i could be brave

Sunday, June 19, 2005

Independent Movie Night With Jamie

Categories: Art • Life • Movies • Religion • Stories • Writing

I have a friend named Ricardo.  He is quite an interesting guy.  Anyone who knows him can back that up. 

He called me up the other night and said he was going to watch a couple of movies at a some of the independent theaters here in Portland.  I’m always up for a movie (movies in this case) and I had been working myself sick on the redesign of this site so I went along.

Turns out both movies were on the strange side. In completely different ways.

First up was In The Realms Of The Unreal at the Hollywood Theater.  Realms was a documentary about the life, art, and writing of Henry Darger.  I had seen Darger’s artwork before but I had no idea about the man himself or his novel that so consumed his life. 

Darger had a pretty rough childhood that was partly the result of circumstance and partly the result of his own actions.  I don’t know what was different about him but my armchair assessment is that he had autism.

After the death of his father Darger was moved to an orphanage.  His inability to relate to those around him quickly resulted in his being kicked out of school and then moved to an insane asylum.

After escaping from the insane asylum as a young boy Darger started was going to consume the rest of his life.  Darger’s lifelong work involved a giant illustrated novel (titled The Realms of the Unreal) about the Christian Vivian Girls seven sisters who looked 10 and acted in turn like wizened warriors or angelic all too perfect naive little girls.  The novel was 15,000 pages long and filled with Darger’s accompanying illustrations.  Darger was apparently fixated on young girls though in what seems a mostly innocent way.  His lack of knowledge of the female form however, resulted in some very strange nude drawings.  I’ll let you figure out what I mean on your own.

Darger spent the rest of his life as an impoverished recluse working as a janitor during the day and spending his nights writing and painting.  His landlords, a priest, and a few neighbors were the only ones to take an even passing interest in the man.  An interest that he did his best to put off.  No one even knew what he was doing until he became too sick to live in his apartment anymore.  It was then that his work was discovered.

The part of the film that interested me the most involved his relationship with God.  Darger was incredibly devout church goer.  He went to mass at his local Catholic church nearly every day of the week and sometimes more than once a day.  Darger’s prayers revolved mostly around his wanting to adopt a girl.  Darger was not in a position mentally or financially to take care of a child and so his prayers were never answered.  Darger was incredibly upset about this and it led him to rebel against God. The rebellion was reflected in his novel as most of his life was and it was only in the end that the novel came back around to its former support of the Christian forces and the triumph of the Vivian Girls.  Yet, even in the end Darger left it open to question by writing an alternate ending in which the Christian forces. 

In his own writings Darger stated that it was an illustrated comic book about the dangers of sin and hell that resulted in his turn back to God.  An example of how Darger was still very immature in his understanding of the way the world (and God) works.  At the same time Darger was obviously an intelligent man. 

I personally took something different from the alternate endings.  In real life you don’t always win.  Christian or not, we are free, and so are those around us.

The second movie was at Cinema 21 (aptly named since it is on 21st ave downtown Portland).  The movie was OldBoy a Korean film that was twisted in ways that people here would probably have a fit about if it were released to standard theaters. 

The extremely intense movie follows the life of Dae-su a normal (so we are told) Korean guy who likes to drink a little too much.  After one of his drunken binges he wakes up in a prison.  The prison is strange in that no one will tell him what he has done or why he is there.  Periodically he will be put to sleep using a gas pumped into his room and things he cannot remember are done to him.  His prison room has a TV in it from which he learns that his wife has been murdered (he is the main suspect but the police do not know where he is).

Dae-su spends the rest of the movie trying to figure out why all of these things have happened to him. 

I won’t go into the movie in any more detail since this one actually has a plot and you may not want that spoiled for you.  The movie is well made, incredibly stylish, entertaining, and a little sick.  I could have done without the twisted stuff.  Koreans and film festival people seem to like it though since the movie is receiving accolades.

So there you go.  Independent movie night with Jamie.

Posted by Jamie at 09:58 PM