Boxes

Belle de Jour has the enigmatic, never explained, Chinese box... which seems to contain the essence of eroticism for Belle de Jour, or else the buzzing that emanates from the box is indicative of neurochemical snapping or some figurative / literal spin on insect aphropdisiacs...

But, anyway, in its place in that film it surely...



...is a precursor of the suitcase trick of arch-thief Tarantino - the idea of both boxes containing souls is not entirely misguided as a reading of both films, even if it's not the correct reading...



...and a similar reading, tapping into the masochism of the first film and the soul-tearing of the second is the puzzle box from Hellraiser... which performs more or less the same function as the Chinese Box in Belle de Jour... the look on Catherine Deneuve's face after the box has been activated mirrors the pain/pleasure of Hellraiser, albeit via Yves Saint Laurent rather than Giger imitations...



(and this in turn reminded me that Richard Kelly's new film is a variation on the Button, Button short story which features a mysterious box and which numbed my limbs as a child...)

Coil - Box Theme

Tom Waits - Black Box Theme

Belle De Jour

Still ploughing through the Bunuel box-set. I'd seen this a long long time ago and I only have a few comments:

1) Lacan apparently showed this instead of a prepared lecture on female masochism.

2) I think I might have seen this first at a critical period in my psychosexual development.

Cabaret Voltaire - Sensoria (The Bloody Beetroots vs SirBilly Experience Remix

That Obscure Object Of Desire

Got the Luis Bunuel DVD box-set for Christmas and have only just got around to watching it. First up, That Obscure Object Of Desire - think I might go backwards, see if they get unwatchable, in the same way someone once recommended to a friends they approach Swans albums..."Start from White Light...Keep going backwards until your soul crushes..."

There's something somehow resistant to criticism about this film but...

Desire is everything; the title is as literal as it gets, could almost be one of those mistranslated titles you see in China, where Face/Off becomes "Who Is Face Belonging To? I Kill You Again, Harder!" and Pretty Woman becomes "I Will Marry a Prostitute to Save Money" (a personal favourite off mine) - The Object of Desire is always Obscure...

In particular, the film seems to be about the desire to desire and the desire to be desired (Imagine a gently surrealist, French-Spanish take on Duncan Norvelle's "Chase Me!" routine... and then wipe it from your memory like a bad uncle).

Both characters are locked in a groove of their own making, doomed to circulate; matter and anti-matter, Moon and Earth - gravity pulls each of them together and forces the embrace that neither of them wants to make... an indesctructible object (the shape of her back might be a colourized Man Ray photo) versus an unstoppable force...

Neither character can exist on their own, their concept of wholeness simply a mirror of what the other can give. On the surface, he's dealing with his middle age in typical crisis fashion; wants jouissance and sees it in her.. while at the same time she's wrestling with a desire for objects (houses, clothes) when really she feels nothing for anything - even as she gives herself to a younger man to taunt her older suitor, she convinces herself it's fakery and pretence - a Jenny Haniver Orgasm.

There's a hefty dose of Lacan of course: the attempt to transcend the pleasure principle, to embrace life despite the constant urge to embrace as little as possible, to give in to the pull of unsatisfied desire...

And all this human sexual political wrangling is echoed by the constant hum of terrorism in the streets below them; another indication of the impossibility of
desire - it's never clear what the terrorists want; they break into factions and come together again under the mantle of the Revolutionary Army Of The Infant Jesus - the key words being revolution (circular reasoning, ouroroborous, the need for a counter to every culture) and infant (Lacan again; the infant looking into the mirror and wanting).

Peverelist and Appleblim - Circling

2562 - Moog Dub

A Perfect Sphere

...a perfect sphere, unknown in the Forest... the shattering quiet/weird moment from Merchant Ivory's Savages... spins through the air like an electron, lands in the world of the Mud People, savages waiting for a Pop Group cover, waiting for old (not classic) Nike trainers, Puma tops...

Mark Stewart And The Maffia - Welcome To Liberty City



^^^^^^^^^^ lots more on the Pop Group, MP3s etc, here ^^^^^^^^^^

not the one with PSH and laura linney, not this one...

this one...

the one with all the Danielle Dax lookalikes...



The New Age Steppers came too late, The Slits came too late...

The New Age Steppers - Fade Away

But although the tribal tremblings of those two are perhaps the most obvious signifiers, I keep hearing CocoRosie in my head while it's playing...

CocoRosie - Promise

Bunuel is invoked of course - The Exterminating Angel quoted (I can't remember much about that film, having seen it only once, years ago but I think I can tell how this kind of thing might have lingered in the memory, since watching a series of Bunuel films on telly all that time ago I still retain some residue of what I've seen, to the extent that occasionally, when I'm tired, the world does start to look like a Bunuel film)

And there's the inevitably Freudian riff on returning to the primal...

imagine Arthur Janov, watching both these films and rubbing with glee at the prospect of the middle classes tumbling into his soft-walled centres, eager to dispel myths, eager to let it out, emotional honesty being the holy grail, emotional intelligence being the final link in the chain...

let it out, just so you can prove it was in there in the first place, let it out, just to show that all that education and cultural capital hasn't entirely muffled their spirit, their we-moon, their inner Wolf Child...

scream if you want to go faster...

The use of the croquet ball in Savages is inspired; in black and white we could be watching a wguilt wracked (but, importantly, curious) Oppenheimer uttering his now famous grammatical glitch: "...now I am become Shiva, the destroyer of worlds..." or else it tries to elaborate on a theme that would come much later in the form of



Rogue Traders - Voodoo Child

where humankind were reduced to their essence - chuckling balls of steel, time-racists --- I think the Here Come The Drums refrain throughout those two episodes is an unconscious echo... the drums are all through The Savages, turning to jazzy skitters as the primitives turn to chattering middle classes (which echoes my stepping out of Jungle and Drum N Bass - once the jazzy fills started to take over and 'intelligence' and LTJ Bukem crept into the scene, I walked away and never looked at another Drum N Bass record again...)

another story...

((((((((((( (we are all time racists) - The Pop Group song that never was, the one were the ethnological forgery really took wind and Psychic TV's Themes records were shoved into songforms that pulled society apart at the primal level, alongside bursting samples from old Batman shows and snatches of Keith Levene guitar... The Pop Group never really did it for me, no matter how many times I've come back to them and tried...I want to love them but the earnestness and hectoring and lack of humour (in everything apart from their name) always put me on the back foot, quietly whispering: Yes, I know that... even Crass didn't always preach to the converted in such an obvious way... I'll probably try again, really do want to see what others seem to see )))))))))))))

The Savages uses various forms to tell it's simple tale: mock anthropology film (which is in fact uncannily similar to the real thing - i had a brief anthropology fetish in my teens), drawing room play, surrealism, silent film... and if form and pace (we languish until we love it) dictate over content then that's only because the content isn't there and shouldn't be...

Still got the drag queens (gloriously unexplained) to work out - I guess it could be just ugly women...

Here Come The Drums...

Sacrifice, primitivism, Murderous Rage, Return to the Woods - the ending ought to be the still taken from the latest Sig Ros album cover or maybe from Von Trier's The Idiots, where idiocy is paralled with creativity in the calmest, coldest way possible - though reality TV trumps all, as always....

Like the young Martin Amis during the Oxbridge Interview in The Rachel Papers, I'm not even sure if I liked The Savages.