The Invisible Counterpoint

This is how Lupita Nhyong'o describes the shooting of the whipping scene in "12 Years a Slave":  And being there was more then enough to handle. "The reality of the day was that I was stripped naked in front of lots of people," Nyong'o said. "It was impossible to make that a closed set. In fact, I didn't even as for it to be a closed set, because at the end of the day, that was a privilege not granted to Patsey, you know? It really took me there. It was devastating to experiencing that, and to be tied to a post and whipped. Of course, I couldn't possible be really whipped. But just hearing the crack of that thing behind me, and having to react with my body, and with each whip, get weaker and weaker …" She grew quiet, and sighed. "I mean, it was -- I didn't practice it. It was just -- it was an exercise of imagination and surrender."  Lupita was trying to become as close as she could to the actual Patsey, out of fidel...

I think we're mostly familiar with ceremonies where we do anointing. Certainly, if we can imagine a context where humiliation would prove most devastating it'd probably be at a ceremony where someone thought themselves due an honor -- "Carrie," "Good Fellas." "We labored long to adore you, only so to prime your hope, your exposure … and then rather than a ladder up we descended the slops, and hoped, being smitten, you'd judged yourself worthless protoplasm -- a nothing, for letting yourselves hope you might actually be something -- due to be chuted into Hades or Hell." Ostensibly, nothing of the sort occurred during Oscars 2013, where the host, Seth Macfarlane, did a number featuring all the gorgeous Oscar-winning actresses in attendance who sometime in their careers went topless, and pointed this out to them. And it didn't -- not quite. Macarlane would claim that all obscenity would be directed back at him, for being the geek so pathe...

Viewing the earth from space is supposed to be one of those opportunities to chuck off familiar ways of apprehending your lived life into a baptism where cognitive categories need to be reapplied … hold on, it's not just blue sea vs. brown terra which this view tells me it is, but of course the Pacific Ocean, and that chunk of terra is California,  and so on.  It's supposed to be one of those chances where in feeling an actual effort to reapply our entire normal way of perceiving, we feel in ourselves the capacity to change … the "us" in us can flow into a better mold. But though in certain kinds of cultural contexts this realization/rapture can be magnified -- like during the space launch, the utopian 1960s -- in some it can be virtually nullified as the fact that it's simply a view from a height lends it strictly not to perspective but to orientation. Arrogant, aristocratic -- entirely-not-our-own -- orientation. I've heard of differing agents in rega...

"Her"  The power of this fusion fantasy can be seen in a simple  experiment that has been repeated over and over again by Silverman and his group.  They showed subliminal messages to hundreds of people, and found that only one —" MOMMY AND I ARE ONE”— had an enormous emotional effect, reducing their  anxieties and pathologies and their smoking and drinking addictions measurably.  “Daddy and I are one” had no effect.  "Iron Man 3" Warriors become fused with the powerful mother that masturbated them during menstruation; they then decorate themselves with menstrual blood-red paint so they can appropriate the fearful power of their Killer Mothers. Wars in early civilizations are fought on behalf of and against Killer  Goddesses, bloodthirsty mothers like Tiamat, Ishtar, Inanna, Isis or Kali. Typical is  the Aztec mother- goddess Hiutzilopochtli, who had “mouths all over her body” that  cried out to be fed the blood of soldiers. ...

12 Years a Slave (Review Part One) 
I've only seen one film this year that kinda gets at how someone could become a person as sadistic as Fassbender's slaveowner is in this film. Insidious 2 got how a little, vulnerable boy, completely owned by an absolutely terrifying mother, was going to have no chance building an independent self apart from her. His life was on the line, and you can imagine how a six or eight or however old a boy he was, would have a brain formed largely on ensuring he does nothing outside of what she wants. The point of life ... is to not be devoured. And the great homo sapiens brain of his would be using all its evolutionary excellence to contrive means to ensure he manages this--even if this means making him into someone who would be to any sane outsider, deviant, insane ... strangely ill-purposed to what life would confront him with. The rest of the world does not realize that this one brain alone negotiated avoiding oblivion! What of if i...