Hello darling, just a quick post for tonight. I'm back from Rhinebeck, where I caught the screening of a powerful, exquisitely well-made film on a very difficult subject, I'm still digesting it. I recommend it highly, but it is excruciating to watch at times; ravishing, aesthetically, in moments, utterly abject in others. I feel completely even-keeled having viewed it, yet at the same time my mind is spinning a bit, because the main character reminds me of someone (though he is not quite as extreme, I am sure), and of my own situation, since I suddenly - or, rather, recently - find myself answering selected CL ads...

there was a curious scene in the film where the character jokes that he's got a vestige of Neanderthal in him - a metaphoric suggestion (as I took it) to account for his particular compartmentalized outsider status

it was curious to me that that was mentioned, because it made me wonder not so much if the Neanderthal was in him - as completely absent

I suppose I'm thinking master/emissary themes again, left-brain/right-brain,
but more than that, also --- that whole idea (for example) of NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) or even forms of sociopathy (the garden variety everyday forms we all of us encounter every day, I mean)

it just made me wonder -- perhaps not entirely literally, or scientifically -- but perhaps so (but who could know?)
that the film depicted a type of human male, who has evolved for whatever reasons to be the way he is
I don't know if it's a comment on the "species"
or if the "species" is so monolithic --
if one follows Darwin, then there would be local adaptations
which makes the idea of 'global spread of humans' quite scary indeed --
if this is the form -- triumphalist, amoral, emotionally detached (though prone to hairtrigger bursts of feral rage), highly sexed -- they are to take

I am posting this mess of a post as is, darling
simply to get downstairs
where I should most certainly check in for real
a delicious aroma of multigrain pilaf is wafting up the stairs - not
cooked by me

the film is called Shame
I'm not sure I agree with the title -- too moralistic
to me it was like a scary scifi tale
except that a lot of us are in it
or brushed up against it

***
film images:
Michael Fassbender, Shame, (U.K., 2011), dir. by Steve McQueen

Ewan McGregor, The Ghost Writer, (France, Germany, U.K., 2010), dir. by Roman Polanski