere. Back to the womb. The eternal reoccurrence of all events. A mathematical certainty: the Poincaré recurrence theorem. Replay the same game. No Nietzschean heroism needed. It wasn’t terrible. It was just never terrific without someone to love.
The Connection
“If you fail to feel the pain of others, you do not deserve the name of man.” – Saadi Shirazi, translated words of Bani Adam inscribed at entrance to UN headquarters.
Baptism Through Drowning
Ah, the Purgists are back, though in truth, they never really leave us. It’s not even a sane argument but the dark brooding of a psychopath’s wet dream, a psychotic belief that Utopia must come at the cost of inflicting a massive amount of human suffering, degradation, and punishment. Sin, after all, must be purged, and what is more sinful than modern civilization? Of course, the suffering must be born by others, the masses, never by themselves, safe behind their ivory towers. Too many people in charge of too many things think like this. If we could purge this parasitic form of thinking from the souls of men, how much better off would we have been as a species? How many wars and injustices would have been averted, how fewer drops of innocent blood would have been spared?
Ray Carney on Cassavetes
“In Cassavetes’ work, personality is plot; behavior is narrative. Living does not involve doing anything but being something – a much harder task for both a character and a viewer to deal with.”
Cassavetes
“Other films depend on a shorthand, a shorthand for living. You recognize certain incidents and you go with them. People prefer that you condense; they find it quite natural for life to be condensed in films. They prefer that because they can catch onto the meanings and keep ahead of the movie. But that’s boring. I won’t make shorthand films. In my films there’s a competition with the audience to keep ahead of them. I want to break their patterns. I want to shake them up and get them out of those quick, manufactured truths.”
Gravity’s Rainbow
“If there is something comforting–religious, if you want–about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”
Art
“Art is a lie, a lie that makes us realize the truth.” Picasso (maybe)
Muriel, or the Time of Return
Where does reality reside? In our memories alone? The fragments of our daily lives broken and reassembled into a coherent whole? We usually construct the story centered in first-person: This happened to me; this is the story of MY life. An illusion, though perhaps a necessary one given the elusive nature of what we mislabel “the events of our lives”. In truth, nothing ever happens to us as there is neither a happening nor an us, but a trace, a remnant of what has elapsed. Time erases us long before the action arrives to cleave to our bodies. Events are superficial and cannot penetrate. The action is determined, but the contours of our being are left undetermined. The decentralized rhythm of existence conjoins a greater totality within the duration. Not my broken pieces. Our broken pieces, synthesized into a totality we struggle to comprehend.
Muriel perfectly conveys this deeper reality. From the edits, the disconcerted shifts of time and tempo and emotion, to the dialogue shifting between the objective (the trite and commonplace observations that we tell to mask our deeper feelings), to the subjective, the unconscious, the longing, the haunting memories that evoke loss, grief, regret.
As Resnais explains: “A classic film cannot translate the real rhythm of modern life. In the same day, you do twenty-six things, you go to lectures, to the cinema, to your party meeting etc. Modern life is fragmented. Everybody feels that; painting, as well as literature bares witness to it, so why should the cinema not do likewise, instead of keeping to the traditional linear construction?”
And like a shroud or a tapestry hung above the scenery, appears the angel, Muriel. The haunting figure of a murdered woman, an Algerian girl tortured and raped by Bernard and a companion, hovers over our world like an omen, a judgement, a collective death sentence, but also hints at, if not the possibility of salvation, perhaps the miracle of atonement.
What Troubles Thee, Sir?
“Not things, but opinions about things, trouble men.”
The Hack 