The bodies of other people are heinous things to me. They fill me with equal parts fascination and disgust, to know that portions of creation such as myself march around fulfilling electrical impulses, contextualising these after the moment with mythic motivations and/or excuses supported by psychology and history. It's a wild trip. The distance between sex and fear has recently started closing for me which is alarming. It's not your average fear of intimacy but a cosmic horror of these bodies and this culture and this species and the fact of anything existing at all over the relative calm of non-existence which I can hold in my mind as a tonic; obviously I have no actual experience at being parcel to The Void but as a reprieve from consciousness I envisage it like an unending spa of gentle lighting and fluffy towels and soothing Muzak. Maybe I'm just tired or still coming down from the weekend.
I watched Parasite last night and it's pretty much everything people are saying it is, as flooring as it was to see a foreign language film win Best Picture and one with such strong anti-capitalist sentiments at that. A token gesture at dissidence by The Academy? Because as we've learned from the non-committal woke-ness of Netflix and the cynicism of Disney nothing sells like capitalism flagellating itself for the cool kids. It too played with expressions of class through dirt, grime, physical presences, smell, 'crossing the line'. As someone who has always had an excessive sweating issue due to my body temperature sitting somewhere between a convection oven and the molten core of the sun, when poorer characters expressed shame in their bodies for bearing the tell-tale signs of poverty, for bearing residual traces of class-origins, I shifted uncomfortably and sympathised completely. No matter how cleaned up I get, no matter how fixated on class mobility I become in my professional strivings (whatever those are), I am also so painfully aware of myself in this body which willingly betrays me, which pisses the working-class accessory of sweat when I least expect or desire it.
As far as crossing the line goes I feel like my obsessions with public sex and sex in massive violent not always super enjoyable quantities comes down to a death wish inside this shame, a will to transcending bodily shame (for being a stopper to class mobility) by immersing in the body completely, by exhausting it's power over me. So is there a light at the end of this tunnel in exhaustive methodical over-abundant fucking? Am I trying to fuck myself into a better, richer, whiter version of myself? A version of myself which isn't burdened by a toxic central nucleus that some vague intuition has me convinced I can fuck away like a reverse-STI? Is it really possible to fuck away my body-held class-shame?
I guess we'll see.
I have lately become more aware of the incentives within myself that call me to hurt myself, in sanctioned consumerist ways. The kinds of ways which friends and family are oblivious to because they're also participants in this regimen of slow death. We will sometimes even call it 'healthy'. What's worse is some of these practices are tethered to identity, so on top of being internal to metrics of marketable harm they've been assimilated as demarcations of self-hood and so frequently experienced as empowering. What a fucking joke.
I mean smoking, drinking, fastfood; all that seemingly benign stuff which actually orbits a threshold of indifference towards myself as a body, as a unit of metabolic configurations scoping it's environment and selectively ingesting pieces of it. Am I just having a Gwyneth Paltrow moment? Is this sudden concern over purity of the body, stemming from an abrupt and violent bodily disgust, a latent expression of a deeper misanthropy? Which is exactly where I'm placing Paltrow's absurd curation of what enters (and exits) her body, a practically fascist policing of her physical borders.
Bong Joon Ho (director of Parasite) has always fixated on themes of class and imperialistic capitalism. He has generally done this in his films through a dark humour, but nothing's approached the kind of thesis-moment of Parasite in which the comedy is filtered heavily through affective domestic horror. So heavy that the comedy is experienced as despair, the same despair of it's characters trapped in structural nightmares which even more hellishly resemble the oppressive capitalistic forces organising our world today. Since his debut film The Host in the early noughties he has concerned himself with the effects of imperial culture mostly through it's ravages on the family, and how while bringing people together in nuclear units it then goes about testing these bonds and inducing stress and trauma by tearing them apart, maybe from an anxiety that it could always be doing things more efficiently or lucratively and so never allowing it's (mostly passive) participants to relax.
In The Host the imperial nightmare was embodied by a monster created by an American pharmaceutical company dumping chemicals into a river. In Snowpiercer (oddly Ho's earliest English speaking film and pitted as his mainstream cross-over, a moment he arguably wouldn't actually have until his Korean-language film Parasite), bioengineering against climate change has induced a new ice age and the only survivors are passengers on an ark-like train presided over by a paternal engineer-god Wilford, with each section of the train representing a class in humanity's hierarchical organisation. Finally there's Okja which extends these environmental themes into justice for animals, interrogating the ethics of meat diets and markets while also lambasting the politics around both activism AND capitalism.
For director Ho Parasite feels like a natural arrival point, the least fantastic of his films in terms of setting, but in it's realism the most brutal and challenging for acting as a mirror and refusing to take sides with it's affluent oppressors or destitute victims; rather, proceedings are concerned with displaying a Greek-tragedy style narrative structure in which everyone is sustaining damage in one form or other and are all variously complicit.
It's some harrowing funny-not-funny nightmare shit and a litmus of how close to the end of itself this system is, really. The hate and rage it generates, perhaps even more so than the ecologically desolating practices it's premised on, are unsustainable and are hurtling us towards bloody implosion. Ho seems to think we will probably tear ourselves apart before the environmental reckoning even occurs.
I tend to agree.
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