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is dedicated to the enjoyment of audio and visual stimuli. Please visit our archives where we have uncovered the true importance of nearly everything. Should you want to reach us, e-mail alex dot carnevale at gmail dot com, but don't tell the spam robots. Consider contacting us if you wish to use This Recording in your classroom or club setting. We have given several talks at local Rotarys that we feel went really well.

Pretty used to being with Gwyneth

Regrets that her mother did not smoke

Frank in all directions

Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais

Simply cannot go back to them

Roll your eyes at Samuel Beckett

John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion

Metaphors with eyes

Life of Mary MacLane

Circle what it is you want

Not really talking about women, just Diane

Felicity's disguise

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Entries in willem dafoe (3)

Monday
Apr072014

In Which We Sample The Empty Bodies Of Nymphomaniac

Fate and Flesh

by KYLEE LUCE

Nymphomaniac: Volumes I & II
dir. Lars Von Trier
241 minutes

The first Google result for “sex ego death” is a crowdfunding attempt from August 2013 that raised 15 dollars. The funds they failed to crowd were intended to erect a “sex and ego death” billboard on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles, in order “to MAKE PEOPLE THINK, and through that process gain enough understanding of their ‘true self’—the self without judgments or social constraints.” 

Nymphomaniac, Lars Von Trier’s latest two-part sexual provocation, has a similar aim but with a budget of 10 million; a chunk of change that managed to secure, alongside stars Gainsbourg and Skarsgård, the presence of Christian Slater, Uma Thurman, Christopher Walken, and Shia LaBoeuf.

Shia, who might be infamously hotheaded but, as he announced by scrawling in Sharpie across a brown paper bag and wearing said bag over his head at the Berlin premiere, is not famous anymore. Shia's supersized sense of self has long since bestowed him the post-empire honor of being a celebrity who Gawker, along with everyone else, hates; but he’s brilliantly cast here because plenty of us would still fuck him.

Incidentally, the first Google result for just “sex ego” is the wiki for the term “Ego-dystonic sexual orientation,” described as a “mental disorder characterized by having a sexual orientation or an attraction that is at odds with one’s idealized self-image.” My grey matter doesn’t really square with psychoanalysis; “It’s boring,” I’ve said enough times to bore myself. But early this year my eyes fell on the phrase “ego death” and snared there, mid-Google search for “sleep deprivation,” which I did after reading a study showing that ceasing to sleep for a few days was temporarily effective in cutting through the psychic chokehold of depression. Nymphomaniac is the last entry in Von Trier’s “Depression Trilogy.” 

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The rug wasn’t exactly pulled out from underneath me. I didn’t trip so much as decide to jump, fling myself from a flying carpet; but there’s a dim panic that descends when major pieces of your life tumble into chaos like a pile of loose change, a slanting tendency to do things you thought weren’t like you at all. Like, for instance, staying awake for two days straight and then going to a mall-watching assorted legs wander the sky bridge over the street separating the cheaper stores (glaring Forever 21 bags stuffed like suitcases) from the seductively expensive Tiffany’s section, a rail train slotting down the middle like needle into vein; like suddenly finding it unbearable to be anything close to sober in the presence of other people; like finding it even more unbearable to be alone. 

In this phantom-limb delusion of fresh heartbreak I told myself that love was a flying carpet and I had rug burns; that this faded, insomniac floating felt like salve.

I was sleep-deprived and riding shotgun on a long drive when, down a barren stretch of desert road, talk turned to Lars Von Trier; someone said he thought Melancholia was meant to indict us. I asked if every movie had to have a message, if intent even mattered (it does, a little bit); but Von Trier isn’t quite on par with the natural nihilist in Harmony Korine, wrecking sandcastles for fun. Closer to him is David Lynch, whose work is like a long bath just beneath a hard surface, like dunking into a subliminal cenote. 

Twin Peaks was the first thing I felt like watching after moving into a new apartment for one, because its project was to map the blood relation between nostalgic beauty and death, between ugliness and love. And in Lynch’s cosmology their symmetry has a glinting refulgence. The best scenes make me feel the same way that Von Trier’s best movies do, which is drenched in a kind of molecular, vibrating awareness. 

In Von Trier’s own words, “Maybe Lynch and I share a fetish.”

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We meet the nymphomaniac facedown in the street. Joe (an ever-magnetic Charlotte Gainsbourg) is bruised and bleeding when the sexless, aging Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) takes her in and makes her tea. “What happened?” he asks. She replies, “I’m just a bad human being.” He tells her he doesn’t believe in such a thing, and from there she proceeds to relay her entire life’s sexual story to a riveted audience of one. 

For a memorable time in her early adulthood Joe is fucking “up to ten men a night.” In carefully orchestrated trysts Stacy Martin, young Joe’s avatar of droll face and lithe flesh, spends Volume I gyrating against nearly a new body per frame per second. Young bodies, old bodies, bodies that walk like big cats, bodies that do nothing but eat her cunt; the only constants being that they’re all men and her own omnipresent nudity. But the most memorable, and most Lynchian, scene of the first film finds her fully clothed, staring blankly at the floor, while Uma Thurman’s scene-stealing scorned wife (“Mrs. H.”) tries to scorch her from her mistress’ seat. 

It doesn’t work. Joe’s sexual nihilism turns out to be flameproof right up until her desire burns out. But sometime during the close shots of the philandering father’s children’s faces, or definitely by the time Mrs. H. departs down the stairs with a piercing, anti-comic shriek of pain, it occurred to me that Nymphomaniac, in spite all those O-face promotional posters, is hilariously unsexy. Which should have come as no surprise — I remember feeling more titillated watching Rooney Mara’s Dragon Tattoo rape scene, a textbook example of men filming the sexual violation of women like they’re gunning for an AVN award, than anything Von Trier has ever done. 

Tiny pleasure-rushes from a few beautiful bodies in the buff (LaBeouf had a great personal trainer, and Martin might be a real mermaid, the kind that drown men for fun) flutter like dying insects under the film’s morgue-esque moods. In young Joe’s final scene on a speeding train every pore on her face pops into relief under sickly fluorescent light, open mouth and lidded eyes evoking an undead Megan Fox, right before she coerces a stranger into a blowjob; the overarching sensation being something like a death dream. 

That ever-enduring debate (don’t say Woody All...) about separating the artist from his art has become deeply dull because it’s beside the point. Every known thing about a person inevitably informs their work like tributary streams, all flowing into the same final destination: the noumenal ocean of the Internet, where I read the following Lars Von Trier quote in an interview about Antichrist: "If the film has anything to do, it has to do with that there is no God; that is how I see it.” In the same interview he said he “hadn’t read much of” and “(didn’t) want to talk about” Nietzsche, which didn’t do much to halt a lot of theory-bro thinkpieces, or me. If God is dead, then Antichrist was an arch illustration of his absence, Melancholia an apocalypse fantasy as foray into the gothic swamp of the (mad) mind; Nymphomaniac, on Von Trier’s other hand, tears into the last component of the Cartesian divide: body.

In careening withdrawal from a specific body it feels like you might actually die from an absence of touch. There’s a line at the end of Lindsay Hunter’s short story “Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula” that immediately became one of those arrangements of letters etched in tattoo ink across my memory. It’s recurred to me in recent months like a wave of déjà vu: “because if no one is there to touch you are you even really there?”

In a new city and beside a new body, I had the dumb compulsion to say, “This is kind of out of character,” a phrase I had started using like it was a protective umbrella that would shield me from the results. But words aren’t waterproof. Do something outside your idea of yourself and your stick-figure lines just expand to encompass it; everything you’ve ever done is you.

Joe, the teenager who would only fuck a man once, eventually tries to grow up. She falls in love and becomes a breeder; years that she once counted in collected cum pass stoically behind a baby stroller. But after trying on a normal life for size — to our utter unsurprise — it just doesn’t fit. Without her rabid sex-life Joe feels dead. Lust is the closest approximation of living she’s got and she can’t even come. Volume I may witness her watching the shit-and-blood bodily failure and death of her father, but in Volume II she unequivocally declares: the worst thing that ever happened to her was losing her ability to orgasm. 

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The loss of her desire was the more existential loss, and through his anti-heroine Von Trier asserts the impossibility of mind over matter, or matter over mind. In Nymphomaniac there are only -alities: states of being alive. To mourn, or in Joe’s case to lubricate, is at least a feeling; depression is the state of being without any, the -ality of the void. (“Fill all my holes,” Joe commands Jerome, the only lover she’s ever actually loved, while naked on top of him. “I can’t, Joe,” he says.) 

Desperate to “rehabilitate” her sexuality, she resorts to replacing penetration with pain; this time, beneath the spanking-crop of a suave blond dom, it works. To the tune of “FIDO,” her new name, her lust finally moves like the blood to her ass. The most graphic shots by far in this purported porno aren’t of cocks but of purpled and bleeding welts and wounds; and thanks to them she’s back in business, in more ways than one. 

But like most hard-won victories, this one comes with casualties; completely gone from her life is her family, is love. Soon she’ll be horizontal in a gutter. If depression can be understood as an enduring state of alienation, the separation from shared reality can act as dangerous buffer. Destruction is all fireworks from a distance. “For a human being killing is the most natural thing in the world. We’re created for it,” Joe says. And for all Seligman’s insistence on her innocence over her self-proclaimed indictment of her own moral character, kill she eventually does. 

Why doesn’t matter. Von Trier cares not about reasons. Or at least Joe doesn’t seem to have any beyond fate itself, narrating that she “discovered my cunt at age two” and spiraled into ruin from there. Outside of “sheer lust” there’s no discernible motive driving anything she does, from Volume I’s teenage sex competition on a train (one of the movie’s many conceits so masculine they make a case for the queerness of the director’s lens — the popular theory that he identifies as the women in his films rather than the men) to Volume II’s forty Roman ass-lashes and ruinously-wounded cunt. 

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In an interview with The Daily Beast, Uma Thurman said of Von Trier: “The idea that people debate whether he’s a misogynist? People should debate whether people who don’t even write women are misogynists. The fact is, he’s dedicated a large portion of his artistic life to the exploration of the female psyche — good and bad, light and dark, shadows, textures.” Von Trier himself has said, “I, of course, believe that women are as bad as men.” He neglects to mention that women may well be born as bad but are then nurtured into being much worse off.

In a 1951 speech called “Keeping Calm and Composed, Let Us Awake to Our True Self,” the Japanese philosopher Shin'ichi Hisamatsu spoke about his idea of the “formless self”: the highest state of which he called “formless composure … unobstructed by mind and body.” He then quoted from the Buddhist text The Heart Sutra: “Emptiness, just as it is, is form.” 

In his last three films, Lars Von Trier has attempted emptiness as emotional form. Modern life can be seen in macro as the division of human consciousness into cubicles, then the movies in the Depression Trilogy — in their exploration of alienation-ality — all perform a possible set of psychic consequences. And this last entry, in its blithe parade of bodies, feels emptiest of all. 

A dualistic God demanded that we master the body; love just wants to subjugate lust; and Nymphomaniac is a circle in red ink around the pointlessness of both endeavors. But there’s something weirdly comforting about the bare honesty of its effort. In yet another interview about Antichrist (he hasn’t done any since Melancholia premiered, when he made a few spectacularly PR-unfriendly comments about Hitler,) our Danish auteur said, “No matter how ridiculous it might seem, the film, like all my work, is made from what I would call a pure heart. I am not ever trying to, as you say in England, take the piss.” 

Self-induced insomnia never killed my ego, but without sleep I felt blurred, somehow softer, like my sharper edges were sloughing off. Deep in the snarl of sex I sometimes feel the opposite — a temporary expansion of self, a euphoric unfurling. As Susan Sontag wrote in her journal: “The coming of the orgasm is not the salvation but, more, the birth of my ego.” In the final scene of Volume II, Joe waxes poetic about what she has decided is her only way forward: eradicating her sexuality completely. “I will master all my stubbornness, and my strength, and my masculine aggression,” she whispers to Seligman, calling him “my one and only friend.” Minutes later, she shoots him. That the film’s framing centers around a single question — whether or not Joe is a bad human being — is in the end a red herring that fades into black, swallowed whole by the real conundrum: the pure fatalism of having flesh. In the way she describes giving birth to her child: “I didn’t feel fear; more like a kind of disgust. I could have sworn I saw him laughing.” In Von Trier’s empty visions, fate laughs at us.

Kylee Luce is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Salt Lake City. This is her first appearance in these pages. You can find her tumblr here and her twitter here.

"Send Her To Holloway" - The Rails (mp3)

"Panic Attack Blues" - The Rails (mp3)

Friday
Oct112013

In Which Ellen Page Could Be Described As Incidental

Two Becomes One

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Beyond: Two Souls
creator David Cage

On the inside, the deep inside, are you aching to watch Ellen Page as a CIA agent gone rogue? Think about this, and realize that French auteur and all-around good guy David Cage has made it so that you can play as a four year old Ellen Page. Marking other people's graves there will be other accomplishments, but for David Cage there can be but one.

david cage watches them so closely

Jodie Holmes (an ELECTRIC Ellen Page) has lived with a spirit all her life. In the axiomatic, potentially libelous language of The U.S.A., this means this being comes from the Infraworld and must be used as a mercenary by the CIA. There was no one else to do this job but Ellen Page. Basically no one could look as good in so many different outfits.

When you think about it, most any job is more properly filled by Ellen Page. She can crow about how her shirt sucks and she got stains on her moccasins, doesn't this totally ruin an otherwise Ellen Page-worthy day?

you don't look a day over 900

French developer Quantic Dream uses advanced motion capture techniques to do the impossible - make Willem Dafoe look any age less than 90. Ellen's mo-cap begins to go awry from ages 8-16: Beyond: Two Souls covers her entire lifespan, including a completely unproductive goth phase. Before she goes out on state-sponsored assassination missions, she must cast aside the pendulous responsibilities of her bat mitzvah:

She is watched by men at all times, Ellen Page is. They want to harm her emotionally, usually, or beat her up. In a bar once, she murders three men who try to rape her. Cage follows this bromide of a scene with a lengthy sequence in which Page's Holmes finds a spiritual connection with some Native Americans.

Because of her service to her country, there is a deep and abiding possibility that Ellen Page could be nominated as the President of the United States. We are just dumb enough to convince ourselves of something like this, Cage opines. All his favorite movies (chief among them Requiem for a Dream quite obviously) and games are American, and Beyond: Two Souls plays out, in its segmented vignettes, like a collection or a compendium of his obsession with our country.

Hailed for his ability to bring true human emotion into gameplay, the character models of Beyond: Two Souls are so realistic that Ellen Page's presence is palpable, and if she overstays her welcome, just be glad that there's no abortion message in there. Oh wait there was one.

Ms. Page actually had to dispel some vicious rumors when the lifelike model of actress Ashley Jensen in The Last of Us tread on her recognizable image by resembling EP too closely. People kept going on tweeter and congratulating her about her performance, the one she never made. (It might have been too familiar a compliment long before The Last of Us ever came to be.)

"um, ms. page, she doesn't really look very much like you" "EVERYONE LOOKS SOMETHING LIKE ME BRENDA" Instead of having the good grace to recognize that not every brunette was her clone, Page issued a warning. She wrote in letters a sociopath cuts out of a magazine, and it said "don't tread on my IP" and there was, for some reason, an emoji after that. (If intellectual property belongs to Ellen Page, it is usually called EP after its Oscar-nominated namesake, Ellen Page.)

She could have further explained, but her new game was not out yet. She could have said, "Guys I have a spirit named Aiden inside of me in my next game, Beyond: Two Souls. Would you be willing to play as a spirit inside me? Sounds good, doesn't it? Chris Evans looks like a hunk of cheese up close. See you guys."

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Infallible" - Pearl Jam (mp3)

"Sleeping By Myself" - Pearl Jam (mp3)

Tuesday
Oct272009

In Which Nature Is Lars Von Trier's Satanic Church

Antichrist 

by JESSICA HOPPER

Akin to Andrea Dworkin, the legendary radical feminist, Lars Von Trier sees the world in full masochistic flower; he refuses to look away from the relentless blunt force trauma of patriarchy.

Antichrist is not the most direct route or noble ways of illustrating it, and his illustration of the nature of women’s suffering—which in this instance is unrestrained and gruesome—has been understood as perpetuating or endorsing that suffering (he was awarded a special, created just for him prize for misogyny at Cannes), rather than bearing witness.

Much has been made of Antichrist’s plotlessness, which has been called perverse and inexplicable, with bits of symbolism and plot from which it is difficult to extract meaning even days after viewing. LVT has called it a dream film, images that haunted him in the deep of his depression, and whether intentioned or not, it’s a film about male hubris. Which might be part of the reason a lot of male critics don’t get it, or call it a horror film.

Women (see Taylor Swift, witch trials etc.) are told throughout their lives, by men--familial, institutional, strangers—that they know better than her. They know what’s best for her body or mind. That she is doing it wrong.

Men grow up with that privilege, that the world values and is interested in their opinion, that however inexpert it might be it counts as (right) knowledge. Their place in the world has conferred them a right of governance.

In Antichrist, following the accidental death of their son while they fucked in the other room (opening sequence, not a spoiler) psychologist He (Willem Dafoe) takes on his depressed wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) as patient. 

Operating at cool, composed remove from her grieving hysteria, he prods her with analysis. “I know you better than any doctor can,” he tells her as he embarks into treating her, which she reluctantly begins to cooperate with. He is clinical and flat, whereas she wails and heaves and bashes her head on the toilet bowl. His interventions set up the film's rationality-versus-nature subtext.

Her nature is portrayed as human wildness—while she cannot heal herself, she consoles herself with fucking—which could be read as an attempt to connect with her good doctor husband, reel him back into peerage, into empathy and not authority. Fucking seems the only pleasure she is capable of, her only circumstance of power.

In order to make her confront her fears, the couple—identified only as He and She—head to their cabin, Eden, which may or may not double as hell. Once they arrive, He begins to become haunted by his own fears, by the irrational, by all that he cannot control—his wife, an oak tree, a talking fox with a Black Metal voice.

Werner Herzog’s description of the jungle in Burden of Dreams, could serve as Von Trier’s thesis for Eden, which Herzog calls a “curse” and suggests the only harmony in it is “The harmony of overwhelming and collective murder…We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery, overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order.”

Once at Eden, once She tells her husband she is cured, which is when we get the major paradigm shift—where both she and the film itself come loose. What follows his refusal to accept her pronouncement of wellness is, true to LVT form, a fairly untidy everyone-gets-what’s-coming-to-them—He, She, a too-squawky blackbird all get revolting star turns of their own. Her vengeance is brutal, and it’s not particularly gratifying to watch—this isn’t Lady Vengeance or Ms. 45.  

Much has been made (rightfully) of the his n’ hers genital mutilation—though watching what she inflicts on him, I was instantly reminded of introduction to bell hooks’ The Will to Change: Mean, Masculinity and Love: “Women all over the world want men to die so they can live.” So cowed by the life-threatening power of men, they see it as the only way out of their suffering.

In her attempts to untangle from her suffering She does herself in, much the same way; by cutting off her own clit, her resource for pleasure being her only consolation, she is rendering herself inconsolable, unfixable, untamable.

In the final chapter of the film, Von Trier asks us to suppose something about nature, which in the film is suggested to be “Satan’s Church”—a kind of equation, where nature = evil, nature = woman’s nature, women = naturally evil. It’s not a particularly steady equation, but it’s an exaggerated response to the equation which we live with every day: men = rational, rational = good, men = good.

Jessica Hopper is a writer living in Chicago and author of The Girls Guide To Rocking and blogs at tinyluckygenius. This is her first appearance on This Recording.

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"Recording Angel" - Arve Henriksen (mp3)

"Poverty and Its Opposite" - Arve Henriksen (mp3)

"Migration" - Arve Henriksen (mp3)