cronenberg/kubrick movie dream

4 am. Just woke up from a disturving dream. I was in a film, the I dreamed the entire film from start to finish and was a character in it. Not a main character, just a participant, but the film was from my perspective. Can’t remember all of it but early scene involved being in a normal house for a cactus enthusiast group meeting. Bunch of average mostly ugly people there. Everyone showing their cactus, talking about them. An obese woman with a dog with a giant tree0like tumor growing out of their dog’s hip.

Later, scene in an apartment. in a city. Big place. Woman artist, shaved head, confident, confrontational, very sexual persona, hosting a party. says she is working on art piece. gives invitations to art show to select people. Then some announcement that art piece will not be occurring, and people start leaving/disappearing. Scared. Not sure wha tis happening.

Next scene I walk into another apartment some time later. I walk into one of the rooms and it is just a short hallway into the room with each side being a raised stage covered in women in bizarre, sexual body horror stuff. natural deformities, body modifications, tumors, sores, body covered in nipples, conjoined twin family of women and girls all dressed as 50’s flight attendants. All the women are the shaved head artist, it’s all gross, confrontational, bizarre,aggressively sexual, but I somehow feel safe here, like I know it’snot directed at me, that the artist is only expressing herself(s) with these pieces. Dream/film ends feeling unresolved (in a good way), I lie in bed ruminating on it, feel disturbed, grossed out.

I get up and write this all down because I know I’ll forget it otherwise and it’s too big and neat to let disappear into my mind. It’s like a comvination of Eyes Wide Shut and Cronenberg Sr’s Crimes of the Future. Slow paced, disturbing, aggressively sexual, body horror psychological thriller. amazed my sleeping brain just came up with that whole thing on its own.

dog with the tumor on its hip must have been a reference to stella. woman with nipples all over their body was like the person with ears all over thei rbody in crimes of the Future. Why does a brain take our memories, fuck with them, and play them back to us? . I’ve written this entirely with my eyes closed in an effort to remember each scene as clearly as possible which has ben difficult because it’s slowly receded/become foggy to my waking brain. Back to bed now.

***

Wow, that’s some impressive typing for having my eyes closed and being half asleep and trying to explain the weird dream I had. My description doesn’t do the dream justice but that’s normal, dreams often feel bigger than you can express. I hope when I read this in the future the visuals come back to me.

time vs you

In the last few years, I’ve become more acutely aware of how much time people have left to do things. A better way to put it is that I’m getting nervous about how little time we have to do things we love.

Example #1: as an avid MMA fan, I think about the window of viability that each fighter has. It’s quite short — they can’t compete at the highest levels of a bloodsport (and win) very far beyond the age of 35. By that time, the various injuries have caught up with them and they’re too crippled to win fights at the elite level. So 15 years is typically the maximum length of an MMA fighter’s career, and most are shorter than that at around 10 years since not everyone hops out of high school and says, “I want to fist fight for a living.” On top of that, when you consider how training, injuries, personal life, and the timing of booking fights against suitable opponents and how those opponents schedules play into it, those 10-15 years of viability are eaten up surprisingly quickly. It would be pretty terrifying to know you have such a short window to do what you love. If someone had told me at age 14, “you can only play music for the next 15 years and then you have to do something else,” that would have loomed over my head in a big way. I would have obsessed about that expiration date.

Example #2: Brandon Cronenberg is a film maker. Brandon made a fantastic film called Antiviral in 2012. Finally, in 2020, he released his second film, called Possessor. Brandon must have started getting serious about making movies when he was about 30, and now he’s 40 and he’s only made two flicks so far. There’s nothing wrong with only making a few movies over your film career — that’s definitely preferable to churning out a mountain of shitty ones — but I can’t help but feel like he must have other ideas and material he wants to explore but hasn’t been able to yet, who knows why, and that gives me vicarious anxiety for Cronenberg. 40 yrs old is halfway through your life, less if you get sick or die suddenly, and everyone slows down as they age too, so holy shit he needs to put his nose to the grindstone if he wants to make some more films in his lifetime.

I wonder if my anxiety about this kind of thing is a short-term thing that will disappear in a week, or if it will stick around and worsen as time goes on. I think it will probably be both. I think I’m going through a bit of a phase right now but I also think this is something that will pop up more and more as I inch closer and closer to death.

Incidentally, man oh man I wish we knew when we were going to die. If I knew I was going to get hit by a truck tomorrow and have my brains splattered across the road, I’d do a few things differently. Like lots more chips and cookies tonight, for starters.

the artistic validity of remakes/reboots

Holy toledo, I’ve had some time off work lately and it’s been fantastic. There is so much stuff I’d rather be doing than working, it’s incredibly rare that I’m ever bored. Yesterday I finished the stuff I wanted to do and still had much of the day left so I went and hung out with the animals in the yard for a while, which doesn’t sound like much but it’s actually very restorative. It’s nice to spend time with gentle, friendly creatures that appreciate some rubs and scratches. Then I noticed our “lawn” (I use the term loosely, it’s more a collection of rocks, potholes, and a wide variety of weeds) was getting out of hand so I brought Kup the Lawnmower out and tamed that shit. FYI for his fan club, Kup is doing just fine. His blade bearing made a little bit of noise but wasn’t too bad. I used to hate mowing the lawn because it reminded me of when my dad used to make me do it but after having my own lawn for about 12 years now, I finally feel like doing it for myself, and it’s actually pretty satisfying. Then I still had some time left before dinner so I *gasp* made a salad to go with it. It’s funny that I recently made that post about how much I hate cooking because I’ve actually been doing a little bit of it since then, just because I’ve had the time for it lately, and I haven’t minded it. I wonder what else I would enjoy more if I had more free time.

This is all just an extremely verbose way of saying that I’m really grateful to have the time to, along with all the things I just mentioned, blog in morning. I was just chatting with a friend about horror movie remakes and reboots, and I think I want to dive into that. I’m dang lucky to have the luxury to spend a lazy morning doing this.

I said to my friend that I was generally not a fan of remakes — of course there’s an occasional great one (like Cronenberg’s The Fly or Carpenter’s The Thing) but I think they tend to be artless cash grabs. There has been an absolute torrent of them in the last 15 years, and a lot of those are remakes of films that came out just a few years prior. When a flick seems like a real piece of shit that no one involved with feels passionately about, and when it’s an obscure horror film that isn’t likely to make as much as it cost to create, I can’t help but wonder what the point of that flick is — if it’s not for the money, and not for the art, why is anyone doing it? Busy work, adding (mediocre) credentials to resumes? That’s all I can think of.

Anyway, my friend replied that cinema is a business so they can’t find fault with the cash grab aspect, that they find remakes are as good or bad as the filmmaker makes it, and this applies to film adaptations of popular books too.

At first I thought my friend was right on all fronts but the more I’ve thought about it, the less I agree. All art involves business at some point but that doesn’t excuse all the disposable art of the world. If I had the choice between hanging something special and cool on my walls, or a soulless generic print of sunflowers I bought at Walmart for $7, it would only make sense to go with the former. Of course it can be argued that for some weird and rare dickheads, the $7 sunflower print speaks to them and they truly love it, but let’s remember that those people are the exception, that for 99.9% of people, the Walmart sunflower print is just something cheap and easy to fill wall space…just like shitty remakes of films that only came out five years prior are something cheap and easy to waste time with. And I have a problem with wasting time on garbage. Our time here is finite, I don’t want to spend it on junk that stinks.

I agree with my friend’s second point, that remakes and reboots are only as good or bad as the creator makes it. A remake can be awesome if the people behind it love it and are willing to put the work into it — this is not unique to remakes too, it applies to all films, and all art in general too. However, I’ve yet to see this occur with one of the immediate remakes I’m more or less condemning here.

As far as film adaptations of books go, I think that it’s a little different from remaking a film because books describe things but words are a lot less concrete and allow for broader interpretation — the reader uses those words to imagine the scene being described, whereas film gives the viewer the entire scene, as imagined by someone else. By virtue of translating from one medium to another, it’s inherent that some things will change in translation. I think that’s a good thing, it makes it more likely for the artist to make the film their own, to really put their personal stamp on it. I don’t mind films being remade decades apart because they are likely then to be different due to a variety of changes in fashion, technology, film trends, etc but these immediate remakes end up so similar to the original that they feel like a perfect exercise in redundancy to me.

I’m glad I thought this over. It can be easy sometimes to be swayed by someone else’s opinion but gosh doodle, if ya just give something a few minutes thought you sometimes realize that yup, you’re still the same stubborn self-important prick you’ve always been.

I grew up seeing the VHS box for this at the video store. I found the image scary but in a weird, inexplicable way — it wasn’t one of the ones I was drawn to, but the cover definitely made an impression on me. When I finally saw it as an adult, I was absolutely blown away. I couldn’t believe I had been missing out on it until that point. Ben thought the special effects were cheesy so I chopped him up and threw his remains in a ditch.

Toilet texting is the shits

I hate how glued to their phone everyone is these days, and what I especially loathe is hearing people fuck around on their phones while in the bathroom. At work, I often hear people sit down on the toilet, take a piss or shit…and then nothing. No toilet flushing, no sink running. Just silence. Then, muffled by the closed door yet still distinctly recognizable — “ding” — text received. Further silence. Eventually, another “ding.” 15 minutes later, my coworker emerges from their cavern of shame, face illuminated by the tiny fucking screen they’re still staring blankly at.

What is happening elsewhere in the world that is so important that my coworker couldn’t finish wiping their ass and wash their hands before fiddling with that infernal device? Did they really need to ‘like’ or reply with an emoji to whatever mindless drivel their friend sent them right then? Was it a time sensitive matter of the utmost importance?

I suppose this isn’t even close to the worst times that people insist on using their phones. I bet there are people who slack at work while playing on them, who use them at weddings and funerals, who miss their kid’s first steps because of them. Those are clearly more grievous examples of the addiction I think most people are gleefully prostrating themselves before but I guess I see the toilet example far more often, so that’s the one that got me started on this diatribe.

A secondary annoying aspect to this is that I am frequently hard pressed to elicit an email response from many people who I know are serial toilet texters. It seems that people are obsessed with keeping in touch, but only if it’s glib or can be summed up with a smiley face. You think that with the countless hours people spend on their phones each day, they might invest it in actually saying real things to people, in actually conversing, but I guess attention spans are too short for that these days.

I hope all cell phones mysteriously, spontaneously stop working and melt one day soon. I’d love to see people in withdrawals, crawling the streets in search of a two-second instagram hit. Meanwhile, I’d continue sending out emails to the void, wondering if there were any other survivors of the iphone apocalypse.

How many Cronenberg images have I used on here over the years? A lot, for sure. But they’re apt. Well, this one isn’t unless you’ve watched Videodrome.

Mandy, Beyond the Black Rainbow, and the hypocrisy of the reviews these films have garnered thus far

I loved Beyond the Black Rainbow, and this guy’s performance in particular.

In the last few weeks, I’ve seen two films made by Panos Cosmatos — Beyond the Black Rainbow, and Mandy. The former was widely panned by critics and has a low approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, while the latter has been lauded by critics and audiences alike.

Meanwhile, I’m baffled as to how these films could be received so differently when they are so similar to each other.

• Both films are set in 1983.
• Both are retro as all hell, a la Stranger Things, down to all kinds of wonderful details like the fashion and furniture of the time.
• Both films utilize a plodding, glacial pace.
• The dialogue in both films is delivered in a slow, dream-like way.
• Both films clock in at about 2 hrs.
• Both films tell simple fantasy stories (BtBR is about an evil doctor that imprisons a girl who has psychic powers, Mandy is about a guy seeking vengeance against some religious fanatics who killed his spouse, and their biker-demon henchmen) but tell them in ways and dress them up with interesting storytelling devices that make the films seem more complex.
• Both films are quite violent, and have scenes where sharp spikes are driven into some poor bastard’s mouth — Cosmatos seems to have a fascination with penetrating orifices with sharp things. I like it.
• Both films wear their influences on their sleeves, quite overtly: for example, the biker-demons in Mandy are clearly inspired by the Cenobytes from Hellraiser, while the “devil’s teardrop” knife from BtBR and Red’s axe from Mandy are clearly inspired by the films of Cronenberg. And of course, though less obvious to the layman, the slow pace and dream-like qualities of both films hearken to the films of both Lynch and Kubrick.
• Both films share a nod to 80’s metal: in BtBR, it’s the ‘heshers’ listening to Venom by a campfire; in Mandy, its the Motley Crue and Black Sabbath shirts she is usually seen wearing.

I think both films are fine (though I much prefer BtBR, most likely due to it leaning a bit more toward the sci-fi and horror genres) and very similar so I don’t understand why one was shat on while the other is celebrated. I bet it has everything to do with Cage being in Mandy, and all the sycophants pushing each other out of the way to eagerly suck a star’s dick.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: critics are fucking idiots. They are as biased as anyone else — nay, more so since they are paid to write their drivel and Hollywood hype machines don’t mind throwing a few coins at the monkeys when it’s to their advantage — so their opinions are actually less valid than yours or mine. Don’t pay any god damned attention to them. Just watch what you want to watch, and feel about it however you feel. You don’t need a fucking critic to tell you what moves you and what doesn’t.

I’m on a mission here.

i wish everything in life was constantly nightmarish

since i was a kid, i’ve been fascinated by things that disturb me. one of the earliest memories i have of this is catching a few snippets from the movie, dune. there is a scene where a guy has to put his hand in a mysterious box and it seems like something weird and awful is in the box and it’s going to hurt him, and another scene where a person is wearing a weird suit that looks like a cage of plexiglass and a bullet pierces the suit very slowly until it gets in, at which point it resumes normal speed and kills the person. both of those really stuck with me — i mean, here i am 30-odd years later, still yammering on about them.

the box that basically started it all

those examples (along with a bunch of other stuff that scared the hell out of me) basically set the tone for the rest of my life. as i’ve grown older and developed the means to search out freaky stuff on my own, i’ve found more of it, and in varying forms — music, film, visual art, words, abstract feelings. and at a certain point, i realized that the things i find most intriguing aren’t strictly gory or violent or typical slasher movie fodder. the things that really mesmerize me are things that are nightmarish. that is the key quality i seek.

what qualities make something nightmarish, you ask?

• sinister overtones in otherwise normal situations
• twisted, deformed versions of familiar things
• things that a) don’t make sense and b) inspire fear

i think it was the movie jacob’s ladder that finally illuminated this nightmare fascination thing to me. i saw it several years ago, loved it, and thought about it a lot afterwards. i thought about how it was scary as all hell but wasn’t really a horror movie. there wasn’t a demented killer or a demon or any of the usual horror trappings. it was more that the main character was experiencing weird, scary stuff and it was hard to tell what was real and what wasn’t. while ruminating on this, i had an epiphany where i realized that the film legitimately felt like a nightmare to me — PINGGGG — and then i thought about a lot of my other favourite things in this world, and started seeing the nightmarish qualities in those things too: lost highway, possession (1982), the shining, eyes wide shut, 2001: a space odyssey, antichrist, under the skin. virtually anything by cronenberg. akercocke, voices, faust (1994), too dark park, the process, the exorcist, and bosch, for example.

perfect example. can’t say why this is disturbing but it is. and i love it.

i’m not sure why i’m drawn to nightmarish stuff. my best guess is that i was a wimp as a kid and things like dune just set off some electrical pathway in my brain that has liked to be stimulated ever since. i think that’s a bland, cop-out explanation and i hope there’s a better reason but i can’t think of one. all i know is that i like the blurred line between what’s real and what isn’t, i like not understanding what’s going on, and i like the fear.

i like it so much, i want it to be present in my life whenever possible — like a shadow that i can sense is near, or catch a fleeting glimpse of. i learned this when jenn and i went on a summer road trip that was lovely fun but tinged with a weird darkness due to the fact i was reading faust by robert nye on the same trip. i only realized long afterward why even the warmest memories of that vacation had a vague portentous tone to them, and why other vacations where i had neglected to bring some good, dark art with me felt more one-dimensional, less compelling. since then, i’ve made a point to bring some kind of satanic literature with me to help spice things up, to help cast a dark cloud over the summer fun, and it’s worked wonderfully.

i can only hope that when i die, i’m plunged into an eternity of hellish experiences, like a scene from hellraiser. only then will i surely have my fill of nightmares.

more annoying dream stories

jenn hates to hear about my dreams so here’s another one for the blog.

this morning i had a crazy nightmare. i don’t remember how it started but i remember being with two petite, very sexy women when i realized it was a lucid dream. i was like, “wicked,” and started having a threesome with them, basically just having them do typically sexy stuff. it was fantastic.

but all of a sudden, when i was mentally directing one to squeeze her beautiful, naked small breasts, something changed and she looked directly at me with a cold, robot-like stare and asked me where i was. it was an odd and unsettling question. i had a vague understanding that this was her way of saying, “i realize the you that is here is just an avatar and i don’t like your game. i want a meeting with the mind that is behind this facade.”

her eye contact was strange too. it wasn’t just her looking at me in the dream, it was like she was breaking the 4th wall of my dream and staring straight into my mind — she had figured out the situation and was looking behind the curtain at the puppet master. that was the most frightening part. she wasn’t fiery or angry but she was terrifyingly blank, just solely focused achieving her goal of taking control of the situation by any means necessary.

i was very scared by all of this. i was scared for my mind because it felt like some alien presence that i had created now wanted to put a hand mixer to my brain and completely destroy the thing that was enslaving her. i had never experienced any sort of mutiny of my dream subjects before, and here was such an intent one. and after things started so well, jeez.

around this time i heard some kind of a buzzing sound, which i assumed was my cell phone in the waking world. i had left it next to the bed, but i wasn’t sure if that was part of the dream or reality, and i didn’t like being unsure of something else on top of the mess i was already in.

i was surprised and scared by the woman’s rebellion but quickly remembered this was my dream and i could direct it to go any way i wanted. i decided to teach this insubordinate automaton a lesson and attempted to rend her and the other girl to ribbons of meat but was surprised once again when they refused to go quietly, fighting against my mental attack. instead of basically vaporizing like i wanted, they became a howling, twisting, amorphous mass of churning flesh that was struggling to retain their original shapes and compositions. they looked like something out of a cronenberg movie. i was alarmed less by the disgusting visual and more that despite the fact i wanted them gone, they were strong enough to resist me at all. i felt pain in my right foot at this point around and realized they were attempting to do the same thing to me as i was doing to them. i worried, “is this still just the dream? if they defeat me, do i just wake up like normal or will i lose my mind forever and become a vegetable?”

then without explanation, it was all over and i found myself in a peaceful black limbo. it seemed that i won the battle. how anticlimactic, i know, but that’s how it went. anyway, i contemplated what had just happened and was still uneasy about it. i decided to do something fun to lighten my mood, and wound up riding gently down a kind of slip n’ slide on my stomach through a lavish sci-fi pleasure dome resort that was full of pastel pink and blue lights. the night sky was littered with stars. i was still too bothered by the preceding events to fully enjoy the slip n’ slide fun and weird surroundings but it was amazing nonetheless.

i woke up from the dream, thought, “whoah, that was crazy. i need to remember this and write it down,” hence this post. then i remembered the buzzing sound from my dream. i checked my phone and sure enough, it had vibrated when i received a text message 10 minutes before i woke up. it turned out i was too late to join my friend michael for a dog walk but man, what a dream i had instead. it was like my own personal blade runner nightmare.

i like my mind.

uuuggghhh. since i was a kid, this album cover has really bothered me but it seems to fit here.

plant face

i’ve had a few disturbing dreams lately. a couple days ago, i dreamed i was in a fancy, almost futuristic bathroom looking in the mirror. my face had all kinds of weeds growing out of it, like little blades of grass, thistles, dandelions. i was bewildered and horrified. in the dream, i figured either my pores were huge and full of dirt, or i was super, super filthy and had a thick layer of dirt on my face, or that my face was actually made of dirt. regardless, i didn’t like the stuff growing there so i started weeding my face. when i pulled stuff out it left gaping holes where the roots had been, and i was further disgusted by this.

this was deep in my face.

that was the end of it. i woke up and felt like i had just watched a good cronenberg film and was all fucked up from the gross body horror.

then today, i dreamed that a few normally friendly farm animals were fighting. i think it was an alpaca and a little goat but they were out for each others blood. it seemed like some sign of disharmony, of impending chaos, like when the light was orange and pink from the nearby forest fires this summer. anyway, then i saw a bunch of people with hands for feet and vice versa. it doesn’t sound too crazy but if you actually picture what that looks like when they use their hands to walk around and feet to write and carry stuff, it’s very strange. i woke up feeling not as grossed out as i did by the weed face thing, but very unsettled nonetheless. there was something very strange and ‘not right’ about it. i didn’t like it.

i told dana about the weed dream yesterday. he half joked that there might be some deeper meaning to it, like not liking something about myself, or feeling like i have some parasite attached to me that will be unpleasant to rid myself of. i don’t think i buy any of that though, i think brains just kind of go to town when it comes to dreams. sometimes they can feel powerful or meaningful but usually i don’t think they mean much.

man, that videodrome gif is disgusting. cronenberg has a real knack, wow. it’s pretty cool that he received the order of canada. it’s like even though his specialty isn’t classical music or schindler’s list — even though his specialty is strange nightmare gore — even classy types acknowledge that he does it really fucking good.

why burning people?

this is weird. i’ve always liked this pic…

…because it is grotesque and uncomfortable. that twisted, charred thing in the casket is the remains of russian cosmonaut vladimir komarov. he was burnt alive when the parachute on his space capsule failed to deploy on re-entry to earth. the capsule got hotter and hotter as it re-entered earth’s atmosphere but it’s presumed he was actually cooked to his final state when the capsule hit the earth. that’s a long time to cook, and i imagine a good chunk of that thing there is melted debris from his craft, making it some kind of a cronenberg-esque part man, part machine corpse. there are recordings of his final transmissions as he plummeted towards his death where komarov can be heard cursing the people who put him in such a botched, piece of shit space ship. what a horrific event.

i’ve also always loved this pic, it’s probably my fave ever:

it’s obviously super famous, perhaps most recognized by my generation due to rage against the machine using a pic from the same incident on the cover of their self-titled first album. the guy burning is a monk named Thích Quảng Đức who burnt himself alive in protest against the south vietnamese government’s persecution of buddhists. Đức simply sat down in the middle of a busy intersection, had another monk pour gasoline over him, and then struck a match and lit himself on fire. he sat still and burned to death peacefully.

the political story behind this is important but that’s not what impacts me. what impacts me is the incredible display of the potential of the human mind. this man was able to focus himself so sharply so as to peacefully sit through possibly the most agonizingly painful death possible. that’s incredible. i think it’s a definitive exhibition of the almost supernatural mental abilities we all probably have deep within us. it says to me, “there is a vast untapped power inside you,” and that hits me in the guts. it’s beautiful.

now, i noticed immediately that both pics are of burnt/burning people, and i thought that was odd. i thought, “i don’t think i have a ‘thing’ about burning people.” but then i remembered that i have also followed the story of jacqueline saburido consistently for about 15 years.

in 1999, jacqueline was in a car with friends when they were hit by a drunk driver. two of her friends were killed instantly and two escaped with minor injuries but jacqueline was trapped in the car as it burned. she survived but with 2nd and 3rd degree burns to over 60% of her body. her life since has been surgeries, depression, physical pain, and public speaking about the dangers of drunk driving. often when i feel really sorry for myself and the stupid little problems i have to contend with, i think of jacqueline. i’d love to reach out to her. if anyone is savvy enough to find an email address for her, send it my way.

so that’s three things involving burning people that have seriously affected me over the years. i wonder if that’s a coincidence or if there’s something about burning that i’m unaware of that resonates with me. i never thought about it till now. i think it’s weird.