I’ve frequently said that good horror is not about bloodshed, or shock effect, but that good horror suggests a deeper kind of scare – an intellectual one, a question about our humanity, or our society, or about who we are. If we really are as good, or moral, or simply in control about our life as we believe. Where our reality is questioned. Where you end up feeling both alone, but not entirely sure if you can even trust yourself and your own motivations.  This, by the way, does not just go for movies – but for anything “horror”. This movie is a good example illustrating what I mean. But, sadly, not because it tries to be a horror movie (quite the contrary), but because of how incredibly creepy the point it makes is, when looking at it from “a manufacturing consent” or (to go back to Dawkins) “religion as a mass delusion” perspective.

Before I go on: That is not meant to say that the movie is bad. In contrast – it is very well crafted, filmed and presented, and certainly has a quite intelligent script. As a movie – disregarding what it attempts to say – it is entertaining and interesting. The problem: Its less and less subtle undertones of Christian philosophy. And from here on there be spoilers.

The movie tells three separate stories that overlap, all three using the same actors and it certainly has quite surreal elements as the realities of each three different scenarios overlap. The idea (which is quite startling given how the movie ends) is that god (or a god like being) is an addict, lost in its own creation. Impersonating humans living within it through avatars, playing and participating in the lives of its creation. The last of the three versions of the story presents the god like being as impersonating a game designer within the reality it (not as a game, but as a world designer) created. The first “incarnation” of the character presents it as an actor, close to a mental breakdown, addicted to drugs and alcohol, suffering from delusions. The second (there’s the trend) as a writer/director, who – again – loses control of reality and is being accused of wanting to manipulate people and control people outside the realities he (the director, not the god being using it as an avatar) creates, mistreating them in the process. There’s a suggestion of comparing this god like being to the players of everquest (referenced as crackquest in the movie) or world of warcraft (the boyfriend as an orc reference). Lost in this process of the game / world / it created, god just missed the last 4000 years, as it is informed  – and here is one of the many places where the movie is inconsistent, as explained later – by an angel, or another god like being, that tries to bring “god” back to the real reality of it as a deity. The line goes “we missed you”.

All this would offer a lot of questions about what “god” is. About it’s morality. As mentioned it (god) is not obviously portrayed as a “good” or a “sane” being. The movie has the chance to ask somewhere interesting questions and remain on a purely and generally philosophical level about religion. And there are these inconsistencies (god is not a 10, it’s a 9, not quite perfect; there’s more than one of them) that seem to carry a somewhat neutral and not specifically Christian idea of “deity”.

But it doesn’t. Instead, the very last scene of the movie undoes all the grittiness and moral ambiguity (there’s less and less of it as the movie progresses) of all that came before. God’s back home, it leaving it’s world did not destroy it, and the way it returns to it’s “rightful” place … it leaves a “perfect” world behind (for the characters involved).

And then there’s of course references to the trinity, gods, mortals and satan, the obvious 4,000 years. This is not about the idea of god, but very specific. The problem: It is not clear whether that is the intended message of the movie. There are too many inconsistencies to say “this is christian propaganda”. Rather, it’s just very likely that someone wrote a “great script”, but the christian message sub-consciously wrote itself in.

That is what turns the movie into horror. The notion that the idea of god – one of the very points of Dawkins – is being indoctrinated into and engrained within members of society from a very young age, to a level that this one religious biased perspective even escapes their conscious knowledge. And, in the case of the movie, it probably doesn’t reach the level of awareness (and the comments on the movie on IMDB suggest this) of most viewers either. It doesn’t need to explain it’s Christian overtones – they are part of the “common sense” and agreed upon conventions. It is horror because, if you perceive it on this level, it will force you to ask about your own perspective, your own reality, your own biases. Those you’ll never be able to quite grasp. That you’ll never be able to be quite certain about. Because you can only filter what you are aware of consciously.

Interestingly – there’s a discussion of exactly this subject and notion about the film on IMDB’s forums. It’s a nice read as (as one participant observes) it happens to pan out between a strong atheist, a (less forceful) ‘atheist’ and a believer.

My vote on the movie isn’t complete yet. If generating debate is a good thing, it can (see above) work. More likely though – I’ll have a copy to give away soon.

And than – there’s that question about myself. I know and have noticed Christian elements appear in my stories. Given the cultural reference of the Bible where I was born and the way fictional writing at times is not a conscious process, this is probably not surprising. I haven’t finished the two stories I am particularly referring to, mind you, and these elements exist within the fictional world created with out really defining their meaning for the characters or the stories itself. It is not a problem that these elements exist. But the question of what they do to the story, what they say, and if they just reinforce and repeat the “consent” or “meaning” these symbols have within a Christian based society need to be brought into my conscious if I ever attempt to finish writing these stories.

In other (and brief) news … I haven’t been well these last weeks. Feeling SI triggerish. Overwhelmed with the world, not being able to do as much as I want, trouble getting up in the morning and needing a lot of effort to push all this away before I can even attempt to work on what I need to (which doesn’t work well, due to lack of concentration). I have to do a critical analysis of and 20 minute presentation on a number of international documents (Stockholm Conference, Belgrade Charter, Tbilisi Document, Agenda 21 [that’s a maybe] and the recently published Earth Charter). This was meant to be group work, but given I still don’t really know anyone on my course – I ended up working on my own.

And there, in my room, no-one to talk to, it all turned into that big unsolvable mess, giving me that feeling of – well – not getting anywhere I want to, in my life, doing things I don’t want or feel are “necessary” for my further development. Until I did, finally, text Alex and just talk it all over, this afternoon.

As always – the world in our heads seems to be so much more unreal and bigger than when one starts to cut it down. Thanks Alex.

It’s the type of movie that makes you look at the titles of the e-mails caught in your spam mail filter and actually almost find some profound meaning in them, only that it just about escapes you around the next corner. (There’s profanity here, but that comes with the territory.)

Betreff:   ID MSG:74452 You have new mail from Olga

Betreff:   V|a_gr-a 100mg x 10 pills = $ 59.95

Betreff:   Prices cant be lower

Betreff:   Hot blonde gives blowjob and swallow some sperm

Betreff:   Available for you period

Betreff:   Transaction failed

Betreff:   RE: Le logiciel populaire, localise pour le franca…

Betreff:   eliminate credit card debt

Betreff:   Thanks for reading

I remember there’s been one spam mail message that I’d kept around for a while. It was one of those automated ones that had pulled out lines from random webpages to mask itself and trick some of the spam filters out there. What amazed was that it was poetry. But I’ve deleted it a good while back, so no quote here.

Today (my old rule of the day not being over before I go to bed still is valid; I am a couple days younger then my passport says) was a day that somewhat escapes words. It is that feeling I struggle with – of not quite feeling things are real, where I watch myself, where I don’t quite feel I fill my body. Where I am not really “me”. But I’ll start with yesterday.

I’ve discussed my dissertation with my personal tutor – and chances are it will turn towards a critical theory approach; not a prescriptive intervention, not me working as a researcher but a participant in a collaborative research project on Adventure Therapy. Where the group decides what Adventure Therapy is (which, naturally, implies a critical perspective on therapy forms that do exist). Where the group forms the methodology. The problem: I am anxious about pushing this forward. I know I need to, as I need to start producing data. But yes … when trying to formulate all this in words (spoken) it goes down the “it’s all too ridiculous line”. Another day.

Back home – late night – the main fuse went off. It’s only Anne and me here right now, this being reading week, and everyone else (including Gopi. back to India, to attend a relative’s marriage) gone. Anne was already fretting about having to finish an essay on rhododendron and with the power off, being forced to call it quits, was getting wound up about the whole situation. Thing is … the wiring in this house is messed up, somehow, majorly. We don’t have lights on the ground floor (and didn’t have any on the first floor, either, for some time). They’ve been here, trying to fix this frequently, it might work for a while, then some fuse refuses to cooperate. It’s never been the mains, so far, however. We tried getting power back on for a while but gave up eventually and used candles (and early bed time for each soon after).

Today … well, one of the amateur builders (they all seem best buddies with our landlady’s agent) came in, switched the fuse back on, and it stayed in. I had to leave, I don’t know if he actually called an electrician.

But also, today, was a day where I couldn’t communicate (meeting Silé, not being able to express myself well). We both walked over to the Liverpool Mental Health Consortium’s general meeting – one of those conferences that are important but largely pass you by. It might become more meaningful a year down the road, once having more of an insight what the Consortium is actually up to.

Once back home … I needed to just crash down. One of the weirdest realisations really is that you feel you are just a brain stuck in a hard skull, it’s all very cramped, physically feeling how claustrophobic it all is. And yes, that feeling of … a distinct lack of reality as indicated in the first paragraph.

The weird thing is – it’s always books or movies or fiction in general that grounds me. That reaches me in a more real way than reality – my reality, my existence, my being, my being a physical form, me existing in a space, in a sense, in well “here” this “place” – does.

I am still trying to figure out how not being me feels like. If there’s common ground between what me individual feels like and what them (other individuals) being them feels like. I guess that distinct thing I am trying to express here is not a common feeling – but it’s not dissociative, not quite (or not even close) – it’s just a keen sense of observing oneself and how unreal and bizarre the way live just always winds and moves forward is. It’s also based on an incredible amount of confusion.

But well. It’s time to end this day.

I will leave that entry - I started writing it over the last weeks and tried to push it out today — sitting for a while longer, keeping it as a draft. That post that you can’t read yet — well its origin is in seeing Yasmin Alibhai-Brown perform at the Liverpool Royal Philharmonics; two weeks ago (the 16th of May that is). Alex invited me. Yasmin’s performance is autobiographical and — at least I guess — connected to her latest book that is about to be published. However, it touches on so many themes and ideas that — there is so much of a personal connection to it. Beyond that, and that was what I really wanted to write about, it connects to a story I’ve been asked to tell, but never managed to. I have told parts of it, fragments, tentative beginnings, to a variety of people — but, and that goes for most of the things I have experienced in Israel/Palestine — I just somehow lack the words and my fluency, my use of language escapes me when trying. It’s not a happy story — it is one of murder and mistreatment — but it does contain — if I ever manage to express it — at least some humour (I hope).

That is not the only reason for the long silence. Here’s a quick run through of what went on from the previous entry to this one; doing these is part of the purpose of this journal — to be able to glance over these entries and say, boy, you are alive, things happen in your life. I know that might sound incredibly saaad. It is about me living too much in the now — in a way.

So what happened than in what is more then a month now? For once, I finished my exams (which, I think, went well for one of them) handed in three essays and a poster presentation, as well as a presentation on my proposed dissertation. This accounted for a busy two weeks that I just couldn’t write or think about anything else than the tasks at hand.

After that … I lost a whole week and only begin to manage to push myself back out of that hole I vanished in. Two things happened, really, that caused this. For one — I didn’t get the job I mentioned in an earlier post. It was with a different ferry company than I thought it was and I have edited out the name. While I was invited to an interview I had the feeling that a decision had already been made either before I arrived or within moments before starting the interview. That is — it wasn’t really much of an interview, with little questions from their side. I never head anything back from them. Regardless — I don’t think I’d have enjoyed the working climate (nothing tangible I can point to) from a feeling I got just by observing the routines there, while waiting for the person I was scheduled to meet.

The other bit and what really pushed me over the edge — was that the person I had made plans to share house with next year and go house-hunting with (we pushed that back until after the exam period) has left the country already for the summer. She only told me that upon contacting her again last Thursday, explaining (which I think is genuine) that she’d simply forgotten with all else that went on in her life. However, her decision of staying on and continuing to live in the student halls means I am stranded again — and likely forced to move in with random strangers for next term once more. That didn’t work out well, obviously, these first two years here in Liverpool.

Her decision affected me so negatively, because I can point to a variety of points where I’d been (conveniently?) forgotten/ignored or passed over by people I trusted in. [Of course what is true and not, what is just my interpretation and subjective perspective — I can’t tell. The point is what it does to my emotional life.] So yes, this hurt. And then I just trailed off in the too well established paths of what — partially — characterises my depression. Needing more sleep than usual and at the same time not being able to fall asleep when I want to and feel tired in the evening; yet, hours later, waking up still feeling tired, never really waking up, that slight drowsy feeling in which days become a haze and just run into one another. Not being able to act, think or keep to the hours that others do, not getting done what I know I should have and want to. And then of course — to keep my mind distracted — going back to gaming. This time it’s been Mount & Blade. I forced myself to uninstall the programme Tuesday evening and since then started with little tasks around the house that are necessary and important.

I am — since this morning — the only one living here, again. I’ve cleaned the kitchen (with Will’s assistance) and started removing all the random bits of trash spread around the house. I’ll put all the refuse bags (and those left behind in the backyard; at least twenty) out for collection tomorrow after writing this. The living room, likewise, is fairly tidy and clean now. As mentioned I still have a month to live here and want to be able to use this house during that time.

I’ve also been at FACT again, yesterday, watching Federico Fellini’s 1963 movie 8½ as part of the Artist’s Choice (a film that inspired the people behind a current exhibition with a discussion of that movie and the significance for their work afterwards) series. lt had been picked by AL and AL — sadly, however, they weren’t around for a discussion afterwards. Especially with this movie that’d have been incredibly interesting, though. lt is an incredibly personal movie that is definitely a movie asking the audience to work with the material presented: Very little interpretation is provided and its disjointed, sometimes surrealist narration just leaves a lot of space for creating very personal meaning from it. (I’d guess it’s referred to as “post-modernist” … but to me that just illustrates my notion that “post-modernism” in literature/movies/art simply is a form of experimental story telling that has been around for a good long while.) Because of that getting AL and AL’s personal interpretation(s) — and just a discussion with the audience would have been great. As it was … well everyone watched the film and left. [The audience at these artist’s choice events is definitely different though — there’s a certain respect and concentration on the movies presented [which is often necessary, too] that is consistently lacking elsewhere.]

I’ve also re-watched Ed TV and seen Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages yesterday night. Code Unknown deals with communication and miss-communication, racism (from both the “majority” and the “immigrant” side) and human relations in general. Despite loving the movie and feeling it does a lot right I find it hard to comment on it. That mostly, probably, because of its careful balance. It is a movie that — through its narrative structure — benefits from not knowing too much about it beforehand.

Haneke’s realistic approach is what drives the movie and, I think, makes his statement so much more focused than what Alejandro González Iñárritu managed in the thematically similar Babel. I agree a lot about Haneke’s statements in the accompanying interviews in terms of what makes for good storytelling (challenging the audience intellectually and accepting that a narration only becomes complete with the audience interacting with what is presented [among other points]). He also makes an interesting comment on stating that as a director he feels it is important to make his audience understand — especially with a realist movie — that (whether it is fiction or a documentary) the movie/narration presents a condensed form of reality. In Code Unknown this continuity of the characters life beyond the scenes is established through hard cuts in the middle of dialogue and actions from one scene to the next. That is, what is important for the narration is presented, while the scenes flow over into the next one afterwards.

I think this point of narratives being a more “distilled” and “intense” version of reality is what really makes me enjoy movies and literature as much as I do. I thrive for that emotional intensity, and I guess I am searching for it in my own life as well. I frequently feel detached from reality — that, again, linked to how depression works for me. I think I need a certain intensity of life to feel alive, needing meaningful experiences. Particularly know, this morning, through this haze of not really feeling present … it is some sort of distance and strange perception of the world — as if through a veil and a little hazy, less real.

That of course leads me back to Sylvia Plath and her being identified as an “intense” person — not necessarily through her writing but her diary entries (which I find so much more engaging than her poetry or short stories). I also don’t feel that an “intense” lifestyle is or has to be negative as long as it is a positive creative process. So on that end, writing about things I do and experience, reflecting on them — the purpose of this journal at part — is so important to remind myself that even in routine and everyday life I create something.

That Haneke’s realism is fairly accurate — well, I have just experienced a scene quite similar to one in his movie when taking the bus back home after watching 8½. An older man (white hair and balding) was shouting racist abuse at an Indian looking young man across the isle. I left my bag and jacket on the backseat and moved to the seat behind the Indian man (I couldn’t take a seat next to him) and in a silent moment between tirades told the one shouting that I thought it was time for him to shut up. Of course saying that won’t stop an enraged person, and him identifying me as a foreigner meant that I took the abuse for the rest of the journey isntead. I kept trying to reason with him occasionally, but naturally didn’t get through to him, being too soft-spoken and not able to really scream back at him. The ironic part of this — the man sprouting his hatred had the clearly darker coloure skin of a descendant of immigrants (if not having been an immigrant himself at some point).

I feel I should have acted different though, and here is that magic idealist realism I’d wish for, wishing to be a stronger person. Much of the anger expressed by him centred on why he should  “spread his seed” if it means his children have to fight in wars elsewhere. His attack was indifferent (given the choice of an Indian-looking and me as an European person) of nationality, however, telling us to go back to where we came from and sort out our own problems. While leaving the bus shouting that he’ll follow me home and show me how building a bomb really is done and that he’ll be back. [the Indian-looking man had left earlier and I’d put my hand on his shoulder, establishing eye contact for a second; an apology and guesture of goodwill.] I wonder. I should have asked him — in that ideal world of being able to react well — if he actually lost someone. But as I said, me being me, I never even managed to get through to him in his rage. Someone hit him (and that mirrors that scene in Haneke’s movie I am referring to) when he left the bus. A reaction I don’t feel well about either.

To explain the title of this post — a cat walked past the living room windows while I was watching Code Unknown and stopped, starring at me, through the window, me looking at the television. It stayed there for quite a while.

A short list of things I need to accomplish these coming weeks:

• Complete the assignments I still have to.
• Find somewhere to live, someone to share with. I am completely at a loss here. [Note … maybe not quite so, we just had an e-mail of someone joining the course for the third year looking for a house-share forwarded to us].
•  Start reading for my dissertation again. I am going back to the basics and looking at counselling theory (I still prefer Jung over Freud).
• Find some job. I don’t know how to go about that, honestly. I don’t really care about what it is as long as the working climate is ok, however. I don’t have much faith in work bank at uni, though — begging for them to do something isn’t mine.
• I still haven’t secured a work-based learning position either and don’t have any idea where to look, too. I already told the respective team and person responsible that are meant to assist us that I need help, but haven’t heard back from neither. Still, it IS, of course, my own responsibility just as finding a job after finishing this course is. The problem is — I don’t feel fit to work in the outdoor industry, don’t feel I’ve gained the skills I really need. Sadly Tom Gee’s criticism of Outdoor Education programmes (here and here) are all too true. Except that after two years I don’t have any Governing Body awards whatsoever. I simply can’t go out there and tell an employer that I am able to work for them. I did however join the Merseyside Mountaineering Club now — but haven’t made it to any of their social get together Thursday afternoon (and possibly some climbing wall practise beforehand) yet, however. For once — I still need to buy the simple equipment (harness, belay plate, carabiners etc.) required for climbing. But I also don’t want to introduce myself and start this on a low … I tend to get panicky about abseiling if I am not feeling well — that combined with how important first impressions are for many — yes, I simply don’t want to start this badly.

Oh and me made quiche [Now possible again in kitchen!]

–C.

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