20210508

I had the thought today – I’m not fully convinced that it was quite a revelation, or even a reflecttion – that I do not understand revenge. I read stories, watch movies, etc. that are full of the desire of one person to get back at another person for having done (or supposedly) done one thing or another. I don’t understand this. It makes literally no sense to me.

I mean, I get it, eye for an eye and so on, but I don’t feel it. Maybe it’s that I’ve led such a sheltered, relationship-free existence (for the most part, anyway). And in those moments when I have been ‘wronged’ (i.e. broken up with) what I feel is a twisting and a gnawing like my stomach has become an angry badger that is slowly having its head twisted off.

But I have no motivation to do anything about it. I have no impulse to kidnap and murder her cat, or key her car, or, you know, force her to watch as I cut out the hearts of innocent strangers. Or whatever.

And I notice that my stories are generally missing that element too. I am more or less incapable of writing a really frightening character, because all of my characters are intelligible. There is a logic to their behaviour N, or Belinda, or Gerald, they’re all twisted in their own way, but there’s no malice there.

But, like in the killing of a sacred deer, the doctor “accidentally” kills the kid’s father, and the kid’s solution, his way of balancing the books is that the doctor needs to kill one of his kids. And he is adamant that this should happen, that it is the only course, and he manipulates circumstances (admittedly through some kind of magic) such that the course is followed. And so the drama of the thing is in the doctor being sucked towards the inescapable conclusion which is that he shoots his son.

And it’s the adamance, I think, that I can’t grok. I tend to be an accomodating rationaliser, I make it easy for other people, I explain away their behaviour and lean mega heavy on empathy. And this is the weakness of my characterisations: they have too much empathy. They have as much empathy as I have, which is 100,000% more than your average person. And so there’s always this sense of safety, of dull edges on the blades, blanks in the handguns, filed-down fangs.

In other news:

The thing about the killing of a sacred deer, and or Yorgos Lanthimos movies in general – the ones he writes himself, anyway – is that there is always some piece of reality that is broken. Either a social rule, or the law of cause and effect, there is always a lingering feeling of something being not quite right in the world. And it is this not quite right that energises the story. Clearly there is something going on here, and the purpose of watching the movie is to figure out what that thing is. The scenes and the dialogue are all motivated by that wrongness and so none of what is going on ever feels like it is something that is just happening. It feels like something magical and strange and exciting and anxiety inducing and enthralling. You can’t stop watching until the brokenness is either fixed or explained.

It’s the same with Mr Vertigo, and the Palahniuk books, and Harry Potter, and the Narnia series. Either hidden worlds within the normal world, private realities where the rules are less strict, or someone or some means of learning how to manipulate the rules.