SubVerse

Watching Pasolini’s Salò this weekend – a suggestion from the director on my current screenplay Kite – seems to have had a lasting effect on my psyche.

Kite’s based on an X-Rated Japanese anime, that we’re attempting to reimagine as a gritty, 70s style, artful exploitation flick, that pushes imagery of violence and sex in daring and uncompromising ways. Our influences are ranging from Lukas Moodyson’s Lilya-4-Ever to Chan-Wook Park’s Oldboy to Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible.

Salò, which I had never seen, seemed an obvious reference to add to the list. But it’s had a deeper impact on me than I expected. It’s made me particularly, queasily sensitive to images and descriptions of violence – which suddenly seem to be everywhere around me.

If I went to sleep after watching Salò that night (or rather, early that morning) with dark and disturbed dreams – the dreams have spread into my waking life in the days since…

- Reading this morning, references to rich young women being raped and scalped in Salman Rushdie’s Fury – imagery that was directly out of Salò.

- Reading in bed last night, an unexpected scene of gay erotica, a man being shaved by a straight razor, in David Benioff’s short story “Merde for Luck” – which was not violent, but turned my stomach with fear as it conjured images from Salò in my head.

- Over my coffee at Jack’s on West 10th, where I’m sitting now, a description in the New York Times by the French woman who had the partial face transplant last week. She describes the moment of waking up from an attempted sleeping pill suicide, and trying to light a cigarette. Confused that she couldn’t get the cigarette to stay between her lips. Looking in the mirror, and discovering that her labrador had chewed off her lips and chin and nose and cheeks.

- An article in the Village Voice I picked up, about the extended scenes of torture in the new horror film Hostel, comparing it to recent films of unrelenting cruelty, Wolf Creek and The Devils Rejects. How Hostel has been the highest grossing film for two weeks. And how Americans seem hungry for deeply disturbing images of sadism in our current political climate.

In the recent past, I could have let these descriptions filter into my consciousness without too much disturbance – maybe even, some titilation at their subversive button-pushing. But these past few days, since witnessing the deeply realistic acts of torture and sadism on my bedroom television screen, the merest mention of violence has made my stomach twist viscerally. And I’ve felt a heavy darkness fill up my chest, like from an imaginary gas pump shoved down my throat.

There’s a positive side to this, sure. Salò has removed my defenses – my mind’s normal ability to dismiss violence in the real world – by simply not engaging it. This modern inability to be shocked that we all worry about publicly, but secretly congratulate ourselves on. I had this same experience last year, after daring myself to watch one of those internet videos from Iraq, of a young man having his head sawed off. That instantly and deeply tore away my defenses, and for weeks afterward, I was incredibly sensitive to violence. But, to what end?

I’m not a violent person. I don’t need to have my awareness of the reality of violence raised, in order to inspire compassion and curb my cruel sadistic tendencies.

I’m an artist. (Well, a screenwriter.) Struggling with the question of whether or not, or to what extent, to include images of sadism in my work.

Because, I feel like there’s another, deeply negative effect that Salò has had on me. As my stomach has become increasingly susceptible to the violence around me, as my skin has become more porous and quick to crawl at sights of blood, I’ve started having very dark flashes. I’d describe them as waves of existential nausea. Where I suddenly become filled up with the feeling that this world is a very, very sinister place – inescapable and slaloming toward the abyss.

It’s a feeling I imagine people in asylums for the criminally insane have filling their heads on a permanent basis. Where all you see around you is the horrific. Where every new description of terror, every sight of a chewed up bone on the street, every disintegrating old man in a wheelchair staring helplessly as they’re pulled out of the world, compounds the horror you feel.

But for me, it’s only come in brief waves. Like a stab of adrenaline when the floor drops out from under you.

I’m very lucky. I have the kind of constitution that quickly overpowers the deep fears, with a strong assurance that the world is good.

And maybe that means I’m blind. Maybe I’ve been absurdly lucky, one of the rare people in the world to have witnessed no horror, to have experienced no trauma, no war, no genocide, no holocaust. And maybe films like Salò exist to wake me out of my stupidity, to see the true violence of the world.

But, as I lay in bed the other night, feeling the tremors and the guilt – another idea came to me.

Maybe there’s a reason I’ve been so blessed. Maybe there’s a higher purpose, if such a thing exists, for why I’ve been given both a peaceful life and a gift of writing.

Because, this world is a very sinister place, filled with horror. But it is also a stunningly beautiful place, filled with everyday acts of exquisite kindness. For every person whose head is sawed off on the internet by a desperate extremist or whose face is chewed off by their labrador while they try to escape from their life in their sleep – someone else falls in love. For the first time. And sees a world suddenly filled with light, brimming with possibility. Someone’s life is saved by an unexpected kindness, someone opens their home to a stranger and is rewarded with gratitude, someone passes out of this world in peace – and feels only joy as they are lifted away.

And it is that simultaneous crashing of contradictory realities that makes this world so complex and delicious.

Heard a great line on TV at 4 in the morning last night when I couldn’t sleep: “Know what the two best words in the English language are? Things Change.”

And maybe, this is my job. To see it all, and to write about what I can see. To remind those whose eyes are mired in the darkness, that the world is also made of light and that things change. And to remind those who are incapable of feeling the darkness, because they’ve never seen it, that the world is not kind to everyone and that everything changes.