[Editor's note: This is an excerpt from a 1993 conversation on ECHO, the New York City virtual community. This conversation was about a different Quentin Tarrantino film, Reservoir Dogs, but the issues are the same. "Miss Outer Boro 1991" is me. --Marisa Bowe, Word editor]
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406:36) S. Berg 23-JUL-93 12:38 ...this has been on my mind since seeing Nick Cave read last night in CentralPark. He read a scene from his book, in which the narrator's father kills the mother by smashing her face against a wall. She was drinking a bottle of hooch at the time. There is a graphic description of how the bottle cracked the mother's jaws apart, was rammed down her throat and came out the back of her head. It was violent and slightly disgusting. The distressing thing about it was that people in the audience were LAUGHING. The same thing happened when I saw RESERVOIR DOGS, during the ear scene. People laughed. Is it now rebellious and hip to laugh at human tragedy? Or is it just that those who laughed are so far removed from reality that they don't realize that shit like this really happens to people? I think too many people feel obligated to have such a reaction because they think that's what expected of them. - - - - - 406:37) jneil 23-JUL-93 12:43 If it had really happened and everyone had laughed that would be different. - - - - - 406:38) S. Berg 23-JUL-93 12:46 My point is that stuff like that DOES happen. - - - - - 406:39) The Strange Apparatus 23-JUL-93 12:53 having not been there, I can only speculate the laughter was a nervous defense reaction. - - - - - 406:40) S. Berg 23-JUL-93 12:54 Nope. The guy next to me seemed genuinely amused. - - - - - 406:41) 2low40 23-JUL-93 12:55 some people laugh or giggle when they are nervous or uncomfortable, i notice this a lot during movies like "menace II society"... - - - - - 406:42) S. Berg 23-JUL-93 12:59 I can understand that reaction to RESERVOIR DOGS. But Nick Cave fans, who like to think they are living in the Apocalypse, seemed amused because of the violence. Not disturbed; amused. - - - - - 406:43) Miss Outer Boro 1991 23-JUL-93 14:19 I think perhaps you're misreading the meaning of both the violent artistic gestures and the audience reaction. We all know horrific, incomprehensible, and meaningless violence has become, against our will, an everyday occurrence. These artists are "riffing" on the topic - working with material that's in everyone's brain. It's sort of a "discourse on violence," if you will. It shouldn't be read in a totally literal way. In some ways I think it's an attempt to emotionally master a horrible reality. Just like the artists I was talking about--I think in Am Myth--whose art is about nature, only it's so horrific and ugly and ironic, it's about the real state of nature today, which, if you face reality, is incredibly bad. Irony as the postmodern evolution of Edmund Burke's "sublime" (which, in that use of it, does not mean the bland "terrific" it means in ordinary conversation). - - - - - 406:44) Miss Outer Boro 1991 23-JUL-93 14:21 One more thought -- I think this stuff is also a rebellion against the false, saccharine sentimentality--the Big Lie--of mainstream commercial culture. - - - - - 406:45) S. Berg 23-JUL-93 14:25 Emotionally master horrific violence by laughing at it? I don't know about that. And I'm not saying the artist was laughing at it. It's evident that Mr. Cave's writing was an attempt to deal with such sickness. I think, though, that laughing at violence is another kind of sickness. OK, fine, it's JUST a book or JUST a movie. But, I repeat, that stuff happens. What does it say about us when we respond without horror to such things in the real world? - - - - - 406:46) Miss Outer Boro 1991 23-JUL-93 14:28 Just because people are laughing doesn't mean they react without horror. And--I think you're right, I do think the laughing is, in some sense, sick. But--is it possible to be aware of reality today and NOT be sick? I mean, how are you supposed to cope? I think in many ways "laughter is the best medicine"- - - - - 406:47) Miss Outer Boro 1991 23-JUL-93 14:29 Also, what GOOD does our "horror" do? What good does the "right" emotional or intellectual reaction do? - - - - - 406:48) S. Berg 23-JUL-93 14:31 It stops you from dehumanizing the victims of such things. It causes you to realize that if circumstances were different, the same things could happen to you. It brings you back down to earth by making sure you're aware of the fact that your life and your good fortune are perhaps mere acts of chance. - - - - - 406:49) Miss Outer Boro 1991 23-JUL-93 14:32 And what good does that do? Perhaps it's better to have art that toughens us for the toughness of the world. We can all be like one big Israeli army. - - - - - 406:50) S. Berg 23-JUL-93 14:46 MOB, that's exactly what I meant. By seeing things as they are (facing violence in all its horror, etc.) you become tough. I know someone who was raped when she was 12 years old. Rape scenes in movies make her physically ill--there's no way she could LAUGH at such a thing because she knows it happens. Seeing it happen in a movie or reading about it in a book remind her of how horrible it was. It toughens her resolve never to let such a thing happen again. It also forces her to realize that despite her best efforts it could happen again. Such a reaction is called living in the real world. - - - - - 406:51) Miss Outer Boro 1991 23-JUL-93 14:49 Well what are we who have not experienced every form of violence supposed to do? Go out and get raped or mugged or beaten so we can live in the real world? I'm not *advocating* that ironic violence we're talking about, I just always think it's more interesting to see where a widespread thing like that comes from, rather than just say they "shouldn't" do it. I mean, they're already DOING it, so I'd like to know what it means and how it functions as communication. - - - - - 406:52) S. Berg 23-JUL-93 14:58 One needn't experience such violence to realize that it's out there. And I'm not saying such art shouldn't be produced. It's valuable and important and needed. As I posted earlier (in the poem everyone probably control C-ed past): Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned... This has happened; that's what such art is a reaction to and an expression of. - - - - - 406:54) Miss Outer Boro 1991 23-JUL-93 18:21 Oh I thought that was in ref. to my apartment. - - - - - 406:55) Jonathan Hayes 23-JUL-93 18:23 Reacting to "art", whether a passage from a Nick Cave book or a violent scene from a movie, have little to do with real experience. "Living in the real world". I don't for a second believe that those people thought that killing a woman with a bottle is a funny thing. I believe that they know subconsciously that sitting in Central Park with an audience of their peers and listening to Nick Cave read a violent passage from his book should appropriately be responded to by laughing. On the other hand, I have seen horrible and cruel things, and have heard people make the harshest and most repellent jokes about them. It most certainly IS one way people have of dealing with horror - make it a joke. Demote it in the hierarchy of reality. Neuter its shock by denying its meaning. It is a perfectly natural thing. Were we to respond with the sort of gentility you seem to expect (or at least whose loss you seem to bemoan), we would be poorly equipped indeed to live in this world. We would be forced to lie in bed, refugees from reality, living on delivery pizza and Barney the Dinosaur. - - - - - 406:56) Marianne (MRPetit) 24-JUL-93 10:32 I am reminded of a video/performance piece I went to last year. They used lots of *reality* footage: horrific deaths, individuals as they were about to die, etc. etc. etc. I hated it. Felt it was really exploitative and manipulative. A friend with us, in reality a very gentle and non-violent individual, laughed and laughed and laughed. And his critique at the end: "Heh, really dug that *faces of death* stuff". He loathes violence on all levels, but had that reaction. - - - - - 406:58) rubberneker 25-JUL-93 22:32 I would say that the majority of people laughing at the ear-removal scene in Reservoir Dogs would be doing so - as Strange A. and 2low40 point out - out of nervousness. However, (speaking from personal experience) some movie scenes are so beyond the realm of my everyday experience that they are absurd and funny. Similar to Marianne's friend, I really dislike violence. To me, seeing people methodically tormenting others is so bizarre and senseless that it is funny (horrible, but funny). Just to put your minds at ease, I don't seek out gore movies to laugh it up. I still cringe at the violence. - - - - 406:59) Marianne (MRPetit) 26-JUL-93 9:23 Agree. Tho' the thing with gore movies (am thinking in particular of Herschell Gordon Lewis films , the violence is a: so outlandish, b: so cheezy that it does set the viewer up for shrieks of laughter. Yes, it is a matter of nerves, but it also sets up an audience dynamic. They're very cathartic in many respects. Spend a few hours with a room full of people going "eeeeeeew (squeal, shriek, giggle, etc.)", and you are spent. - - - - - 406:60) Miss Outer Boro 1991 26-JUL-93 17:15 I was thinking today that the high art world of galleries and glossy magazines represents today's equivalent of "the academy," and the apocalypsers are the real avant-garde. And if there IS a future, historians will judge them as such. Even though the official artists are, many of them, basing their work on what they consider Marxist theory, it's an institutionalized avant-garde, Marxism as a parlor pet. - - - - - 406:61) The Lonesome Drifter 26-JUL-93 18:56 Funny, Marianne, I was one of those people laffin' at the ear scene in RESERVOIR DOGS--and it was out of nervousness at first, then actually out of shocked glee when he (SPOILER ALERT) *talked* into the ear, then gave a little chuckle at his own wit--but I just find Herschell Gordon Lewis movies revolting. Or similarly, TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE is one of my favorite movies, but most other "slasher" movies I've seen just make me feel dirty and angry. I don't have any way of accounting for this without resorting to tired old explanations about "moral seriousness" or things of that ilk, which I find kind of revolting in its own way. - - - - - 406:62) Miss Outer Boro 1991 26-JUL-93 20:15 I still think my phrase "Marxism as a parlor pet" is cool. - - - - - 406:63) Neandergal 31-JUL-93 11:03 I'm interested in Jaze's statement that the Young People knew it was appropriate to laugh at Nick Cave's violent passage --whereas I can't imagine that the Older People would laugh at a reading of say, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men - or Norman Mailer - or, who else?- you know what I mean? Does Nick Cave's violent description have an ironic ring to it that the audience was responding to? a self-awareness, a consciousness that this didn't really happen? (whereas older writers are more "verite" in style)? - - - - - 406:64) Miss Outer Boro 1991 31-JUL-93 11:15 I think Neander has her finger on the button here, to mix metaphors. I think irony is kind of the base currency of contemporary culture, postmodern or X-generation culture. SPY wrote about this in a disparaging way a few years ago, but I think it's interesting. - - - - - 406:65) Perpetual Dawn 31-JUL-93 14:40 I agree--it seems to me that everything nowadays is ironic. At least around here (NYC, I mean--but also Echo). This was definitely not the case 20 years ago. - - - - - 406:66) Loud Zoo 31-JUL-93 15:53 Irony is a defense mechanism and NY is a jungle. Imagine if you took every ad you read literally. - - - - - 406:67) Miss Outer Boro 1991 31-JUL-93 16:42 I think it's often a point of contention between X-generation and Baby Boomer people. The boomers think Xers are shallow because they're ironic. The Xers think the Boomers are irritatingly naive and literal-minded, and that their insistence on earnest moral pronunciations actually shows a moral shallowness. But I guess this is the wrong item for this. Though it does relate to apocalypse culture tangentially. My brother and I were talking about Eraserhead today. Could this fit in any definition of apocalypse culture? Could Blue Velvet? Twin Peaks? - - - - - 406:68) Gerry Jonas 31-JUL-93 18:02 Nothing chills me more than audiences laughing at "well shot" "well scripted" "well done" murders etc. Nothing, I believe, so desensitizes. Can there possibly be no connection between this phenomenon (which is new in my experience) and the casual murders in our cities? - - - - - 406:69) Perpetual Dawn 31-JUL-93 18:20 I think so, Gerry. - - - - - 406:70) brett de facto 01-AUG-93 1:00 Irony distances. An overabundance of irony is the result (or concomitant?) of an insufficiency of commitment. Of FEELING, or the willingness to feel. The willingness to experience pain, willingness to even RISK experiencing pain - - - - - 406:71) Miss Outer Boro 1991 01-AUG-93 1:33 It could just as easily be a desire not to cheapen or corrupt one's true feelings by making a public display of them, Brett. - - - - - 406:72) marlowe 01-AUG-93 3:12 I think it is amazing that a society so incredibly self-centered is also so incredibly unable to deal with their emotions. Often, I do laugh at some sick things but having worked with students, I find that the laughter at violence tends to stem from an unwillingness to deal with pain. It is a sublimation, an avoidance, a way of not dealing with what someone has just seen. The real SICK part of this is when a society becomes so numb that we regularly laugh at violence, it becomes easier to inflict pain on each other. We become numb to hurting others and hurting ourselves. We get lost in a sea of denial....and we just make believe that something did not happen. We ignore violence, pain, wrong-doing and evil...until finally we are a society without any safety. How many of us make believe that something did not happen as a method of dealing with pain? - - - - - 406:73) Miss Outer Boro 1991 01-AUG-93 9:56 But which came first, the chicken or the egg? Escalating violence, or numbness? - - - - - 406:74) T-girl 01-AUG-93 10:08 Repeated acts of violence cause one to become numb. Then it either spirals up or down from there. I was also thinking the other day how a Consumer Culture has an effect on all of this too -- that is, seems that we're more concerned with Getting & Having things than we are with people and our relationships to them, our responsibilities for others. - - - - - 406:75) T-girl 01-AUG-93 10:14 so ... let's see ... cutting/piercing the body -- either a reflection of the lack of importance of the Body/Person/Spirit -- or a crying out ... I Am A Human Being (and to prove it I'll show you my red blood?) please don't laugh at my misguided musings. ha. - - - - - 406:76) Miss Outer Boro 1991 01-AUG-93 10:14 Often you count more on your things than you can on other people. This is just the way society has evolved. People always move, get promoted, lose their jobs, change friends, become drug addicts, etc. Things just stay where they are unless YOU move them. - - - - - 406:77) The Lonesome Drifter 01-AUG-93 11:06 LONG POST AHEAD I don't know what Apocalypse Culture means exactly--I even have the book, but I can't draw a very secure circle around all of the topics it raises, except that generally they are all on the fringes of "reason." But I feel like I had an encounter with it the other day. A friend is moving away from New York, and we were asked by the host of her going-away party to bring her, as a gift, a "little piece of New York" to remember the Greatest Little Burg in the World by. In search of a gift with the proper 'tude, I descended into the bacterio-palimpsestual crotch of Manhattan, the Times Square area, figuring I could find a NEW YORK--WHERE THE WEAK ARE KILLED AND EATEN T-shirt, or something of that nature. (Has anyone been there recently? The Deuce has been turned into a big artwork/pomo environment/urban detritus theme park, with Jenny Holzer slogans on the marquees and the closed peep-shows' facades altered by various artists, etc. etc.--it's something to see) I found a jokes/novelties/souvenir store right next to Show World, called the Fun Emporium. All joke shops exude a sleazily manic-depressive atmosphere of course, but this one is creepier than most: the rubber molds of screaming severed heads, miniature toilet bowls overflowing with realistic shit-log replicas, and strap-ons made to look like a hacked-up cow bone in place of a penis are, I'm sure, mainly sold at Halloween, and yet the syphilitic air of the place suggests strongly that at this moment there are at least a few serial killers living nearby who make their serious interior-decorating purchases there. In addition to the joke stuff, these Masters of Merriment also stock a fairly wide selection of Loompanics and similarly nasty-spirited publications. Loompanics specializes in Forbidden Knowledge. Books on changing your identity, surveillance techniques, and the infamous How to Kill series--things like that; also, a long series of books on Revenge Techniques--dirty tricks to play on your enemies, with titles like GETTING EVEN, SCREW THEM BEFORE THEY SCREW YOU, etc. etc. Anyway, it was getting late and I had to make a decision. I thought maybe that, whereas my friend would be getting a lot of the usual NY stuff--Statue of Liberty replicas, NYPD T-shirts, etc.--maybe it would be good to send her off to California with a little bit of New York Attitude in hand. So I figured she'd get a laugh out of GETTING EVEN and picked it up and got in line at the cash register. Then I realized I was waiting in line behind a trio of gangstaz paying, with the most polite deference to te placid old gent behind the register, for a book called MANUAL OF DISPOSABLE SILENCERS. It didn't look like they were buying it as a gag gift for a friend. I underwent a mild crisis of conscience--like, Can I really patronize this place or not?--decided I didn't want to and went off to find something else. Irony has its limits, even in apocalyptic times. - - - - - 406:78) 100 degrees Kelvin 01-AUG-93 11:18 Things break, go out of fashion, loose their importance, wear out. I think part of the problem is that people tend to treat "friends" like "things", expecting them to be there for them, where they last left them, they forget that friendship is an ongoing process that requires effort by both parties. Friendship requires a 100% effort and commitment, but it's worth it. Not only for the friendship itself, but that kind of commitment is good for your soul somehow (I think). I think things like drugs can really screw up friendships because they have a way of becoming the most important relationship in some people's lives, and it can happen so quickly. - - - - - 406:79) Samurai Squirrel 01-AUG-93 18:14 Drifter -- that was a very vivid and unnerving post. - - - - - 406:80) Tom Lipscomb 01-AUG-93 21:45 I'll say. Let's get that kind of material in Tina's NYer "Talk of the Town" - - - - - 406:81) Miss Outer Boro 1991 02-AUG-93 0:53 Yeah that was an interesting little tale, Drifter. And as usual, they're using the artist to pretty up the gentrification process. Giving the area some "class." Kevin what you said is interesting... I wonder how it links up with the other stuff we're talking about in here. I'm sure it does, somehow. - - - - - 406:82) 100 degrees Kelvin 02-AUG-93 8:59 It was in response to #76. - - - - - 406:83) T-girl 02-AUG-93 9:50 I think LD hit it when he said "fringes of reason" though the use of quotes around the word reason indicates that we're not always sure what those boundaries are. Also, my post in #74 was not geared to our interpersonal experiences, but towards the way the Consumer Culture At Large strips us of our humanity/emotions by reducing everything to a product, and that THAT is one more way we become NUMB. Examples ... a favorite song that you once had an emotional attachment to now becomes part of a commercial. It kills a little bit of those emotions. We are no longer Just Folks, but rather everything we do/say/wear comes back at us through some kind of promotional advertising. - - - - - 406:84) OpPhantom 02-AUG-93 10:03 Everything is hyped, marketed, appropriated, sold, adapted... virtually nothing is permitted to just "be" any more. - - - - - 406:85) Miss Outer Boro 1991 02-AUG-93 18:01 Except the money in my bank account, which sits there totally undisturbed by anything. Including interest. - - - - - 406:86) Miss Outer Boro 1991 02-AUG-93 18:03 Anyway yeah. Fringes of reason. Apocalypse culture is a critique-via practice of Enlightenment ideals of reason, which have gone so obviously and horribly gruesomely nightmarishly haywire (tho people like William Blake had their finger on certain aspects of it long ago, and were I less ignorant I could list a whole useful slew of others). It's like a millennial religion or sorts. Methinks. - - - - - 406:87) The Lonesome Drifter 02-AUG-93 20:11 Yeah, I think so. Especially "critique-via-practice of Enlightenment ideals"--very well said, MOB. What jolted me, specifically from the perspective of this item, about my Times Square interlude was that I've seen the Amok catalogue and ordered the Loompanics catalogue, and gotten hard-boiled chuckles out of them in the security of my apartment. Not for a while had I gotten such an electrical jolt of knowledge that this stuff actually does intersect with a society that seems headed for the "fringes of reason" actually, historically, "objectively" if you will--not just in a few boho aesthetes' epater-la-bourgeoisie fantasies. - - - - - 406:88) Miss Outer Boro 1991 04-AUG-93 4:59 I think that's a very, very important point, one worth looking at in much greater detail... too bad my brain is being eaten alive by microbes. - - - - - 406:89) The Strange Apparatus 04-AUG-93 11:00 Just picked up the latest "Industrial Gear" 'zine, which is dedicated to much of what we've been yapping about, here. There's an interview with the frontwoman of the body-modification-oriented band, The Genitorturers (her photo shows her to be a rather striking, muscular, tatooed woman with a long wire running through her tongue). Anyway, this band incorporates bondage and piercing of audience members into their shows. The singer, Gen, states at one point: "I definitely believe that the body is a temple. Thus....I choose to decorate the temple. I believe that you are your own God.....In other words, seeking within yourself and not looking outside of yourself to find the truth." While this lifestyle is not one I really understand, my reading of it is that this is a much more spiritual thing, focused on self-determination. And that doesn't sound apocalyptic. If anybody's interested, call for Industrial Gear #24 (7/93), at (215)552-8805. - - - - - 406:91) Miss Outer Boro 1991 05-AUG-93 1:15 Anybody read the TIME article about the Maya? Bloodletting was a VERY BIG THING for them. They liked to run ropes through their tongues, the king would do it thru his dick to get a message from god. - - - - - 406:92) Si mi chiamono Mimi Stahl 05-AUG-93 4:13 I think the way it worked was noble men would put a spine from some kind of fish (a ray?) through their dicks, while noblewomen would pierce their tongues and put threads with spines through. The blood spilled would satisfy the earth and gods and make a good crop likely. - - - - - 406:95) brett ipso facto 21-AUG-93 3:56 Gen must have been reading Foucault. Or maybe she's channeling him I think violence is violence, weather perpetrated on yourself or others. Give me the South Sea Islanders who stuck an orchid behind their ear for decoration.... - - - - - 406:96) Norrin Radd 01-OCT-93 2:24 Okay, this is in response to the Nick Cave stuff a while back (just read the item all the way through). I could see chuckling at Mr. Cave's reading of such a gory scene because not of his material, but of his DELIVERY. He's pretty overblown and hammy. Sometimes, of course, it works well for him. - - - - - 406:97) Garbled Uplink 14-OCT-93 1:30 Apocalypse Kultur is this: THEY won't share the Dream, so WE will share the nightmare. - - - - -