feeling very tired and worn out now, like it's the end of my life. I don't feel like i've got any strength to be bothered.
my mind's really clinging onto lars von trier and the film Dogville, so it gives me hope to carry on - one good thing out there in the world. I remind myself again and again of the poignant moment when the man from the series "7 Up" who said he wanted to be a coach driver, aged seven, said at 21 or 28 "I really want to be a coach driver now". That moment has stayed with me and I have understood it better and better as I've grown older; at least, lets say, it's a moment I have returned to and felt in tune with many times. In hard times, something that breaks through to remind you that there was once a time when you wanted something, and there was a possiblity. How you cling to the faintest dream. I don't know. The world of criticism and unpleasant stupidity tires me out so much, and lars von trier seems to be producing the antithesis of criticisable things, being self critical, and being experimental. Dogville has added to my dream world, basically, giving me somewhere to relax in (there IS something outside that is happening) but also something to agitate me out of my current situation (and make me depressed in it). I feel like: Why am i always living on the edge?
I really like the idea of revenge that Von Trier talks about "I was listening to Pirate Jenny, the song by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill from The Threepenny Opera. It's a very powerful song and it has a revenge theme that I liked very much." (dogville site.) I found Dogville reminded me of Straw Dogs, but was satisfying.
In both films, I desperately wanted the "rescue" to take place. I read a comment on the Dogville website forum that victims don't get rescued. And I suppose it's a dream come true, when degradation is at it's height and the situation can only be resolved - & a new start made by the victim - by destroying everything concerned with it. That's just what has to happen when things get that bad. It seemed, to me, a pathetic victim's dream in the Pirate Jenny song. But in Dogville, Grace doesn't have any dreams of escape, aside from the escape from turning into an aggressive personality.
But like Von Trier says, Grace's escape from power has given power to a number of other people (the residents of Dogville), by "giving herself as a gift", and they have systematically pushed her to the limit of the possiblity of her generosity. And she didn't conceive of this possiblity before it happened.
Straw Dogs also ends in a righteous fight, when it's all too late, and the victims have been weak for too long, and the only possible way to survive is to destroy the enemy of their values (the enemy created by their own ineffectiveness,
damn it*) by force. I found this more immediately terrifying in Straw Dogs because the victims were completely unsupported.
*Implied here is my belief that posh people, strong and stable types, somehow manage to avoid these types of situations with their strength of character, and an ablility NOT to drive people into a frenzy of anger and hatred against them?
I was comforted by the Mafia's God-like presence in Dogville. (This obviously means I'm susceptible to the idea of protection and justice, but I don't believe in God.) A regular fear of mine is that there is no route though all this, and that 99% of people are just always going to obstruct me and and wear me down until I have to move on and start again with a whole new set of them. That's why I keep thinking i live on the edge. I keep on learning lessons the hard way, and ending up in fights with people, and these obstructions block my progress and make it all feel painfully slow sometimes. I keep thinking, if only people could see that I was strong and prepared to fight if I had to (IE, if only I didn't hide my strength and unwillingness to be the victim that seems to be equated in the 99% of minds with my undemandingness of people, and dis-inclination to be aggressive to them) - if only this, then it wouldn't always have to end in aggressive confrontation.
(Being more tough on myself, this is a feeling of " if only people really knew me"... how good, how kind, how clever, how fair.)
This is a hard lesson to learn, as it means a person can never be "themselves", can never relax, because this isn't an ideal world; we always have to be acting - showing what we are capable of at all times - so that we can fend off other's power over ourselves. To submit to doing this, is to submit to being "just like everyone else".
"You have to have some limits".
Now, my attitiude has turned to positivity. I believe that the only thing to do is to produce (and I mean to produce experimentally and freely), or I'll repeatedly be the victim of losers sadder than me, because I'm too ashamed to admit to them that I think I'm better and more capable than they are, though it is clear that I think so because I hold myself apart from them in a patronising way and I "feel sorry" for people. This is confrontational and leads to confrontation.
___________________________________
By the way, of the 6 people watching Dogville in Penzance cinema screen 3, Saturday night, one third walked out during the excruciating beginning of the film. They might have stayed an hour. The film lasted about 3 hours and was worth every minute. At the beginning, I, too, was all criticism, but the film soon shut me up! One of the prejudices shattered was Nicole Kidman as Grace. By the end of the film, I was pleased Nicole Kidman was in the role, not least because she would encourage more people to go to the film. And I felt she endured well the scrutiny of the role.
"Nicole said that she wanted to work with me and I wrote the part of Grace for her or rather, for the image I had of her. I found out that she's a very, very good actor. It was interesting to take someone who had mostly done these colder characters and to let her do something else. And of course it's intriguing to take a Hollywood film star and put her in a film like this. It might give us a different audience than we otherwise would have had, so long as they are not scared away by the fact that there's nothing but a black floor with actors on it"
Posted by Eleutheria at March 25, 2004 03:15 PM