F.A. MacNeil (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tocryabout) wrote2005-04-19 01:28 am
tocryabout) wrote2005-04-19 01:28 am
Navel-gazing with David Cronenberg and Julia Cameron
Julia Cameron's The Vein of Gold has always intrigued me because I like trying to find the common themes in disparate things. The main exercise is also very meme-like: list five of your favourite movies, and find the common thread. My current top 5 movies:
1. The Shape of Things
2. Black Robe
3. Garden State
4. Dead Ringers
5. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
1. This was a play before it was a movie, and it shows: lots of talk, lots of ideas. It deals with art and ethics, manipulation in relationships, how we delude ourselves over "love" and (basically) what we have a right to expect from others. It's a morality story centred on a grand betrayal, with many smaller betrayals lurking in the corners. The most terrible part, as people all observe when I show them this movie, is that the main character at the end has lost the person he once was, and the reminders of the betrayal will physically be with him forever.
2. I haven't seen this in years, so its themes aren't clear in my memory anymore, but what sticks with me are the images of the wilderness, and the sheer brutality of the northern winters. There is also something in there about maintaining yourself, your identity, and your culture even in terrible circumstances, where it would be easier to give in. Like The Shape of Things, it's a tragedy in which the loss is the loss of self, but here it is through loss of connection with the culture.
3. I felt guilty putting this on the list, but I really do love it. In particular, I love the beginning, where we meet the emotionally dead main character and watch him try to interact with a world that mostly isn't interested in getting through to him. I see the "loss/recovery of identity" thing at work again.
4. A weird movie that I used to be obsessed with, which always makes it onto lists for sentimental value. "David Cronenberg" and "sentimental value" don't usually go together, but hey. Obviously this is another one about threats to the integrity of the self, in the motif of Siamese twins and the terrible surgery scenes and the final, bizarre "separation" of the twins.
5. This one doesn't seem to fit this theme of "loss of identity" at all. I love this movie for its cavalier maltreatment of verisimilitude, its stylised Washington, its idealism, and the kindly presence of Jimmy Stewart. Like Garden State, though, it's about the invasion of love into a colder world, and it's about taking risks and not caving in to the pressure to live a pessimistic life.
So, I can't see any single unifying feature there. But there is isolation vs. connection, a belief in a moral order that must be carefully preserved (even Neil LaBute is fighting for that moral order, in his devil's advocate way), a strong sense of place...what else?
Thoughts? Can you see a Vein of Gold in your own top 5 movies?
1. The Shape of Things
2. Black Robe
3. Garden State
4. Dead Ringers
5. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
1. This was a play before it was a movie, and it shows: lots of talk, lots of ideas. It deals with art and ethics, manipulation in relationships, how we delude ourselves over "love" and (basically) what we have a right to expect from others. It's a morality story centred on a grand betrayal, with many smaller betrayals lurking in the corners. The most terrible part, as people all observe when I show them this movie, is that the main character at the end has lost the person he once was, and the reminders of the betrayal will physically be with him forever.
2. I haven't seen this in years, so its themes aren't clear in my memory anymore, but what sticks with me are the images of the wilderness, and the sheer brutality of the northern winters. There is also something in there about maintaining yourself, your identity, and your culture even in terrible circumstances, where it would be easier to give in. Like The Shape of Things, it's a tragedy in which the loss is the loss of self, but here it is through loss of connection with the culture.
3. I felt guilty putting this on the list, but I really do love it. In particular, I love the beginning, where we meet the emotionally dead main character and watch him try to interact with a world that mostly isn't interested in getting through to him. I see the "loss/recovery of identity" thing at work again.
4. A weird movie that I used to be obsessed with, which always makes it onto lists for sentimental value. "David Cronenberg" and "sentimental value" don't usually go together, but hey. Obviously this is another one about threats to the integrity of the self, in the motif of Siamese twins and the terrible surgery scenes and the final, bizarre "separation" of the twins.
5. This one doesn't seem to fit this theme of "loss of identity" at all. I love this movie for its cavalier maltreatment of verisimilitude, its stylised Washington, its idealism, and the kindly presence of Jimmy Stewart. Like Garden State, though, it's about the invasion of love into a colder world, and it's about taking risks and not caving in to the pressure to live a pessimistic life.
So, I can't see any single unifying feature there. But there is isolation vs. connection, a belief in a moral order that must be carefully preserved (even Neil LaBute is fighting for that moral order, in his devil's advocate way), a strong sense of place...what else?
Thoughts? Can you see a Vein of Gold in your own top 5 movies?