Thanks to the magic of stumbleupon, I came across a blog called The Rawness: Human Nature and Sexual Politics. www.therawness.com. I have never read a blog which almost exclusively had posts that interested the hell out of me. The author of the Blog, Ricky, is a genius at dissecting, analyzing and synthesizing pretty much all aspects of human behavior. They were so fascinating in fact that I posted lengthy comments on some of them. I was so inspired by his work that I decided to write my own blog. I've been a movie buff for quite some time and have wanted to review them. In his latest series post, Ricky discusses "emotional vampires". He recommends the classic movie Darling:
Darling (1965)
Directed by Jon Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy, A Kind of Loving)
I will have to check out more of Schlesingers work, he seems to have an incredible knack for realistically portraying profoundly disturbed characters and the rapport (or lack of it) that they have with their close ones, (Ratsos interaction with the Naive Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy is classic). I would like to view (but so far can’t seem to find any decent torrent) the film “A kind of Loving” which is his directorial debut and a “Kitchen Sink Drama”. Kitchen sink dramas were films about the ordinary lives of British folks often shot in regular homes hence the name. They were made in Britain right after the 1960 Suez canal crisis where Britain completely lost face with the whole world watching, so they are famous for portraying raw intense emotion and a healthy dose of cynicism. While England and especially its capitals culture and image changed very fast that by 1965 it was the cultural capital of the world, apparently this filmmakers intense style and vision hadn’t changed much and he applied it to this new reality of the vacuous Jet-Set crowd. I am guessing that many of these famous Kitchen Sink dramas contain a whole slew of conniving manipulators and emotional vampires, so it is worth checking them out.
While not a subtle director, take for example the symbolism of Diana winning at roulette and immediately changing lovers, the trapped fish in the aquarium and Diana “trapped” in her lifestyle and the contrast between the speech about equality and then a jump cut to black servants in ridiculous kitchy Victorian wigs. It all seems to work however because everything in the movie is so powerful and raw and the pacing and acting and cinematography and editing is superb. The frequent breaks in continuity where we have to figure out what happened in between encourage us to think about her complex psychological profile of both cold calculation and haphazard emotional spontaneity.
To digress completely and at the risk of being prolixy I was even a little taken aback during the scene where it is bluntly stated how much German photo enthusiasts would love Dianas “Aryan features”. I don’t exactly what Schlesinger was driving at, I am assuming that similarly to Fassbinder (who by the way is an undisputed master and pretty much all of his movies revolve around emotional vampires) he was poking fun at Germany and how even during times of intense social change with a new generation reaching adulthood during the Swinging Sixties, Germany changed little even from US govt. mandated “Denazification” programs which failed miserably, these old school values were just less open and hidden under a thin veneer of materialism during the German Economic Miracle. I could be reading too much into this, he was both British and a Jew that survived the horrors of the London Blitz so this could have been a purely visceral snarky remark. There could be something I don’t know however about the photography/fashion scene in Swinging London, and German involvement in it. I am curious how true the stereotype of Europeans not forgetting is, and what young British peoples thought of Germans were. After all, there was a ton of cultural interaction, the Beatles for example, first gained mass popularity on German soil.
With regards to analyzing the fine points of cluster B emotional disorders both you and Schlesinger are both ahead of the game. In the new DSM-V which comes out next year there will no longer be criteria for specific cluster B disorders but they will be classified according to what and how many symptoms of each disorder one has. That just goes to show once again that artists and people with a healthy dose of common sense and life smarts triumph over psychologists who want to neatly categorize everything.
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