Back in black, hit the sack but it’s been so long I don’t remember how to write anymore. I’ve been avoiding freelancing on the belief that it would give me a chance to get caught up on my creative writing. But… that’s not a road that leads to any cold hard cash. “Ooh I’m Dying Here!” Also wondering if I need to get back into it just so I can remember how to put one word after another. It’s easy to allow them to tumble out online or in a journal or whatever, less easy when you know they are going to print.
Hit the old insomnia last night from a combination of an overheated apartment and staying up watching Funny Games. It’s essentially an art-film version of torture porn, about a couple vacationing at a summer home who are set upon by sadistic strangers who basically toy with them for the whole night on a whim. It was horrifying… but I think to a point. The movie is a complicit exercise in cruelty, as the director sets his characters up for the most unimaginable falls through a skillful negating of the conventions of thrillers. All the chances for escape that you hope for an on-screen character are presented to you, and then snatched away, sometimes accompanied by a direct to camera wink by the sadists on-screen. 
In it’s own way it’s as much of an anti-narrative sort of film as Monty Python’s Holy Grail; showing the conventions that you expect in a narrative, in on-screen expectations, and then casting them aside. It’s amazing how much faith we put in narrative in the movies; we want people we’ve been ‘invested’ in, the nice couple etc;, to have that last minute timed cellphone call, that skillfully flagged down automobile, that helpful neighbour who arrives just in the nick, but in a story, it only happens because the storyteller wants it to. Funny Games shows what happens when they decide NOT to give you that relief, and pushes it as far as it can go.
But uh, that doesn’ t mean it’s good. It’s horrifying and intellectual, and forces upon the viewer a level of detachment (ie, realizing these are not people, but a constructed theatre of cruelty). Shit, that’s why I hit the fast-forward button. I don’t know what it is about these French existentialists. I always get suckered in, and I always regret it. Usually it’s because of the promise of some euro soft-porn but they always mess that up with a splatter of violence. I mean, what the Hell?
While this seemed to service some point in a meta-fictional sort of way, but it’s not one I’d like to revisit. I think I prefer my happenstance from the school of Catholic causality, ie; from the works of Flannery O’Connor. In her short stories,while they usually hit a grim climax, it is always to drive a moral edge; there is something to them that is hard and instructional. There is a sense of ‘there’ there; that in her grim ends, it is not just an exercise in cruelty, but in some moral or philosophical demonstration of the ways of the world.
In the meantime, I’ll try to avoid those French thrillers. Next time I want something that subverts genre and narrative, make mine Hot Fuzz.
