Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Tuesday, October 07, 2003 The Pitch: It's like Into the Night meets Cabin Fever! Insomnia again. Last night, it was my stomach trying to kill me. Tonight, I woke up at three, went and peed, and then proceeded to feel hives rise up along my legs. By the time, I got some aloe on, got covered up (I don't know if there's a mite in the bed, or what) and got back into the bed it was 4:00 and, by 4:30, an hour before I was supposed to wake up, I just threw in the towel and got up.A lot I've been meaning to write about here, and haven't had much of a chance. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre blew my tiny mind when I saw it last week, and I also had an interesting time staring the death of Bollywood film right in the face with Boom at the Naz Super 8. Is a lack of musical numbers, three hour running times and weepy melodrama worth the excitement of English dialogue, gun fights and Indian supermodel nipples? I'd personally say no, but the Indian supermodel nipples make it a tough call. As for Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I'm trying to figure out why it is that I'm deeply, deeply satisfied by movies so dark they practically glow with a black nimbus, but similarly themed books hold absolutely no appeal. I've been reading this great compilation of Stephen King essays and interviews and included in it is this introduction for Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door, where King praises Ketchum as a hero to people who write suspense fiction. King compares Ketchum favorably to Jim Thompson and goes on to talk about all the impressively unflinching brutality in the Girl Next Door, where kids, under the guidance of an insane caretaker, slowly torture and maim an innocent girl. On the same day I saw Boom and TCM (someday, a truly hilarious misunderstanding will ensue with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Turner Classic Movies and I kinda hope I'm there to see it), I picked up Jack Ketchum's The Lost. The first chapter of The Lost has to do with three friends who are hanging out in the woods, and one of the friends decides to kill two women, and gets away with it. A few years later, we see all of it start to go to hell. I made it through about fifty pages of The Lost and then put it down, and doubt I'll ever pick it back up again. It just seemed unpleasant and ghoulish and obvious to me, which is odd since, less than a day earlier, I sat riveted as Marilyn Burns screamed while being mocked by a table of violent psychopaths. More than riveted--I was deeply gratified. It may have something to do with a complex issue of verisimilitude, the thin line between veracity and belief. I just don't believe in the charismatic pussyhound in Ketchum's The Lost who shoots two women and has such a hold over the younger teens with him that they still blindly accept him, just like I don't buy the crazy woman and the torturing kids, just like I don't buy everything I've ever read by Richard Laymon whose plots are fueled by a near-constant priapism mixed in with violence. But I believe the three inbred crazies of TCM, and the way the hitchhiker starts laughing as he takes the knife and starts jabbing it into his own hand... That may be because the victims in TCM are decent types, people who pick up a hitchhiker and have no idea what in the name of Christ they're getting themselves into. Or maybe it's some crucial disconnect between screen and literature for me, and I'm able to view the horrors of TCM in a way that preserves my sense of self-value, whereas similar literature tries to push me inside the head of the horrors, a push I summarily reject. You don't have to go inside the heads of Leatherface or the Hitchhiker or the Cook--the actors put the details on the outside, and that's really all you need. (There's something about the shy smile that Jim Siedow gets when Edwin Neal is mocking their victim that gives me far more empathy--and thus scares the shit out of me--than the hundreds of pages of being inside a killer's mind in Ketchum, Laymon or countless splatterpunks). Hey, my alarm went off. Time to get up, and just as I started yawning. Today is going to be a pretty rough day at work, I expect. posted by Jeff Lester | 5:40 AM | |
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