It is your sister’s, Gretchen, birthday, and
your plan is to wish her well. Kim sent a note that they will stop for dinner
on the way home but will probably drive on to wake up in their own bed. –
Amorella
1124
hours. This is understandable. Yesterday was stressful driving which I-75 can
be, especially now, on a weekend during Spring Break times. We have been there,
done that. Like Twain describing the mighty Mississippi River when he was a
Pilot of a riverboat – there is an ebb and flow to the river depending on the
season, you have to know where the shallows are as well as the deeps, at least
that is how I (generally) remember his story.
** **
NYMPHOMANIAC: VOL. II
Sheila
O'Malley
There's a stunning shot more than halfway through Lars von
Trier's "Nymphomaniac: Vol. II", when Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), wandering through the
wilderness, comes across a twisted tree jutting out of a rock. The tree has no
shelter from gale-force winds, causing it to turn almost completely sideways,
the roots still buried in the earth. Joe stands on a nearby rock, framed by the
almost-horizontal tree in the foreground, and the camera pans around to the
side to give us the magnificent long view. It is a grandiose shot, thematically
driven and emotional in nature, operatic in scope. e.e. cummings wrote
"since feeling is first / who pays any attention / to the syntax of things."
Both volumes of "Nymphomaniac" pay attention to both, the
"feeling" and the underlying "syntax of things", making the
films a story of erotic misadventure as well as a meandering first draft of a
many-footnoted thesis paper.
Vol. I felt much wider in scope, crazier, satirical, goofy even.
Vol. II narrows the lens, and has more of a desire to explain, to diagnose, to
wrap things up. Gainsbourg's performance of Joe doesn't help; her monotone line
delivery and flat affect is clearly a performance choice, but it's a bit
tough-going to sit with for two hours. The flashback structure of Vol. I
highlighted the artificial framing device and created an entertaining
distancing effect. That distance is no longer present in Vol. II, when
Gainsbourg plays herself in the flashbacks, and everything gets a bit too
literal.
Joe is still lying in bed, telling her life story to Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard) who has taken her in after
finding her beaten in an alley. She shares a momentous moment from her life
when she was 12, when she lay on her back in a field, and experienced a
spontaneous orgasm, all while being watched over by two hovering female
figures. Joe has gone through life assuming that the women she saw were
variations on the Virgin Mary, perhaps standing in judgment of her sexual
awakening, but Seligman is delighted to inform her that, because of the
symbolic objects the figures carried, they were actually the Whore of Babylon
and Valeria Messalina, wife to Roman Emperor Claudius, and known as a rampant
floozy. Seligman launches into an explanation of the giant schism in the
Christian religion, an important motif of the film: the Orthodox (Eastern)
church focused more on the redemption and the transfiguration, while the
Western church zoomed in on the suffering of the crucifixion. Joe incorporates
Seligman's iconography into the rest of her story. In her life, she went
towards the suffering.
When Vol. II opens, Joe is now married to the drippy Jerome (Shia LaBeouf), and they have a baby son.
Unfortunately, she has also lost all interest in sex, and has no more sexual
sensation. He gives her permission to take other lovers in order to get her
groove back.
As Stacy Winter morphs over a three-year period into Charlotte
Gainsbourg (while Shia LaBeouf remains the same, making one wonder if he didn't
think to himself, "Why does my wife look totally different now?"),
the story takes a darker turn. No more the casual conquests on a train, or the
rotating doorway of lovers, exuberant and messy and awful. Joe starts to seek
out "dangerous men", like the two African brothers who don't speak a
word of English, who stand over her, arguing over who gets what hole,
essentially, all as she sits between their two erect penises, watching them
fight it out. It is the film at its most bratty.
Joe then seeks out the mysterious K (Jamie Bell, in a fantastic performance), who
services women in what looks like a deserted office building. Filmed with the
utmost naturalism, down to the ugly fluorescent lighting, the K sections are
the best of Vol. II, tense, disturbing, even erotic (the K scenes stand out,
since the rest of the sex in the film looks altogether dreary). Women sit
quietly in a makeshift holding area, not talking to one another, waiting to be
summoned. K sets out the rules to Joe bluntly: He will not have sex with her,
and there will be no "safe words" while he is in charge. He is both
soft-spoken and violent, giving the women the beatings they want, but there are
strange solicitous moments, careful and gentle, like when he takes Joe's coat,
or when Joe starts to hyperventilate at one point and he whispers,
"Breathe. Take it easy." It's a fascinating little character study,
and Jamie Bell casts a long shadow through the film.
Joe becomes so addicted to the dynamic with K that she leaves
her baby son sleeping in the crib at home, unattended, so that she won't miss
an appointment. It is the first moment, in the entirety of her adventures,
where you start to understand why she keeps telling Seligman that she is a bad
person. The K experience launches Joe into the final chapter, which will
explain why she was found beaten in that dark alley. This final chapter is the
most conventional of either of the volumes, plot-heavy, character-heavy, and it
involves Willem Dafoe, in a very entertaining cameo, as
a guy who employs Joe to sexually harass those who owe him money. Joe takes on
a protege, a misfit teenage girl, and things get messy. What a shock.
Seligman still stops her story repeatedly to bring up this or
that connection and after he shares one anecdote, Joe thinks it over and
comments, “I think this was one of your weakest digressions.” And it was! These
moments of distancing, so common in Vol. I, are few and far between here, and
they bring welcome moments of levity and self-awareness. Finally, Seligman
reveals that he is a virgin, and: "I consider myself asexual". So
there is a reason for his detachment from the erotic content of her stories,
there is a reason he is not turned on by them and hasn't made a pass. At one
point, Seligman is shown from above, body splayed out, falling slowly backwards
onto a floor covered in books. Both characters are seeking escape from the
banal, and her swoon upwards as a child into sexual sensation is connected with
his swoon downwards into the life of the mind.
Joe attends some Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings, and immediately
causes friction with the group because she says she is not a "sex
addict," she is a "nymphomaniac". Her independence is paramount.
The self-help world is not so much lampooned (although there is some of that
going on) as shown to be completely unequipped to deal with the real chaos at
the heart of the sex drive. Joe is told by the leader of the group to get rid
of anything in her apartment that reminds her of sex. We then see her boxing up
and wrapping up literally every object in sight, until the room is empty of
everything but a bed. The scene is played for laughs, and it is funny, but
underneath it you can feel the urgency of the question, something humanity has
wrestled with from the beginning: How is this to be controlled, exactly?
It's like trying to put a leash on a typhoon.
Independence or no, Joe has ended up destroyed. She has had so
much sex that her vagina is now basically a wound, and she can't bear to have
it touched or looked at. She puts her hand over it to hide it, crying. The
Latin root for "pudenda", depending on what source you use, is
"thing to be ashamed of", or "to be ashamed". A woman realizes
how the culture feels about her different sexual body parts by going back to
their linguistic roots. "Pudenda" is not the only example, although
it's the most revealing. Shame goes so deep that it's in the word we use. Joe
has lived her life trying to get far away from the domestication of sex. It has
ruined her body and ruined her relationships. She says flatly, "Society
had no room for me." And indeed it didn't.
I wonder how people will feel about the final moment of the
film. I thought it was great, albeit extremely cynical. Joe had said earlier
that she was afraid that Seligman might have "misunderstood" one part
of her story, despite his latching-on to different aspects of it in order to
discuss Beethoven, "Dr. Faustus" or fly-fishing. We learn in the last
moment of Vol. II that the situation is far far worse than mere
misunderstanding.
Or, said another
way, we learn that "misunderstanding" is at the root of all of our
problems in life. "Nymphomaniac", both volumes, as uneven as they
are, especially when taken together, is not so much a plea for understanding,
as it is a brutal diagnosis.
Selected and
edited from - http://www.rogerebertDOTcom/reviews/nymphomaniac-vol-ii-2014
** **
1601
hours. No more ‘art’ films for a while. Wow. What an excellent two films this
was. This combination about did me in heartanmind-wise. “Fly fishing” what an
irony. This film certainly makes you think deeply because of the shear raw
honesty. It makes me wonder on the soul and why it might dread having to ‘absorb’
such a concoction of human heartanmind. In the film the naked winter tree is as
a soul; and as such, ‘what naked tree does your soul look like? You’ll know
when you see it.’ I am so glad I took the time to watch these two films. I am ‘turned’
some for doing so. – rho
The ‘turning’ is intellectual – you now have
more empathy for the sense of what womanhood is. And, it reminds you of that
famous quotation by Isaac Bashevis Singer: “We must believe in free will, we
have no choice.” - Amorella
1610
hours. Indeed, and just moments ago I sent a reminder of the quotation to my former student, “Dr. Zach” Moore, relating it to a different subject.
Post. -
Amorella
***********
Now
you put it together and be done with Dead Eleven, GMG.2. Amorella
***********
Draft –
Two once new souls without eyes, a trunk, hands and feet.
And, here we are again, old friends, without eyes and trunk,
hands and feet
Hearts, we have
And, Minds too, but alas, they are secondary sources and not
our own
Even Dead they do not suspect that it is we who are the
primary.
Hearts and Minds rise and set by their own son
Even though we are the breath they take in
How was it though without holding heartansoul within
We were essence without wonder
And, we were not self-generated and thus self-serving
We are not self-serving
Such a weakness in reason
When Dead life is Saudade
A framework for reason is
Saudade
A naked soul is not unclothed
Humanity is not clothing
Humanity is water to the soul
Only water, not nourishment
Souls feed on each other
The opposite of breathing in and out
Swarms of souls
Schools of souls
To what end from what beginning?
To remember how it is to be a what
Relative or not
To life in the living – being
Only when once been.
Can once be again reformed
A new alphabet for a new thought
Life can be spelt differently in irregular form
Grammar like gravity is the same living or dead
Grammar is the soul’s shell
Stored for good pickings in memory
A spirit to have been recoiling
Without an inside or out
A line without end no more solid than a period.
Bent by grammar not gravity
No words, no punctuation in this spiritual deep.
***
Merlyn does not exist with the Dead as his Soul speaks. When
alive Merlyn did not exist with the Living nor the Dead when his Soul spoke.
Souls are Primary; heartsanminds are what they are.
Merlyn thinks; when I was alive I ‘felt’ I had a soul but I
had no proof. Now, I have no proof I was alive. Residual dreams are not proof. I
was and am only when I dream. I dream consciousness and I am.
***
You have also doubled your number of words in Dead
Eleven – basically beat fifties poetry in soul-like conversation. You are not
pleased with the segment so far. – Amorella
1718 hours. I get the gist with the loosely dropped
poetic medium but what sense for Merlyn? I assume he can listen in.
Merlyn can though it seems as a musical
piece. The melody is not so much haunting as basic and simply raw in note. –
Amorella
1723 hours. A railroad metaphor will do here – something
along the line of an empty rail car being pulled to Dachau in someone’s
enlightened memory. In seems odd in this clicked-clack of a ‘flash’ but
fortunately there is not a soul on board as it was on board such a car at the
Holocaust Museum. No souls on board and I don’t believe when I stepped on alone
my soul stepped on with me. It hung on the corners outside keeping the created
memory intact during real life some time distant.
You’ve captured an unspeakable honest
thought here and I’ll find a way to use it. Souls don’t mind punctuation even
without the word ‘transmigration’. – Amorella
1735 hours. I assume I am to make sense of this?
It’s from your head boy, it’s your sense not
mine. Post. – Amorella
***
29 march 16
0935
***
To the
Living Foretoken and Venerable appear untouchable yet these two early
soul-friends are solid enough within a vision sprayed of resourceful and
heartfelt fancy. All souls know what they are – immortal and though as nothing,
souls are stronger than the physics guiding and framing the many universes
containing the Living.
***
Merlyn
rests reflecting. I was born and died many centuries ago, a millennium and
more, from these dream puffs I raise as once cooled bones with a sweater of
warm air above. My soul stirs uncomfortable in her present mode. Methinks she
wishes to be free of me but that kind of thing doesn’t happen every day. No one
can define life without being dead. The Living do not know what’s missing, and
truthfully it is not much.
Enough though, responds Foretoken. Be
well-spirited Merlyn.
Merlyn sits
up as stone rising from stone. Our grave is Earth. One of many semi-solid
cemeteries scattered within Encompassed Physics. To see multiple dimensions
with multiple universes within -- it breaks the concept. Methinks . . ..
Venerable
touches Foretoken with a notion – Shall we let Merlyn see what he cannot, a
soul’s shape in the nature of such things?
Foretokens
touch responds, To sit in the entirety of what is Nothing, without an Eternal Bliss,
is nothing.
Merlyn
mutters, how is it that wordlessness matters, wordlessness designs physics and
beyond.
**************
1642 hours. I have the construction material
for Dead 11.
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