While in New Orleans, I was intrigued by a poster called The Last Session.
Joshua Walsh’s “The Last Session” features Louis Armstrong as the Christ figure.
In trying to research who each of the figures of betrayal were in the work, I was quick to learn that parodies of Leonardo Da Vinci’s 1498 iconic work are common as thieves. The proliferation of this icon, re-branded and spun, is confusing to say the least, an image that everyone seems to know and yet no one understand. Yes, just like getting a tattoo.
Existentialists tend to discourse on our sorry lot as humans in this life, caged between birth and death, trapped in this existence, the terror and nausea of realizing how lousy it all really is. Friedrich Nietzsche referred to this terror as the greatest weight: What if this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself.
The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, a speck of dust!
Jean-Paul Sartre expounded on the horror in his play No Exit: You have stolen my face from me: you know it and I no longer do. Luckily, thanks to our evolved sensibilities and their application to technology, we can see the kernel of this philosophical gobbledygook captured in profound and eternal loops.
The GIF – or Graphic Interchange Format – is, as Albert Camus wrote, basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all. There is only absurdity and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.
As I work through a screenplay set in the days of my ill-spent preteen years – the mid/late 1970’s – I have been unearthing the music that I obsessed over. Surprisingly, it’s still strong, especially the direct guitar leads and plaintive lyrics, to say nothing of the awesome cartoon album covers.
Babe Ruth’s The Joker: “A quarter ounce for a five dollar bill?!?” Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak: “Like the game, if you lose, go to jail.” The Car’s Candy-O: “I need her so.”
While Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Color received controversial press for its stark portrayal of sexuality, the film’s only real problem is in its self-indulgence. Choked with scenes of endless dancing, staring into space and, yes, sex, the film needs an editor; at over an hour too long, the film’s essential moments and images are lost in the ego of the author. Of course Kechiche is not alone in his onanism; many an excellent director has fallen victim to believing that everything shot is sacred, including Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now Redux, Lars von Trier’s Nymphomanic, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Michael Cimino’s infamous Heaven’s Gate. This is to say nothing of the glut of Hollywood monstrosities such as Titanic,The Lord of the Rings and all of the superheroes piled atop each other.It’s the simpler things that ring true, such as a director listening to his inner voice: “Cut!”
I was academically introduced to the concept of the “it” in Georg Buchner’s unfinished play Woyzeck, where a man is terrorized by a vague unnamed force which lays in wait for him in the bushes. I had no idea what this “it” was – a ghost, a demon or what – until it dawned on me over the years that it was, as simply as I can put it, a primal force so overwhelming that we must instead coddle ourselves with poor facsimiles such as sports, work and travel.
Rasafa, Syria
In other words, our consciousness is so puny and small-minded that instead of blossoming toward truth, justice and beauty, we drink and have sex. John Williams is succinct in his reflections on our futile struggles at the conclusion of Butcher’s Crossing: “You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all of your life on lies, and then maybe when you’re ready to die, it comes to you — that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain’t done it, because the lies told you there was something else.”
The Bachelor/Bachelorette franchiss offers a nightmarishly funny experience in which contestants seem to believe in finding something genuine in the world of reality television. This goes beyond paying lip service to the experience, not just repeating lines that everyone knows by rote: “being here for the right reasons” and “living a fairy tale”.
It requires an acquiescence to an established coda of “taking it to the next level”, meaning that the bachelors must make themselves “vulnerable” and “open to the process” by confessing personal secrets – family deaths and alcoholism being the gold standard. As depressingly amusing as this can be, it has its limitations, as exhibited in last night’s episode in which Andi, the bachelorette, is accused by Eric of acting for the cameras. Andi’s fury knows no bounds. “Every single day this is real to me!” She cannot abide Eric’s assertion simply because he has broken the fifth wall, that of non-reality reality; personal confessions cannot relate to the televised situation at hand,.
Ironically enough, Eric was killed weeks later in an accident, leaving the network and Andi scrambling to gain closure with a segment full of crocodile tears and trite pathos on the real world infringing on the reality of the reality world…or some horror like that.
Excess is best. Or at least excess is great while it lasts. So is the message of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street(2013) and Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette(2006).While Coppola’s film does attempt to present the Queen of France’s point of view, placing her debauchery in the context of her heritage and youth, the film depends almost solely on a litany of gluttonous imagery. Scorsese makes no such effort, starting and ending with scenes meant to shock – dwarf tossing through orgies to drugs on top of drugs – that becomes tedious and, rather than offer a point to reflect, childishly glorify the experience. There might be a moral buried somewhere in these films – after all our heroes meet bad ends – but that isn’t the theme of either. Instead we are made witness to tributes to consumption, all of it beyond our wildest dreams – palaces and helicopters – and how marvelous that really is. It is an interesting comparison of time periods – the French Revolution and Wall Street America – exposing two societies which hid behind claims of freedom, knowledge and tolerance to maintain the excesses of the few who continued to grind the species towards extinction.
The proliferation of this icon, re-branded and spun, is confusing to say the least, an image that everyone seems to know and yet no one understand. 
Yes, just like getting a tattoo.
