read thomas mann’s death in venice? i’m not trying to be overtly literate here, but somehow the idea of art is invented for the sake of compensating your emotional obstacles which keep you from directly speaking of what you feel without some mediator in between. (in other words, cinephiles could be fucked-up people..correction: SOME cinephiles)..ok, let’s back to the death in venice, which is a story about writer who reaches his doom of death due to his obsession with the sight of a beautiful boy in venice, and he costs his life simply for more chances of gazing at the lad even in the face of contagious plague. so the point is, he dies for a love of some enchanting vision without even a touch of the actual thing, and he’s gazing into other’s life from the outside without any acutal involvement simply for a morbid satisfaction of optic, voyeuristic kind of delight. such ruinous passion has some rapturuous ecstacy, and it’s sheerly aesthetic for the sake of purposive disinterests and detached pleasure. yes, that is how cinema is to me: looking into others’ lives from the outside, circumvented within a dark room (theater, movie-box) for a grasp of abjected bliss, in which i could forget myself, put my life, my existence into obliviion as if i no longer exist, disappear for good, vanished into thin air…meanwhile life is passing through as i close my eyes, saturated in the fragments of fantasies as if nothing matters anymore, absorbed by the magnitudes of my dreams, which are woven by thousands of threads of excesive emotions from love, hate, sadness, joyful romances, secret delights which i feel too embarrased to confide to any living soul. in other words, I’M DREAMING MY LIFE AWAY within a series of moving images with people who surrogately live the life i want for me. sounds quite pathetic, right? also quite ritualistic as if each individual is turned to a nomad whose atoms of soul are floating upon the screen. IS IT A CURSE? i don’t know.
the love of cinema is like an ambivalent relationship torn with love/hate with a fucking cunt. sometimes, you want to be devoured by such giant cunt who bites, somehow you just wish to get the fuck away from her by putting on a book concerning politics, sociology, philosophy in order to de-toxicate your unhealthy love for her. some feminists say cinema is like woman, which people wish to possess, exploit with the aggression of their gazes. but some say, cinema is camp, an artice which conceptualizes your aesthetic perceptions with exaggerations.
to me, cinema is A PHANTASMAGORIA which satiates my masochistic want of self-erasure.
yeah, dreaming your life away, SO WHAT? it’s better to dream your life away than weep it away. (at least you could get some satisfaction in this case…the pun of that rolling stone song: i simply cannot get enough satisfactions)