(no subject)

[ivyfic]

Also, I've never really liked magic acts. There's just that little bit of the monstrous in it - the hint that something horrible is happening just behind the curtain. This movie uses that innate fear of illusions magnificently. The audience is made into an unwilling participant in the barbarity of the tricks. The very first trick you see - the metaphor for the whole movie - is shown to an innocent little girl. The trick is killing a bird, which she delights in. The magician is making the audience delight in and applaud something they would abhor if they knew the truth of it. But no one in an audience wants to know the truth; they're all conspirators in the act.

trakkie pointed out that she's seen that birdcage trick. I don't know if crushing a bird is how magicians now do it, but if so, then trakkie and everyone else in the audience cheered as a man crushed a bird to death.

I just keeping having this vision of a bloodthirsty audience applauding night after night as a man drowns. *shudders*

Comments

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Speaking of conspirators in the act, there's a very good Tales from the Crypt episode that makes conscious for the audience what isn't shown here. A man with the ability to regenerate himself from death actually makes a living at a freak show by having people pay to kill him. It allows them to exorcise fantasies of murdering a man, and they cheer and clap as he dies, often painfully. It's sickening to see, but, at the same time, you also understand how they fall prey to the enjoyment of it--as long as it's not "real" (as Tesla pointed out in the film), it's okay to be horrible.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

There's actually a Highlander episode, "The Immortal Cimmoli," in which a newly minted Immortal, knowing nothing of what he is or the Game, uses his ability to be shot to death on stage every night. In that, though, they don't focus on the barbarity of that but the trivial use of Cimmoli's immortality. In the end Cimmoli can't turn away from the fame he can gain because of this and loses his head because of it.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It's a compelling story because it speaks to human greed and vanity, on both sides of the gun. If you were immortal, why wouldn't you try to make a few bucks off of it? It's very tempting.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

The episodes kind of cool because MacLeod and Amanda are trying to make Cimmoli see what a gift immortality is, but now that he is an Immortal he has to abandon his ties to mortal life. What Cimmoli is after -- immortality through fame, recognition, money -- are all purely mortal concerns and he can't get enough perspective to even see the possibilities of an immortal life. He's too grounded in his own life.

There's also a whole theme going through of his relationship to his mother. In order to survive as an immortal, he has to disappear for a while, get a new identity, hide until he is strong enough to fight. This is what Duncan tells him to do, but Cimmoli can't imagine running out on his devoted mother. Duncan doesn't seem to see this as that big a deal -- you're immortal now, your mortal life is over, she was part of that mortal life, you need to abandon her. Cimmoli clinging to the fame is partly to fulfill his mother's dreams.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Ah, the many faces of immortality, and how hard it is to really leave mortality behind. Another good theme to play with. It's interesting to consider how hard it would be to let go of fear of death as an immortal. It was a terrible movie, but one of my favorite scenes in The Crow: Salvation shows the Crow from that film immediately disabusing himself and a future victim of the notion that mortal concerns are his by first shooting himself in the face and then crashing the car they're both in and surviving. What you do as an immortal says more about your view of mortality--and how close it is to you--than words. If you cannot let go of all versions of immortality, you're going to drop one of the threads, and it might be the literal immortality, which is what sounds like what happened in that Highlander ep...