Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road: Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
Such is the case with Ari Aster’s films Hereditary and Midsommer. Make no mistake about it, these are both very well made films. Perhaps too much so. It isn’t just the visuals – although sawing off one’s own head is hard to forget – but more so in the music, especially in the majestic, almost comic finale of Midsommer,
I want to forget the images of Dani wailing as her boyfriend is roasted in a bear suit, but that damn music by Bobby Krlic keeps creeping back into my head. It’s that good.
What is wrong with this story is that it is not a true story. Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of. Do you believe that? (From Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plains)
Cormac McCarthy doesn’t allow the reader a moment to breathe among the barbarous imagery of Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West.
Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like a funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts……riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bendylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the blood wigs and hacking and chopping the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing is an uneven story of a young man drifting from human contact into an abstracted, shadowy world. The writing can be riveting: East and to the south there was water on the flats and two sandhill cranes stood tethered to their reflections out there in the last of the day’s light like statues of such birds in some waste of a garden where calamity had swept all else away. (171)However the prose get bogged down by McCarthy’s repetitive tendencies: His pale hair looked white. He looked fourteen going on some age that never was. He looked as if he’d been sitting there and God had made the trees and rocks around him. He looked like his own reincarnation and then his own again. Above all else he looked to be filled with a terrible sadness. (177)
In an attempt to confront our demons, we are compelled to drum up the worst we can imagine, images that terrorizes us in our dreams, and reproduce those in film for all to see. I am haunted by images of a man hurled into a pit of alligators, a woman’s head floating in a jar and a basement where evil lurks. Seeing these things doesn’t do us any good; it isn’t a relief to the images out, but instead raises the stakes, inspiring more horror to behold. As Cormac McCarthy wrote in The Road: Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever.
Every story needs its ticking bomb: Will Luke destroy the Death Star? Will Jack really kill Ralph? Will Gatsby run off with Daisy? Will Chigurgh catch Llewelyn?* We are compelled to keep reading, to find out what happens in the end.
Without this tension, this inherent inevitability, the story flounders, and with no land in sight, the audience is lost, the story a disaster.
A certain malaise descends on me at this time of year. It is not so much the growing dark – although I am sure that plays a part – so much as the descent into the ‘holiday’ season, a time of year synonymous not for giving and family but for greed and accumulation. Human nature does not have a positive connotation for a reason; it just isn’t good. We take and hoard until we can almost forget what we really are, even if is for just the briefest of moments. We say things and make promises, actually believing some of the profundities we claim…. but there is nothing of substance, just the shell of something half-built, the world always the same as before. The slogans and liquor wear off and we are as we started, creatures who want more.
Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Saramago have had a few things to write about this, but in the end they’re just words, like these, read and discarded on the road to the next thing, the next electronic gadget.
Solar-bikini-powered ipod
And so, yeah, I can feel a little low – as Black Friday et. al. approach – and dream about the darkness in Greenland, being alone with the aurora borealis and nobody else.
Cormac McCarthy and Ridley Scott’s joint project The Counselor shocks to sell. Brutal imagery and non-stop sex banter aside, a main selling angle is in the exotic cats. Offered as colorful metaphors, the cheetahs – to say nothing of the film – quickly become blunt and unwieldy. Meant to convey, as Cameron Diaz’s puerile character explains, examples of killing “a quarry with elegance”, they are realized only as gimmickry, much like Diaz’s cheetah tattoo. “It is our faintness of heart that has driven us to the edge of ruin. And the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining.” Hopefully not words for a sequel.
Writing is a business. Nothing more than that. It doesn’t matter how great the story is nor what a clever little wordsmith I might be. If I can’t pitch the idea, that’s it. It all boils down to the hook, the copy read by that deep-voiced movie trailer guy: Deirdre Sinclair must come to terms with a moment she cannot remember, a past she cannot forget. I think I did all right in the end, getting the interest of three out of four editors, each of them noting my spin: It’s The Happy Hooker meets Born Free in the style of Cormac McCarthy.I gave them a minute to think about that and then went back into it: “She was orphaned as a baby. She’s into performance sex. And she has an exotic cat! A serval! Do you know what that is?” As my coach pronounced, “Everyone loves a cat. Does he live? Whatever you do, don’t kill the cat!” I couldn’t. I love that crazy cat.
Warning: This blog is entirely derived from sensationalism
Sensationalism is a type of editorial bias in mass media in which events and topics in news stories and pieces are over-hyped to increase viewership or readership numbers (Wikipedia), such as a horrific event from this week in which a man was pushed onto the tracks and killed by a New York subway train. This image of the man’s final moments has led many to ask why no one helped and instead took pictures of his death. This type of imagery dominates the media and has indeed infected my memory. (Or as Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road: The things you put in your head are there forever.) I remember well the 1979 murder of ABC journalist Bill Stewart in Nicaragua, played over and over on network television, and obsessed over another image taken in 1988 of a German bank robber threatening to kill his hostage. (He didn’t.)In the end, I used this as source material for my first novel The Sacred Whore, a sensational story in itself about prostitutes who kidnap a basketball team so that they can broadcast their views on what’s wrong with America.
Sensational (also a horse, album and hip hop artist) is defined as causing great public interest and excitement, as in “Sensational Superstar Vickie looks sensational!”
The 3D tools for Sensational Superstar Vickie
Sensation (also a song, event, film and type of BDSM play) is a style of writing, similar to verisimilitude, which aims to imitate the sensations of experiencing an event.
Christopher Walken experiencing too many sensations in film, “Brainstorm”.
Sensa is Latin for ‘thought’ or ‘teachings” as well as being a weight-loss program.
Rodin’s “The Thinker”
Sensis a commune in Burgundy, in north-central France.
Cathedral in Sens, France
Sen is the name of the protagonist in Miyazaki’s magical Spirited Away.
Sen (Chihiro) in “Spirited Away”.
Se is the internet country code for Sweden and also represents the element Selenium. And S is a letter, a series of Teslacars, the stock identifier for Sprint Nextel and the sound a balloon makes when it’s run out of air.
