on torture films, Borat and a few other political quibbles...

The L Train was only running to Lorimer again this weekend, it was impossible to make it down to the station because of the surge of people constantly making their way up to the buses that would take them the rest of the way home. It's like this most weekends, except those weekends they just shut down the L, but the mayor, the MTA, you know, they're doing a good job. It would be nice if we held people accountable occasionally.

At some church that fills up like a last place NBA team's arena, some minister talked about his sexual sickness and had his job taken away from him. Most of his followers seem to blame Satan for this, Satan or Bill Clinton I suppose. Before long it'll be Nancy Pelosi, they're already trying to scare each other about her. Take a look at rushlimbaugh.com sometime, and you'll see the character assassination already well underway. Of course, I suppose we shouldn't mention his Viagra-ridden Dominacan trip when discussing matters of character. After all, I'm not saying he went down there to have sex with 16 year olds like many of the middle-aged American men who go down there, after all, it's a strictly economic arrangement even if he did.

It seems sad to me, these hotel rooms with reluctantly gay Republican and yahoo-Christian backgrounds nervously getting it on with men who cheerlead them on toward a real orgasm. Looking at Haggard's male escort's ad, where it says "hey, I'm a nice guy!" it was almost heartbreaking to imagine Haggard nodding to himself, thinking "I'm going to do it!" Sex shouldn't be so fucking sad like that. Grow up. And then Crist, down in Florida, having to meekly dodge gay questions everywhere he goes because if he admits he's gay he'll probably lose. What's there to lose when you're losing your self-respect every day? I feel the way Nietzsche felt about beggars when I think about these guys. It's annoying to even think about them because it arouses such feelings of revulsion and pity mixed with disgust at their absolute inability to deal with the world of truth. Their attempts to make a world that stands at moral attention forever, a world in which they may forgive themselves by condemning others, well, that world becomes that very lonely hotel room quickly.

Anyway, I saw Saw 3 and Borat this weekend. Why did I see Saw 3? How could I not? Rudy, Meghan and I usually manage to find the worst film out at any given time and agree to watch it. What is odd, is how successful these movies about torture have become. The Hostal movie already has a sequel coming out and there's a hideous looking thing called Turistas coming out next month. Then there's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the Beginning, or whatever, with all those images of vulnerable women and burly men. It makes sense we would be obsessed with torture given our circumstances and fears of the other right now, but watching the totalitarian "philosophy" at work within the mechanizations of Saw 3 was truly depressing anyway. Anti-intellectual and believing that there is something fair about the way "Jigsaw" kills, because he takes people who aren't "grateful" for their lives and gives them a chance to redeem themselves through tremendous pain, the film walks us through a torture chamber and an operation room within that torture chamber. As entertainment, we witness brain surgery with power tools, but without any elan, sadly. We also get to see a man twisted to death in a machine better found in some mad king's castle. The operation is performed under torturous duress and the grimness of the doctor and the patient speak to some joyless world where one wonders how anybody could develop any sense of gratitude for life. I mean, in a movie, this should be put forth with a bit more sense of...something...fun? Fear? It's just accomplished fact here. We see bloody phlegm and the flap of the brain's protective seal that rests between skull and said brain. We see blood splatter all over a woman's face and we see her wash it off. Then later, in the same spirit, we see bone twist from skin and muscle, and the whole time there is the thinnest of stories tying us from the events we witness to some narrative understanding of these events. At the end, they cynically throw in a twist, so as to not make it too obvious that the main entertainment was the manipulation of body parts into positions of pain, a kind of pornography really, but later you can talk about that twist at the end. Whoa!

Whoa! indeed.

But I talked earlier about totalitarian yearnings in the subtext of the film, and there, at least, there was some interest in watching this waste of carbon. In the movie the people are told they have lived their lives wrongly, therefore, they must suffer in order to learn what is truly important and thus enter the world of livingly righteously. They deviate, they are punished in horrific ways and then they learn to understand what is truly important. Any individual ideas of right, wrong, redemption or corruption are subsumed by one who has taken it upon himself to teach the correct way. Jigsaw suffers greatly, but his goal is so important, that even as he lays struggling for life on a bed surrounded by instruments of death, he focuses on ways to instruct those who do not value what is so freely theirs. He is a martyr, giving his life so that we may understand. He occupies the position of Christ-figure, the fountain from which wisdom springs so that others may live, and of course his suffering excuses any suffering he inflicts. There are scenes that show him, some kind of industrious Ben Franklin, creating his works of instruction, these scenes, told in flashback, lack irony; there are scenes of him in love: those things that have been taken away from him as this great responsibility of torture are thrust upon him. Meanwhile, a judge, a failed judge, white, middle-aged, who failed to punish, is covered in the filth of slaughtered, rotted pigs, and almost drowns in them. Later his head explodes as a shotgun goes off while a black man, nailed and held in place by huge metallic clamps that cover most of his body, is twisted, bones popping and ripping, slowly to death. I'll leave the obvious subtexts here to somebody else.

It would all be so comic and ridiculous, if so much of it was not in accordance with ideas Americans seem to value. If you don't like what you're given, then it's you that's the problem! You don't know what suffering is! Let me tell you what suffering is, and I got through it! All this machismo and this desperate scrambling to fit into the norms of experience that have been traced for us. And the willingness to judge and punish...ugh: they're gettin' what they deserve. Watching it, I've blocked much of it out, not from the oozing imagery, but from the sheer monotony and grimness of its tone. It was so serious, and it really did seem to think it had something to say, and it was going to say it through the misunderstood actions of this moronic duo of torturers, one of whom it held up as some kind of visionary. It reminded me of these anti-intellectual and nationalist novels of Weimar Germany that are so ignored today, in which the values of a lost generation of German militarism were celebrated. Martyrdom is an essential component of those novels as well. Subtlety is confused with weakness and moral indecision and corruption. Certainty, the ability to will over others, those are the primary attributes of the heroic according to those that have argued thusly. We all saw where that went.

For those who can't understand the attraction to George Bush during the 2000 and especially the 2004 elections, and in the period of time the war on Iraq was first launched, watch this film, think about its popularity, and it all comes slowly into focus. In ten days, Saw 3 has made $60 million.

The next day I saw Borat, which was fun. The fraternity boys were the scariest, I think.

I think the Senate is going to go 51-49 for the Republicans. I saw somebody forecasting a 34 to 40 seat gain in the House for the Democrats, but I don't know about that. I think 15 to 20 maybe. I won't be surprised if I'm wrong, of course, and I hope I am and that every Republican running loses, but I wonder if a lot of these polls that show close races in historically Republican held areas won't see a reversion back to the familiar once the voting booths open. I think Americans now see polls taken before the elections as ways to show pleasure or, especially, displeasure with candidates. If you are going to vote for a particular candidate and he slaps his mistriss around, for instance, and somebody calls you and asks, are you going to vote for that guy who just slapped his somethin' on the side around or are you going to vote for this person, well, who are you going to admit to voting for? Or if they ask you, are you going to vote for this obviously racist guy who calls people mean names and, just in general, acts like an ass, or are you going to vote for this guy who just thinks weirdly about women (really, who can you vote for in that election - ugh), well, again, seeing as their stances on women are probably really a wash, it's easier to fess up to the lesser embarrassment. I do think Allen is in trouble in Virginia, but I think he'll win in the end. I think the Dems have a good shot in Missouri though. Stem cell research should be a bigger issue than the Democrats have made it really. In Missouri it might actually tilt the vote.

Conversely, if you're a good candidate, but running in an area that typically votes counter to your party or politics, then you can't believe leads in your favor. If I were Ford, in Tennessee, I'd want to see a seven or eight point lead before I felt like I had a real chance to win, because people might think you're a better guy, but when the chips are down...and it looks like Ford is going to lose sadly. Corker, well the name really does say it all. Fuck him. And his gross campaign.

It stinks of Republicanism.