After Further Thought

• 13 Jun 2005
• conferences,
• watching

After further thought, I’ve decided that there was something more to last night’s film than I’ve given it credit for, and that the protracted nature of its brutal imagery was up to something more serious than what it seemed, on first glance. There’s something in the duration of the images, and the length of the film, that forces the viewer to really encounter the horror of war, to move beyond a desire to look away, to understand that desire as a displacement of one’s wish not to see, to produce instead a visceral response to the damage. To be brutalized, as are those we watch.

Again, or so I think today. But I was much too wrung out, much too tired and without emotional reserves, to have been able to fully participate and adequately respond last night.

Today continues in a thoroughly draining fashion. More this evening, if I can manage it.

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