Shocktober Day 1: The Antichrist (5☆)

I'm not doing reviews but I want to keep track of and rate what I watch and I hate the idea of using mubi or letterboxed and seeing everyone elses low ratings of genre films. I'm not feeling particularly combative when it comes to film anymore, just kinda resigned to everyone's weird, barely closeted conventional taste (whether they accept it or not...even people who entertain genre appreciation and whose tastes overlap with mine still often adhere to a code of consistent conventions and value markers rather than engage in a holistic consumption of those films) and like...imo just idiocy. I mean if Hereditary is seen as a revolutionary film but by and far Mother! was panned as pretentious by these same people when it was actually uhhhh great, idk what to even say...... I think a film by a conventionally artistic/well-esteemed wide release director that is actually far more bombastic and rigorously committed to its unspooling vision and lack of regard for its "wide release" audience than I would have ever expected from him is much more engaging than a film with obvious haute pretensions and self-regard, from a director who is clearly aiming for an elevated approach toward his vision rather than a total layout of it. I respect and value the "tasteless" authenticity of Mother! (a presumed commercial "art film" with all its conventions and middlebrow appeal, downgraded to exploitation and derided; or, alternatively, a presumed commercial horror film from a Middle Class Fancy director that doesn't adhere to the instant gratification, easily followed, narrative formula expected of it and thus derided) than the artificial aspirations of Hereditary and other A24 output which is largely targeting an audience that already sees genre films and tropes as inherently bad or "lower" with few exceptions and looking for someone to "elevate" it by applying a more conventionally art house/readily estimable sheen in a contrived, clearly (to me at least) inorganic and self satisfied "I went to film school" way.

Anywayz, for a movie that is one hundred times better and more genuinely artful than Hereditary (even though I liked a lot of Hereditary and thought it was fun...as a narratively average cult worship movie, which is what it is.......)....please watch Antichrist (1974). Also known at The Tempter which is...such a bad title but great poster. Click to enlarge so you can read the amazing text.

http://www.oprah.com/spirit/the-truth-about-the-people-you-cant-forgive

"If we can find a way to live inside of a deep gratitude for our own undeserved grace and mercy, past hurts have very little power to cause us pain in any lasting way. They are not worth our time or energy. They are mere sludge and dredge in the great school and journey of life. The gratuitous surrendering of hurts ("forgiveness"), the refusal to make them our identity, is almost the heart of the matter. If you do not transform your pain, you will with 100 percent certainty transmit it to others. And, I am afraid, you will have pain! Both the Buddha and Jesus seem to say that pain is part of the deal, and its overcoming is the very shape of enlightenment." 

Permanently deleted my current Facebook and my Facebook from high school, and downloaded all my data off them. This is officially my only public outlet. I need to find a way to download and back up all my old Tumblr data as well now. And my newsletter...which I will get to soon. Also I finally saw Tomb Raider 2018 and it's honestly...amazing? I really hate men lmao. They're the only reason it was rated so low critically. As a tale of a 20-something solving ancient mysteries and discovering untapped strengths, it's all I could have dreamed of.

This is what 24 felt like

This is what 25 has been like

I'm fascinated by the idea of being haunted or supernatural contact thru the internet, especially as it extends beyond the internet or bleeds into the everyday, because the internet is a ghostland in itself. Just as someone attaches meaning to fragments of an image, orbs or solar flares or unexpected shadows, and builds upon it, interpreting it and completing it for themselves until it becomes whole, we allow ourselves to be interpreted and consumed based on a silhouette rather than a full person. An outline of who we are for the rest to be filled in by the other. Meaning is built upon the ethereal. (Good) horror movies about the internet draw upon this idea of the self-made ghost. We haunt the internet and the internet haunts us. We allow ourselves to be fragmented in order to haunt others.

There's a lot of lonely people desperately reaching out for something or someone to save them, lost and directionless spiritually. Going along with the next trend or the next revelation put in front of them, waiting for a zeitgeist breakthrough. I wont ever be one of them, because I refuse to. I find it pathetic and sad, jumping from one sense of faith or purpose to the next thinking each one is The One. Rather than building with each new experience in the development of the Self. The Self is unshakeable. Each leap of faith is a new cataclysm, a new shining light, revelation to revelation to revelation. Earth shattering truth that can be developed on your own, that can build, that can create. It's okay to destroy your Self and build it up again but only if the blueprint is already there. Destroying the self and building a new image each time, there never is a sense of self to begin with. There is no Self, so your world will continue to shake and you will continue to be searching from ground zero. Keep searching but to keep building.

Interest in paranormal as way to circumvent trauma

Some quick notes:

"I am arguing that alien-abduction memories are best understood as resulting in a blend of fantasy-proneness, memory distortion, culturally available scripts, sleep hallucinations, scientific illiteracy, aided and abetted by the suggestions and reinforcement of hypnotherapy. **But this analysis is still insufficient for an understanding of the phenomenon.** As the abductees themselves say, 'If you're telling me it didn't happen to me, that I made it up, why in God's name would I WANT to?'...But Donald Spence also argues that the validity of our conclusions–the HISTORICAL truth of our explanations–is irrelevant. The important question is: Do our beliefs have NARRATIVE truth? Do they provide us with meaning and value? When people believe they were abducted by aliens, does this help them to understand perplexing or upsetting aspects of their lives [finding a measure of similarity to PTSD victims]? If so, the explanation is going to be persuasive, satisfying, and resistant to argument [concluding these stories give them peace because of some relative knowledge of some cause, are transformative for their lives in giving them perspective, a worldview, orients them to the banality of living in relation to this world]." 

- Susan Clancy's author's intent from Abducted: How People Come To Believe They Were Kidnapped By Aliens, a book I find problematic in its approach to the phenomena but fascinating for the fact it was initially meant to be about sexual abuse victims' "recovered memories" but sexual abuse false memories seemed far more controversial to debunk than alien abductees who the public already has little sympathy for so she chose to explore her thesis through them instead. While kept as two different subjects here, I do think there's probably a huge overlap in people's propensity to believe in the paranormal and their desire to escape or distract from their situation or circumstances, which I'm obviously not immune to. As a form of trauma reassignment, it seems much "easier" if equally scary to refocus that energy and fear and curiosity and latent emotion onto something that is in a journey of "being discovered" rather than concrete things that have already "happened". Reading more about gnosticism, UFOs, the paranormal, I see a large similarity to the sort of distraction, exasperation, and processing work one undergoes coming to terms with trauma. The man who lives in fear after alien abduction and the man who's frustrated that nobody believes his Bigfoot sighting are fighting a similar internal battle. I'm reminded of Mysterious Skin where the trauma of child sexual abuse is easier to render in hindsight as alien abduction because it lends a mystery and recurrent, randomized element to something that was a concrete action of the past specifically enacted upon an individual.