Bowling, Bloodblisters, and Brazil

I got a group together to go bowling last night. It ended up being pretty interesting. I rolled a 122 my first game, a 127 my second game, and had a strike and two spares after four frames in the third when our time ran out and Rock 'n Bowl started. Here's the thing, though.

Last week, while moving my bed frame, I sliced open the pad of my right thumb. It's been tenderly closed for a few days.

You know how cuts on your finger tips have that really pink, smooth skin around them that doesn't even have fingerprint sworls on it yet? Well, as I bowled, my thumb started hurting more and more. Then, I started noticing that I was bleeding under my skin, little creepers of blood seeping into that virgin, undifferentiated thumb pad tissue. It's not pretty, and it hurts.

True to my title, I have another topic to consider. One that is somewhat painful to me. Almost ten years ago, if you asked me what my favorite movie was, I would have, hands down, said Brazil. I watched it again this morning. This was a mistake.

It was just as textured and rich and visually compelling as I remembered it being, but it was also really, really, really not interesting in its story. I mean, yes, granted, I have come to know and despise some of Freud's work since I last saw the film, but that's really not it. It isn't just a gut reaction against all the cheaply Freudian symbology--at least I think it isn't. The thing just doesn't go anywhere. I remember distinctly that I used to start arguments about whether the end (of the director's cut) was supposed to signify that the entire story had taken place in his head (a possibility that allows one to forgive all of the considerable absurdities of the primary plot), or if the end was an extension of the "real" narrative (a possibility that certainly complicates the line between reality/dreams and/or sanity/insanity and/or collaboration/resistance). I found myself completely indifferent this time.

The main character is completely impossible to sympathize with, either when he thinks he's on the right side but isn't or when he is on the right side and is killing and destroying and ruining lives for no clear reason or politics except his delusion. Even with the clear political parallels with today's administration, I found Gilliam (and Stoppard and McKeown) to have no clear political statement to make that wasn't tied up in a kind of ludicrous Luddism and cringing paranoia.

Don't get me wrong. "Fascism is bad," is a fine starting point. It just doesn't really get us to the concept of terrorism very easily, or with enough tools to make sense of the questionable reality of the "terrorists." Ambiguity only drives a movie so far--even a movie clearly based on a palimpsestic, etymological dream-logic. Okay, so the first computers did get bugs in them. And that is why we have "bugs" in machines and computer programming, etc. But to combine that kind of chaos theory (a fly flaps its wings) with a theme of "cause and effect" without examining the first causes and nature of the society that's constructed seems...hollow? Seems never to get out of the logic of the dream. That Lowry will wake up and be in the real 20th century and no longer need to question, or struggle, or anything else.

But. Before I completely crap on this movie that I saw for the first time when I was four, I would like to say for the record that when I die from a spear thrust, my last thought will be to regret that pinkish orange jets and gouts of flame don't erupt from my wounds until my body turns to white ash, floating up until I stretch out in a gracious column of shifting, Brownian light. Because, to me, that film is beautiful, even if it is also, simultaneously, shitty.