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sesiondemadrugada

Spring (Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead, 2014).

#Spring (2014)#The perfect Valentine's day movie no doubts

Spring (2014) is so good at how it shows different ways people experience grief.

Some choose to worship their dead. Some try to escape grief by fleeing to the other end of the world. Others have sex with a 2000 years old Lovecraftian horror that kills people. Then there's also a farmer who keeps faithfulness to his late wife. It's all so very human.

#Spring (2014)

phoenix

Spring (2014), directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead

#I love Spring - one of my favorite lighthearted little films #it pretends to be a body horror flick but is actually a comedic romance about love grief and coming of age #A Valentine's day option for 'Sean of the Dead' ha

loving-the-world-since-00

#The Master

I am glad that 50 shades of Isabella Linton finally triggered a conversation around the popular culture's failures at handling coercive control, domestic violence and sexual abuse. I saw it with quite a few interpretations already, when an explicitly violent dynamic between very unequal partners of the source is re-imagined as spicy romance. The latest cinematic iteration of Rebecca is probably the most bizarre example, worthy of a separate talk.

But I also wonder how modern audience, used to violence and control represented as love, acceptance and healing, would perceive a film like The Master. An obvious excursion into the workings of a certain cult and other high control groups, it's very explicit in how charismatic cult heads prey on vulnerable, insecure, traumatized and mentally unstable people.

But since the main character is doing better while being actively psychologically tortured as he's brainwashed into obedience to the cult's will, would the current discourse represent it as liberation and healing through the unconditional submission to the controlling will of the other? The same thing now done to the stories of domestic violence against women, Isabella, Persephone, Rebecca's unnamed narrator and so on, the explicit acts of pretty brutal psychological, physical and sexual abuse - rapes, beatings, kidnappings, a looming threat of femicide - re-imagined as liberation. After all, violent cults and a dynamic of domestic violence have one and the same thing at their core: power and control.

With the growing popularity of new age cults as something bohemian and edgy, not the dangerous violent groups they truly are, I literally won't be surprised at all if soon there's going to be a film like that. We've kinda already seen it with the people's reaction to the Midsummer, although that one was pretty self aware, sticking to the horror genre. There's going to be an explicitly positive one soon, I bet.

#wuthering heights

Ok, so apparently the new Wuthering Heights made Isabella Linton into a hot "submissive" girlfriend because suddenly it got trendy in media for women to be really into sexy domestic violence perpetrators, duh.

What a coincidence that rape, abuse and forced confinement experienced by Isabella are re-imagined as something cool and fun at the time when globally, violence against women is merely daily news. Heathcliff, a self-admitted wife-beater and a rapist, is turned into a booktok daddy-dom, although in my opinion there's rarely much difference to find between the two. Neither could give much of a shit about "no"-s.

The attempts to give agency to the victims of violence by making them willingly submit to these very acts of violence are bizarre. We've had this shit with Persephone for years now, poor girl rebranded as a happy obedient wifey to her rapist uncle, a victim to the evil mother, who - what a btch, right? - grieved over her taken daughter. People love to confuse a grim acceptance of one's terrible fate for cheerful enthusiastic consent. Now there's this stuff.

There's no agency in tolerating violence by definition, as it always involves the abuser eroding it all via coercive control and power over the victim. An established victim posed as a willing participant creates an illusion that she might be in charge of receiving or resisting violence. I don't know how people can get an idea of well-negotiated, enthusiastic and consensual pretend play in a fully controlled environment, and use it to replace or merely denote an actual domestic violence scenario, as if those two are in any way comparable.

Sure, abuse has an exceptionally complex psychology. Victims can act like they are OK, romanticize their bruises and broken bones, defend the perpetrators, whitewash them, downplay even the most grievous violence, come back to their abusers again and again, even side with those who hurt others. None of that changes the fact that rape and violence are serious crimes that are solely on the perpetrator.

Shifting the focus heavily on the canonically battered woman's choices simply elevates the responsibility from the perpetrator and places it on his target.

#wuthering heights

facciocose-vedofilm

thiscoldheart

"Those things aren't made for human eyes, but those of souls."

LA CHIMERA (2023) dir. Alice Rohrwacher

addictivecontradiction

Cave of forgotten dreams, 2010

Life imitates art, but the closest unintentional reflection of The Island Dr Moreau and its themes is the Travis (chimpanzee) wikipedia page.

#more down to earth it's probably The Plague Dogs as its literary cousin

i've been thinking about it a lot, how humans incorporate themselves into animal tale, otherwise unable to see the tragedy of animal beyond human, and so Moreau's tortured animals become human-animal hybrids (a redundant phrase, but anyways).

The weird old film frankensteins human onto animal. The modern popular fiction, The Daughter of Dr Moreau, re-imagines a story of animal into a story of a human woman.

Antonio del Pollaiuolo or some other Renaissance man adds two ravenous human boys beneath an Etruscan bronze she-wolf. So Lupa Capitoline is made, to honor the founding myth of Rome. Minotaur roams the labyrinth of Knossos.

Centuries come and go, but "-animal" must always be paired with"human-". Without "human", animal is not enough. Dr Moreau's tortured beasts and an iron-hearted scholar transform into the human-beast hybrids to be freed by man, and a vulgar mad scientist.

Tortured beasts are too common for humans to tear up over, and a cold scholar is usually seen a respectable luminary of science, perhaps until he vivisects a fellow man. The beast must become human to provoke sympathy. In the novel, the beast folks are merely the next logical step after the circus monkeys. Dressed like us, forced to move like us, changed to look like us.

In the later versions of the Island, human is twisted by its beast side, tormented by fully human for its beast side, liberated by human to stand tall among the fellow featherless bipeds.

While the great H.G. Wells eventually gives us an equivalent of this:

(the sculpture shows the death of Munrow, who was mauled by a tiger).

megadollbabe

“The creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men. They were animals-humanised animals-triumphs of vivisection.”

— H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau

On the 17th of May, Umberto Eco walked upon a market for the purchase of apple, lemon, orange, cabbage, ham, oil of olives, celery, parsley, a quaccula, an arboreal fowl known for its plumage and virtue, earthly carrots and the fruit of potato, bean, vinegar, tuna (or thunnus, which is the umbratile beast of the seas), and other victuals.

#give me more lists professore #I need more lists

lost-forest-heart

Grabs you by the shoulders

Not liking rap is absolutely no reason to not listen to Black music.

We have folk of all kinds (Mon Rovîa and Allison Russell come to mind), we have country (you have heard Darius Rucker if you listen to the radio at all), we have alt rock (De'Wayne's music is a fantastic place to start), the list goes on.

Every kind of music you listen to has roots and inspiration somewhere in Black music. Look for it. Rock and roll as you know it wouldn't exist without Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Most of the music that made Elvis himself famous was taken from Black artists. Blues and everything that came after would be nothing like you know it without Robert Johnson and countless others. It's not that you don't like Black music, you do. You listen to our music every day, you just don't know it. Start listening to it on purpose. I swear to you, we've got something you like if you'll just look.

bacchanalium

I hope it doesn't derail, but the other day I was listening to Edmond Dédé.

He was a 19th century composer born in New Orleans and working predominantly in France.

Dede is often credited as the author of the first African-American opera, Morgiane, or the Sultan of Isfahan. Sadly, it was lost for the longest time and was only revived this year. However, the recordings of his other works are easily available online. They are very beautiful, I highly recommend to check them out.