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What are your theories about the show Severance?
Dear M,
Thank you for your question.
Part 1:
A relative stranger to the series, some time ago I watched a few minutes of an episode where two or three people were gathered talking in a large, fluorescent lit room, sparsely furnished with a few pieces of office furniture - when an elevator door opened. I recognized one of the actors as Adam Scott, from the 2009 series Party Down. Scott played Henry Pollard, a one time actor, who along with an assortment of struggling actors and writers, worked for a Los Angeles catering company. Everyone but Henry imagined something more for themselves.
In another time and space, life in the totalitarian state of the Czech government during the 1960’s provided ample material for the filmmakers of the Czech New Wave, including Miloš Forman, who was relentless in exposing the “contradictions and distortions”* of any given system, large or small.
Although much has been made of Forman’s use of the outsider as protagonist, it’s clear from his early work in Czechoslovakia, and later in the US, that the focus of his films is less a singular heroic figure, but rather a group of people within a social or political system.
Most famously here in the US, the main characters of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Forman’s 1975 adaptation of the Ken Kesey novel), are a mental hospital and the inmates that occupy the world of the hospital. According to Forman, here was an opportunity to make a “real Czech movie…about a society I lived twenty years of my life in…it is about everything I know, everything I feel. Cuckoo’s Nest ending is my life in Czechoslovakia - throwing something through the window to escape.”
The story is decidedly about something Forman had intimate knowledge of - living life in an environment that subverts reality - replacing it with something incomprehensible and beyond reason.
A knowledge at once familiar and foreign to many of us.
Part 2:
A response from the Ists: (a Strategist, Herbalist, Artist, Sociologist, and Cardiologist).
- Snake House
"How much coffee is TOO much coffee? How do you suggest I eat my stress?"
Dear C,
Thank you for your question(s).
Some might say that there is no such thing as too much coffee. Or that the too-muchness of too much may even give way to transcendence. Have you seen that episode of Futurama where Fry drinks 100 cups of coffee and overcomes the laws of space/time?
There’s also the adage (veiled warning) that one can have too much of a good thing. But these days? In these times? Leave it to the austere ones, the ones with vices hidden, or those peons of puritanical respectability. I say, have as much as your pleasure allows. Importantly though, for fuck’s sake keep corporate coffee from passing your lips. There is no pleasure in tyranny.
Thank you for your question(s).
Some might say that there is no such thing as too much coffee. Or that the too-muchness of too much may even give way to transcendence. Have you seen that episode of Futurama where Fry drinks 100 cups of coffee and overcomes the laws of space/time?
There’s also the adage (veiled warning) that one can have too much of a good thing. But these days? In these times? Leave it to the austere ones, the ones with vices hidden, or those peons of puritanical respectability. I say, have as much as your pleasure allows. Importantly though, for fuck’s sake keep corporate coffee from passing your lips. There is no pleasure in tyranny.
Stress
Preparation time: depends
Serves: every last one of us
CHOP the onions until you cry
TOSS them in oil (pick out the fly)
DREDGE the hot peppers in breadcrumbs and spice
SIZZLE in fat twice rendered from lice
SQUEEZE a whole lemon as hard as you can
into your mouth, not into the pan
CRUSH the herbs, stems and all
SMASH em into a giant tea ball
STEEP them deep in your own boiled tears
The ones we’ve been saving for hundreds of years
CHILL
BITE one small piece at a time
MASTICATE slowly, embody the mime
SWALLOW or spit, it’s all up to you
DIGEST on your back, admire the view
RECONSTITUTE
- Snake House
“How does the integration of personal family archival footage in a fictional short film affect the audience’s understanding of memory, identity, and authenticity, and what are the implications of blending personal history
with narrative invention?”
Dear S,
Thank you for your question.
In discussing her 1990 film Sink or Swim, Su Friedrich describes herself as “an unreliable narrator”. The film appears at first to function as an intentionally incomplete portrait of Friedrich’s father, however, it slowly reveals itself to be a compelling meditation on autobiography, childhood, and the conflicted relationships between parents and their children. Shot in black and white, Sink or Swim is 48 minutes long and often mistaken as a film constructed from found footage. Friedrich notes that, with the exception of one scene from a family movie, all of the footage was shot (created) by the filmmaker herself.
Walid Ra’ad says of his 1998 video, Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, “…the events depicted are not attached to memories of actual events but to fantasies (mine and others’) erected on the basis of memories.” The video is a twenty-five minute three part project that includes Missing Lebanese Wars (in three parts), Secrets in the Open Sea, and Miraculous Beginnings (in two parts).
Thank you for your question.
In discussing her 1990 film Sink or Swim, Su Friedrich describes herself as “an unreliable narrator”. The film appears at first to function as an intentionally incomplete portrait of Friedrich’s father, however, it slowly reveals itself to be a compelling meditation on autobiography, childhood, and the conflicted relationships between parents and their children. Shot in black and white, Sink or Swim is 48 minutes long and often mistaken as a film constructed from found footage. Friedrich notes that, with the exception of one scene from a family movie, all of the footage was shot (created) by the filmmaker herself.
Walid Ra’ad says of his 1998 video, Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, “…the events depicted are not attached to memories of actual events but to fantasies (mine and others’) erected on the basis of memories.” The video is a twenty-five minute three part project that includes Missing Lebanese Wars (in three parts), Secrets in the Open Sea, and Miraculous Beginnings (in two parts).
As a visual montage of action and still shots with multiple narrations said to be inspired by the diaries of the fictitious wife of an equally fictitious historian of the Lebanese War, Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, it is hard to make sense of the images and sounds we hear and see, any more than we can make sense of our own memories - what is true, what is imagined?
Describing the “facts” of displacement in part two of Missing Lebanese Wars, the narration states that Zainab Fakhouri left her husband, taking with her seventeen objects from her household. These migrations from place to place are remembered and recorded in the objects she has chosen to take; they are the effects of her history. The objects are what remain as evidence, or the “fact” of the departures. However, these “facts” only speak when we decide what they will say.
Perhaps the implication of what is true or not may reflect the shifting relationship between ourselves, our memories, and our past. Is it a desire for satisfaction that propels us towards facts?
I don’t know about you, but I want to be led down the garden path in unknown directions with little regard for the truth of what I encounter along the way, or the promise of certainty, as I interact with a work of art. Art can navigate a void - or place of nothing, and reflect something in that nothing. There will always be gaps - it is within and through these spaces that we can begin to imagine something more.
- Snake House
Describing the “facts” of displacement in part two of Missing Lebanese Wars, the narration states that Zainab Fakhouri left her husband, taking with her seventeen objects from her household. These migrations from place to place are remembered and recorded in the objects she has chosen to take; they are the effects of her history. The objects are what remain as evidence, or the “fact” of the departures. However, these “facts” only speak when we decide what they will say.
Perhaps the implication of what is true or not may reflect the shifting relationship between ourselves, our memories, and our past. Is it a desire for satisfaction that propels us towards facts?
I don’t know about you, but I want to be led down the garden path in unknown directions with little regard for the truth of what I encounter along the way, or the promise of certainty, as I interact with a work of art. Art can navigate a void - or place of nothing, and reflect something in that nothing. There will always be gaps - it is within and through these spaces that we can begin to imagine something more.
- Snake House