The very end of Ran, where the blind boy is playing the flute while standing on a precipice is my favorite bit of movie ever.

Saw Kurosawa's The Lower Depths a couple nights ago. It's maybe nothing original but it's the most blunt, fundamental presentation I can recall. So starkly laid out. The Predicament. How to cope with this life. Sad to know after all those good films he tried to kill himself, slashing his wrists more than 30 times just because he couldn't get funding for movies after already making so many masterpieces. The miracle was that he ever got to make movies in the first place that were so cerebral and dark. Wonder if WWII had something to do with it...

Also watched Gilliam's 12 Monkeys again. Rewatching a lot of old movies on netflix that are free and instantly available online. Sort of a memory test. Who was I back then? Howard the Duck was interesting in trying to remember who I once was. Awful, absurd movie that I still liked. And I remembered why as I watched it.

Gilliam's 12 Monkeys is a lot more like Brazil than I remembered. The time travel thing, watching his own death, is just too gimmicky though.

I've tendency to misremember my intelligence when younger in the sense of thinking myself dumber back then then I actually was. My main 'lack' back then was actually just having too much hope in me. Being too optimistic. Thinking there might be a way forward. A point in trying.

..on a subconscious level I was wishing for death the other night. Was thinking about how people slowly kill themselves, not just with alcohol or illegal drugs, but even with junk food. Or for that matter by destroying relationships, perhaps. All not necessarily with even realizing just what they're doing. In a sense in the face of the typical obese flat affected hospital patient I'm seeing a nihilist who's been slowly killing themselves for years.

(Not that it's entirely all that bad. There's two levels. There is the one where indeed it's that bad. Where, indeed, there is no hope at all. That humans are awful, disgusting creatures. Where the number that break through, the true revolutionaries, the ons who manage to show compassion, concern, friendliness to people outside their family or prospective family are so rare and so setting themselves up for pain that one anymore wishes them to just not even be that way....etc.

But then there's the mere survival, moment to moment life. Where there's some security, some jokes, decent health. And hardly any hurry anyway. It's all a short blink anyway.)

I've been looking forward to death for at least a few years now. The feeling though has definitely increased, recalling back to a poem someone read a few years ago. Since then still more negative information has been uncovered.

It all worries me. I'm afraid I'll have a moment one of these days, where I suddenly feel too 'artistic' and I slash my wrists 30 times. Try to remind myself there's hardly any hurry. And my health's good. I can go jogging for a bit yet before my joints give out. My wife is very very nice. My parents are too. And I have some slight association with a couple beautiful people, to the slight extent they're not locked into barbaric social norms. Anyway there's no hurry and nowhere to go anyway.

Try to withhold honesty on the topic of suicide because I know of quite a few on the political left who have been 'suicided'. Steve Kangas comes to mind. Getting Jack Daniels forced down his throat in a bathroom while he bled to death from the hole in his head. Or perhaps Gary Webb. I surely don't matter at all though and have nothing to worry about there.

No. It's just interesting that my subconscious is thinking about such things. While my conscious has almost completely ignored such questions. Or I should say my conscious has only thought of such things theoretically and generally, but not personally. At least in the last 18 years. Consciously I don't go around thinking about killing myself. If it were to happen it would very sudden. Which is what worries me.... Sometimes I'm driving and it just pops into my head how wonderful it would be if I just suddenly jerk the steering wheel...

What to do?

Remember there's no hurry I guess. And not bother stressing too much during chop chop times.

(Extreme spoiler to The Marriage of Maria Braun:)
"while Maria, when she finds out the profound extent to which she – self-proclaimed "Mata Hari of the Economic Miracle" – has been not only outfoxed but regarded as nothing more than a sexual commodity duplicitously exchanged between Hermann and Oswald, takes revenge – or is it justice? – into her own hands. Maria's explosive end, in Fassbinder's universe, is no less ironic, and horrible, than Mildred's."


So that's what the ending meant. Creating one's own destiny. And not being subservient to any man.

And then you go and kill yourself when you realize how nice people have been trying to be to you.

The negatives of militant feminism.

Of course they didn't think of her as a sexual commodity at all. And he only kept quiet for her sake, as she was so intent on hiding the truth from him, thinking it would devastate him when actually he was OK with it.

This prewar Visconti sounds interesting.

What are the big idea stories I've really liked?

Fellini's Satryicon. What it symbolized for me I know not at all if that's what he was going for. Maybe the same idea could more or less be potentially drawn from endless movies. To me it symbolized all the endless (wonderful) people that have lived and died such lives that I'll never ever know. Of whom no meaningful trace is left.

It sears my soul somehow this movie. It is for me the best movie of all. The music and images are crucial. Much of it, the crucial symbolic stuff, is beyond my conscious mind. And perhaps I'd rather it stay that way.... Nah. But for now it is.

Kurosawa and Dosteovsky's The Idiot is such an important concept to me, yet is paid virtually no attention to in modern society. I think because people just aren't honest basically. Everyone hides how being good leaves them open to be hurt. Like most of the blogs I've got linked (with a few exceptions) people hide almost all their weaknesses.

And so many of these good people are tied into minority activist causes (I think) and I really suspect activists feel the need to be kind of fake. They feel like they're always on display as a representative of whatever activist cause they're associated with and thus must hide any 'weaknesses' lest that weakness be used against them in some attack by the conformists. And so The Idiot concept is all around us and yet something of a secret.

I think? Ultimately who knows for sure what all these people are hiding. I'm pretty sure they're hiding so much though and it annoys me. It is against truth seeking. Although, it means they're not as big of Idiots.

Panglossianism. Voltaire's Candide tried to show it. Anyone else? It is the most crucial concept in politics, yet it seems to rarely be mentioned. Would I be attacked as preachy and polemical if I tried to write a story primarily dealing with this concept? Probably. Was Voltaire being preachy? Would Candide even have gotten published today?

I love how over the top Kurosawa's Ran is. I would like to see that same feeling reached but concerning social actions reminiscent of the most awful of Milan Kundera's stories. Surely someone else has managed it but no one comes to mind at the moment. ...I think of Monty Python's The Search for the Holy Grail where he gets the "what's your favorite color?" question wrong. A world where humans are utterly hopeless to the point where they aren't capable of telling the truth about anything. They can't do anything honest. Everything is an act. And behind the act there is nothing at all.

I appreciate how Kubrick didn't use the same actors over and over again unlike most of the other best directors. Also he was more consistently very good, excluding his last film which unfortunately starred two miscast truly ugly human beings. It's only chance was by making them clearly evil, which it didn't. Kubrick didn't strike me as being as ambitious though. He didn't get crazy like Fellini. He didn't go for the big, cerebral ideas quite like Kurosawa.

Tim Burton was lucky/smart enough to latch on to Richard Elfman of Oingo Boingo to do the music to his movies. Although he's a long way short of the others mentioned....

Terry Gilliam did some nice things. Brazil was a nice little dystopia. The ending of that movie reminds me strangely of the bizarre happy ending to Jack Vance's Emphyrio. I'm sure Vance was given orders by his publishers to cut it short and make it happy. And it seems he purposely made it ridiculous. Which works in a way, if you're thinking abnormally hard. Because there won't actually ever be any socialist utopia.

...or it's unlikely anyway. Still should move forward somehow.