Things woven (untangled vs. solid)

[tetsab]

There's a club if you'd like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you
So you go and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home and you cry and you want to die

We all know that one. It was written by the guy who said "I had the glummest, dreariest childhood you could possibly imagine. Pop music was all I ever had, and it was completely entwined with the image of the pop star. I remember feeling the person singing was actually with me and understood me and my predicament." (So that in the same article it can point out that "fans reacted to him with passionate identification" .... so that they can then quote Morrissey again saying: "When you're face to face with an audience, you can sing what you like, and if they really love you they'll accept whatever you say.")

[And then thanks to bad formatting what's going on can strangely bleed into a different turn on the same topic, which then bleeds into ridiculousness].

* * *

I'm still getting by and hanging on OK by hunting out those who seem to understand my predicament. It's not just music (where I've already mentioned that I can't figure out if listening to Dire Relationship Songs of Doom is good or bad [the fact of this post is the fact of settling on it being good]) but it's also personal comics from 'damaged' people, books (including the Bible even though I still fly my a-gnostic colours with spectacular determination), and the thing I've always historically gone the least to: film.

* * *

Yesterday I watched The Wall (yes, 1982... Bob Geldof and Pink Floyd), American Beauty and Fight Club (quite purposefully: each folds into the other getting further away and closer again).

So ya
Thought ya
Might like to go to the show.
To feel the warm thrill of confusion
That space cadet glow.
Tell me is something eluding you, sunshine?
Is this not what you expected to see?
If you wanna find out what's behind these cold eyes
You'll just have to claw your way through this disguise.

Some time in the '90s I was in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in Ohio writing out a quote from Roger Waters on the genesis of 'The Wall' being about his sudden shock at how contemptuous he'd become of his fans (he would most certainly not like them to accept whatever he says because they 'really love' him... [he wouldn't think that was love at all...]). I was writing this out by hand on a scrap of paper I had since it was so striking to me -- this honesty and fight against self -- that I didn't want to lose it... since this was before it became a fact of the Internet that every quote ever is at your fingertips if you want it. A central pivot of his disillusionment was around moving up to stadium shows and losing the intimacy with the audience (actually seeing them see themselves in what he's expressing ["Hey you, out there beyond the wall / Breaking bottles in the hall / Can you help me? / Hey you, don't tell me there's no hope at all / Together we stand, divided we fall."]).

* * *

None of these films are subtle in their use of things that scream therapy and crisis. The Wall is filled with a lonely child without a Dad. It starts quietly with a song in the background exactly about that and ends with children picking up the pieces, alone and ignored, of what they shouldn't be picking up. Fight Club doesn't bother with kids it just states it bald-faced: "Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God?". Both of these films also, on the immediate surface, don't particularly like what was left behind by the abandoner. Fight Club goes with the statement again "We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need." (Then again, it goes with a whole lot more than that if you attend to what's present for most of its running time...). The Wall goes waaaaaaay more explicit than statement and gets very striking when it literally turns the women into cartoons. The films shows in sadness the impact about Father but it speaks about Mother (and gets called by one critic a 'diatribe against femininity'). And, just so it's not forgotten, Lester in American Beauty starts to make himself feel better in part by Putting His Wife In Her Place (even though he knows... he knows that place is awful because he says it right at the start that she used to be happy. He's focused on himself and his unhappiness -- and not on his wife who berates and hits herself and tells her daughter that she learned the key lesson early that all you can depend on in this world is yourself -- until he isn't). But Fight Club ends with Marla and American Beauty ends in Lester's mind with Carolyn (but they both end so you don't know where they go...).

The Wall doesn't need a female voice singing Mother for you to see that the whole film is in no small part "a tender acknowledgment of how fear can entrap all of us, even when we want to do nothing but love" because it's already doing that.

It makes sense that in the film Mother starts with a polaroid of the main character with his wife. He's happy and she's looking at him with something that might be love and might be admiration (...to go back to the start again and what happens when fans just admire you...). He's now trying to reach her and she's not there -- she's moved on to someone else -- someone (as you see the clip she also found engaged and admirable and who would talk to her in stark contrast to what else happens in the clip where she tries to get his engagement and he ignores her with determination. By the end of the film when he's on Trial her line then spoken as the cartoon women is "You should have talked to me more often"). Maybe she shouldn't have taken him pulling away so hard but at the same time he knew on some level what was going on ("What shall we use to fill the empty spaces where we used to talk? How shall I fill the final places? How should I complete the wall?") and things even worse than that (When "Don't leave me now. How could you go? When you know how I need you" seems like a heartbreaking question until he chases it in song with "To beat to a pulp on a Saturday night"...). And in the end, for this and everything else, he puts himself on trial (and doesn't).

* * *

The most striking of these ignoring moments is when he tips to the side to keep staring at the television he spends a huge part or the movie staring at (until he flips out and hurls it through a window... & later makes it part of a shattered parody of something akin to a sand mandala). Now we're in 2014 and quoting Damon Albarn from an album called 'Everyday Robots':

I had a dream that you were leaving
It's hard to be a lover when the TV's on
And nothing is in your eyes

And what's remarkable about this isn't that we're still on about this but the fact that he named it for an 1888 Oscar Wilde story about love.

* * *

Completing the weave on this I was surprised to see that the Wall was directed by Alan Parker whose first project was a musical of a totally different sort: Bugsy Malone. That's a move that's all kids and also ends in love after a span of all parody murder and Looking Out For Number One. I loved that film as a kid, especially for the music. The music was done and sung by Paul Williams who I came to love all over again much more recently in The Phantom of the Paradise (written and directed by a man also famous for gangster films that are extreme). The song that ends that film also works as a perfect mirror in all of this.

* * *

Mama's gonna keep you right here under her wing
She won't let you fly but she might let you sing

If you're tried of the clichés and find there's nothing new under the sun it's good and right that there should be nothing new until you learn what's here... because what you can most see in all of this is that our ears are eternally filled with not hearing.

* * *

Joey puts her make-up on really well
She looks cool in the flashing lights
And all the boys gossip about the shape of her legs
On these muddled up and drunken nights
And if it's all got to end up between the sheets
She can coo like a virgin dove
But really she just doesn't want to be alone
And if you want you can call that love

I look out from my window view, there's really nothing else to do
Read a book maybe write a letter, mother, things are getting better
Watch the mirror count the lines, the battle scars of all the good times
Look around and I can see a thousand people just like me

You shut your mouth, how can you say
I go about things the wrong way
I am human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does

All alone, or in two's,
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down outside the wall.
Some hand in hand
And some gathered together in bands.
The bleeding hearts and artists
Make their stand.

And when they've given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it's not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall.

Comments

[tetsab]

Something else not new under the sun:

"Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to," said Bleak. "When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move."
...
"Oh, it's hard to let go," said Quartermain. "All my life I've held on to everything I ever touched. Preach to me, Bleak!"
Bleak, obediently, preached: "Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it. It's like boats. You keep your motor on so you can steer with the current. And when you hear the sound of the waterfall coming nearer and nearer, tidy up the boat, put on your best tie and hat, and smoke a cigar right up till the moment you go over. That's a triumph. Don't argue with the cataract."
...
"You cut yourself off from life. The boy has reconnected you. He is the grandson you should have had, to keep the juices flowing, life staying alert."
"Hard to believe."
"You're coming around. You can't cut all the phone lines and still be on speaking terms with the world. Instead of living inside your son and your son's son, you were really heading for the junkyard. The boy reminded you of your utter and complete finish [...]. You weren't hurting the boy. Actually, what you were trying to do was make him grow up. You were both wrong for a while. Now you're both winning. Not because you want to, but because you have to."
"No, it's only he who's ahead. The idea was to grow them as fruit for the grave. But all I did was give them--"
"Love," said Bleak.
Quartermain could not say the word. That dreadful sweet, candy-sickening word. So trite, so true, so irritating, so wonderful, so frightening, and, in the end, so lost to himself.
"They won. I did them a favour, my God, a favour! I was blind! I wanted them to race about, like we run about, and wither, and be shocked by their withering, and die, like I'm dying. But they don't realize, they don't know, they're even happier, if that's possible."
"Yes." Bleak pushed the chair. "Happier. Because growing old isn't all that bad. None of it is bad if you have one thing. If you have the one thing that makes it all all right."
That dreadful word again!
"Don't say it!"
"But I'm thinking it," said Bleak, trying mightily to keep an unaccustomed smile from creasing his lips.
"So you're right, so I'm miserable, and here I sit, crying like a goddamn idiot fool!"
...
"We can help ourselves. You were heading for the cliff. I tried to warn you. You can't hold them back now. If you'd had any sense, you might have encouraged the children to continue their damned revolution, never grow up, to be egocentrics. Then they really would have been unhappy!"
"A fine time to tell me."
"I'm glad I didn't think of it. The worst thing is never to grow up. I see it all around. I see children in every house. Look there, that's Leonora's house, poor woman. And here's where those two old maids live, and their Green Machine. Children, children without love. And over there, take a look. There's the ravine. The Lonely One. There's a life for you, there's a child in a man's body. That's the ticket. You could make Lonely Ones of them all, given time and patience. You used the wrong strategy. Don't force people to grow. Baby them. Teach them to nurse their grievances and grow their private poison gardens. Little patches of hate and prejudice. If you wanted them unhappy, how much better to say, 'Revolt, I'm with you, charge! Ignorance, I'm for you! Down with the slob and the swine forever!"
"Don't rub it in. I don't hate them anymore, anyway. What a strange afternoon, how odd. There I was, in his face. There I was, in love with the girl. It was as if time had never passed. I saw Liza again."
"It's still possible, of course, you can reverse the process. The child is in us all. It's not hard to keep the child locked there forever. Give it another try."
"No, I'm done with it. I'm done with wars. Let them go. If they can earn a better life than I did, let them earn it. I wouldn't be so cruel as to wish them my life now. I was in his face, remember, and I saw her. God, what a beautiful face! Suddenly I felt so young. Now, turn me around and roll me home. I want to think about the next year or so. I'll have to start figuring."
"Yes, Ebenezer."
"No, not Ebenezer, not Scrooge. I'm not anything. I haven't decided to be anything. You can't be anything that quickly. All I know is that I'm not quite the same. I've got to figure out what I want to be."
...
"Think on it, anyway. Don't wait, or you'll sink back into being nothing but a mean old son-of-a-bitch again."
"So that's what I've been! Well, well. I didn't start out intending to be mean, but I go there somehow. Are you mean, Bleak?"
"No, because I know what I did to myself. I'm only mean in private. I don't blame others for my own mistakes. I'm bad in a different way than you, of course, with a sense of humour developed out of necessity." For a moment, Bleak's eyes seemed to twinkle, but maybe it was only the passing sun.
"I'll need a sense of humour from here on out. Bleak, visit me more often." Quartermain's gnarled fingers grasped Bleak's hand.
"Why would I visit you, you sorry old bastard, ever again?"
"Because we're the Grand Army, aren't we? You must help me think."
"The blind leading the sick," said Bleak. "Here we are."
He paused at the walk leading up ot the gray, flake-painted house.
"Is that my place?" said Quartermain. "My God, it's ugly, ugly as sin. Needs paint."
"You can think about that, too."
"My God, what a Christ-awful ugly house! Wheel me in, Bleak."
And Bleak wheeled his friend up the walk toward his house.

-- Ray Bradbury; Farewell Summer; Chapter 31 (more or less).