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film club: brand upon the brain
So it's been a while since I've updated the Too Many Projects Film Club blog. We'd convened a little less frequently than normal because of a couple of busy months, but it looks like we might be getting back to some sort of a regular schedule right about now. We left off back in April [!] with Johnny Got His Gun, a film which dwells on the horror of a young person's radical facial disfigurement. We followed that up with my pick, Eyes Without A Face, a surprisingly ghoulish French film from 1960, which centers around a psychotic doctor's disquieting attempts to repair his daughter's own facial disfigurement. Here's the trailer, which gives some sense of the film's creepiness: The imagery of that trailer is pretty much all sinister labs, diabolical parents, and vulnerable young people, which leads quite neatly to our newest pick, Guy Maddin's marvelously unhinged Brand Upon the Brain (2006). Like Eyes and Johnny, Brand Upon the Brain is obsessed with the beauty of the young. Brand, in particular, is interested in the particular androgynous beauty of adolescents: This concern fits well with Maddin's career-long fascination with the "look and feel" of early film. Here he seems especially interested in recreating the capacity of the silent cinema to evoke a nearly otherworldly glamour. (Watching this film, I was reminded of filmmaker Maya Deren's remarks that early film stars constitute "a mythology of gods of the first magnitude whose mere presence lent to the most undistinguished events a divine grandeur and intensity.") It's not unusual, of course, for a film to be enamored with the appearance of the young: we can see this everywhere from (say) Larry Clark's Kids to, I don't know, National Lampoon's Van Wilder. What makes Brand a little more interesting (and less prurient) is that it seems especially interested in making its viewer inhabit the subjectivity of the young, specifically this kid here, who is our protagonist: The movie's greatest merit is perhaps located in the way it ends up being a spot-on recreation of the confused fever dream that is existence on the cusp of puberty: a welter of weirdly important missions, intense infatuations, and erotic pleasure / confusion made all the more bewildering by the fleshy horror involved in the actual realities of carnality. Of course, to a sensitive child, everything that is disturbing about carnality is most literally embodied in the form of any given adult, and so it follows that the adults on display in the film should be appropriately monstrous, a mix of repressive attitudes, undecodable rituals, and grotesque physicality: It doesn't give too much away to say that since youth is, by its very nature, fleeting, that the pleasures of youth to be found in the film are also presented as fleeting (see also: Krapp's Last Tape, Film Club XXXV). It comes as no surprise, then, that every single adult character in the film is to some degree concerned with recapturing their youth, eventually driven to the extreme of consuming the young, both metaphorically and/or literally (!). Great stuff; thanks to Tiffanny for her pick. We followed up by pursuing the idea of androgyny, and just yesterday we watched Sally Potter's Orlando (1992). I hope to have a write-up of it ready soon... Labels: adolescence, children, media commentary, sexuality
Monday, August 03, 2009
Well, now that I have your attention...
No, seriously. Many Imaginary Year entries over the past two years have dealt with sex, and today's deals explicitly with the inability of language to adequately describe the experience of sex.
The last several entries have been leading up to this one, and over the past few weeks I've been thinking about how I wanted to handle it. At the same time, I've been engaged in this business of pulling the old fiction out of the files and revising it. All of this has reminded me of a dormant project, a book that I've wanted to write for some time now, a book of short stories which all deal with human sexual behavior.
We human beings think about sex an awful lot—at least I do—and yet there still seems to be a surprising shortage of good sexually-explicit literature. I'm not talking about erotica and porn here—those two genres certainly have substantial cottage industries. But the goal of stories within those genres is to titillate the reader—to get them off, in short—and I'm more interested in a literature that attempts to represent sexuality in a way that's honest, to communicate the ways human beings actually explore sexuality, experiment with it, mess around with it, play with it; a literature that is interested in sexual failures as well as sexual accomplishments, that examines the ways people integrate sexuality into their everyday lives. I have trouble thinking of many authors who have pursued this theme extensively—the only examples that leap to mind are Henry Miller and Philip Roth (both of whom are problematic, at best). Also Anais Nin (also problematic, but in a different way), and perhaps Jeanette Winterson?
If you have a favorite author, novel, or story, who deals with this kind of material, feel free to let me know via the comments link (or e-mail, if you're shy).
Anyway, I've been working on this book on and off for a few years now. I've written two stories for it, and about half of a third, and I have notes for a few more. The fact that the project continues to nag away at my mind must be a sign that there is some promise there.
The book's working title is How We Come.
There are all sorts of difficulties involved with representing sexuality in fiction, but I'll go into those more in a later entry.
Monday, May 20, 2002
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