cinema k-hole

Stuck in suburban sleaze-odyssey, divining the grooviest low-rent splatter flicks like some crusty punk oracle slap on a Misfits album and drain a few brews as some fuzzy VHS rip of underground cinema unfolded before my eyes like an ever-shifting Rorschach test of D.I.Y. gore and no-budget ingenuity; these were the simple pleasures of the damned: a zine-making electric guitar-screaming poète maudit going nowhere fast, desperately trying to escape that particular ennui of the semi-industrial wasteland of the world by tuning-in and copping-out and watching that strange, beautiful cinema of trash auteurs. I was a teenage wasteoid, a seventeen year-old basket-case chock-full of sexual frustration, half-digested Nietzsche, creative angst, and a desire for the lurid and the demented. I was in my own little world, a German Expressionist funhouse converted into a grimy video store mainlining hardcore shows off a two-inch makeshift stage, and I was off on my own long, strange trip, sans psychedelics. If you were caught in that rare somnambulist mood, typically on a 2 A.M. Saturday morning a couple of drinks deep, then the fabric of reality would merge with the celluloid of film, creating an idiosyncratic, alternative vision that provided a unique gateway into one’s own psyche like some kind of grindhouse psychotherapy, a 42nd Street of the mind, an audio-visual lobotomy. And there was a strange, savage beauty, a barbaric surrealism that always came through on only the most low-budget films, the Shot-On-Video sick flicks that were made by three teenagers in the nineties with twenty bucks to make their vision come dead-alive, accidental innovations made through simply forging ahead and making use of whatever was at their disposal, whatever they could do, however they could film it, by kids who probably argued banal record-store banter like if the Iggy mix or the Bowie mix was better on The Stooges’ Raw Power (and the answer is the former, naturally). But sometimes the most interesting and brilliant visions come from a merging of high and low, the arthouse and the grindhouse, that come together not to make middlebrow art but something else entirely, a Hegelian synthesis that transcends both thesis and antithesis and brings about a new reality, experienced in that purest form of transmission, the movie theater.

Good art, for me, is that which is focused on form, on aesthetic, on guaranteeing that those who partake within the art are being told not what to see, but how to see. A good story means little to me if its prose doesn’t meet the criterion of its plot, or if the camera merely follows the characters it films. There must be a sense of cultivation, an understanding of perception, that we are being made to see thing outside of our normal periphery, and both the best and the worst films achieve this; to paraphrase from an old article tucked away within a spine-cracked and deathly-yellowed copy of a seventies Artforum issue, performance art is inherently alienating—it makes you notice the inherent artificiality of the medium, drawing your attention to the crackle of the fluorescents lighting the exhibition, of the space between the self and the performer, of everything that is distinctively outside of the performance, much like one of Bertolt Brecht’s plays lets you know that what your watching is a play through that same concept of verfremdungseffekt. The difference between good art and bad art is that the latter invokes it minimally unconsciously, while the former invokes it very consciously, and this principle can be furthered to knowing when to draw the perceiver in, and, so to speak, when to spit them out. A fantastic dialectic of sorts that illustrates this mastery comes in the form of David Lynch’s Inland Empire and Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, both of which I saw in theaters completely blind, which not only enhanced the shock of my experience but fully cemented that certain sublimity of horror, bringing my appreciation of both films to new heights that would not have been achieved if it weren’t for those necessary conditions.

Possession’s juxtaposition of the monolithic, almost suffocatingly brutalist rendition of Eastern Europe against the grotesque eroticism of what is perhaps one of the greatest and most infamous reveals in arthouse cinema provides a boring mundanity like the dulled rotation of a drill, piercing the skull with suppressed effect until it becomes like an ice-pick and breaks into the brain, achieving a most subversive and remarkable effect in its unholy switch that breaks the mind of the unsuspecting viewer in a trance of high strangeness, much as was my experience when I went to see the film. I spent the latter half of that film in supreme stupidity, at a loss for any cognitive thought, merely imbibing on the reel as it unspooled before my dumbstruck and broken eyes with baseline comprehension but a strange, heightened awareness of the vividness of the color, the grain of the film, the crispness of the sound design, the industrially-gothic beauty of the composition. I was unable to focus on anything but the film in its purest form, which provides a good counterpoint to the sturm-und-drang metatextual dissociation of Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Inland Empire is perhaps the best example I’ve seen of a film that is able to completely capture the dialectic of alienation and fixation, a metaphysically-violent piece of transgressive media which transgresses its own medium in the fact that it constantly leaps from its reels, throttling the viewer with bludgeoning sound design and continuous jumpscares that somehow, thanks to the well-documented genius of Lynch, goes far beyond standard horror convention and delivers something genuinely horrific. I was constantly caught between hypnotic trances and violent dissociation because of the peculiar fashion of filming, where protagonist and audience are both made the victim; character and viewer are one and the same without the use of P.O.V. shots, forming a completely different synthesis where no place is safe. It was the most unsettling piece of media I had ever witnessed, heightened by the sur-reality of being surrounded by strangers in a black box who seemingly didn’t respond to anything, despite the fact that I was constantly screaming and crying and shuddering throughout the movie, experiencing a forced mental breakdown through the maniacal deterioration of screen and life, thus completing a triptych of synthesis in a no- man’s-land of fictive reality. And if Possession can be defined by its stark, Soviet towers, then Empire similarly mirrors the filthy gutters of L.A. in its diseased mimesis, afflicted with an unknowable, incomprehensible, and uncompromising evil that haunts Hollywood, and which came to haunt the screen.

This is the cinema k-hole, the final experience of a film: being mind-melted by a movie and having your unconscious and the screen meld, becoming one and the same; the synthesis of self and strangeness.