08 July 2013

The Nightmares Among Us

Tell me, do the characters populating movies like Winter's Bone and The Paperboy exist?

If they do, do they watch movies?

This is a genre that utterly escapes my imagination.  Better, that undermines my own sense of the human.  That is to say, THAT may be as real as it gets.  And the truth, it is too horrifyingly imaginable.

So, consider, the horror that is a videotaped beheading in a desert land we call the "cradle" of civilization juxtaposed to a beheading in London and to a beheading in Brazil and finally juxtaposed to the "swampy" killing in these movies.

Consider too that the Brazilian atrocity might be called "crowd-sourced."

I suppose after watching the scene in Jaws where Quint is bitten, half in and half out of the shark's mouth screaming at his "dilemma," I have always feared this "awareness" of the dying as it happens.  A  subset of this might be the fact of being eaten--let's face it, Jonah in the belly of the whale is a goner.

We suffer this realization.  Why do we embody it?

But, there is a horror of a depravity of being.  That the twisting of the natural--eating what is edible for your type of digestion--is depraved into a kind of power in being the killer, not the killed, the consumer rather than the consumed.

Can we then make this "systematic"?  That is the Western civilizations have, primarily, consumed all cultures and resources encountered?  The irony of the consumption of the so-called savage whether in the "dark continent" or in the Amazon or in polynesian islands, is in the very fact that the cannibal has been consumed by the very society afraid of being eaten by the cannibal.

Perhaps the greatest perpetrator of this kind of cannibalization outside of the mechanized (and soulless) U.S. was Genghis Khan.  Eating, raping, destroying--"seeding" the world in his own image--probably the most impressive and awe-inspiring act of what, super-natural naturalism (?), the world has ever known.

People are hierarchically meaningless in a social organization just as in nature.

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