He Confuses the Public with the Private
That’s a paraphrase, or it might be an accurate quote extracted from a review of Oliver Stone’s film Natural Born Killers that I saw floating around on the internet recently. It’s hard to say, since I can’t locate the review anymore. Still the words of the critic have been ringing in my mind for some time. He confuses the public with the private. This statement was thrown out as a bit of qualifying criticism of Oliver Stone’s ultraviolent satire on America’s obsession with celebrity and … ultraviolence.
It’s hard to know exactly what this critic meant with their words, though I think he or she (probably he) meant to say that Oliver Stone shared too much of his own sexuality while making Natural Born Killers. There are all these strange sexual grace notes in the film (for lack of a better term) that bubble up to the surface and don’t seem to have much to do with the plot. Just off the top of my head I remember some strange nipple-twisting between Tom Sizemore and Juliet Lewis, as well as some erotic asphyxiation between the Sizemore character and a prostitute at a seedy motel.
Are these Mr. Stone’s personal paraphilias? Should they not be up on the big screen? Does it matter? I don’t have the answer to any of these questions, though they’ve been running through my mind, so I might as well share them with the one or two people who may stumble upon this blog entry in the next decade or so.
Anyway, the only answer that I can half-produce to the questions above is a bit convoluted, but here goes: Yes, Oliver Stone (and Spike Lee and David Lynch) are rare directors who throw private elements of their ids on the screen, and I find it fascinating (if not always enjoyable) to see what’s going on deep inside someone else’s head, if only because one just does not see it very often. Even directors with the reputation of auteur usually present their hobbyhorses or personal obsessions in such a way as to conceal as much as to reveal. Very few people in any artform are willing (or even eager) to show the worst parts of themselves. An even smaller group can’t seem to help themselves. Their darkest parts pound their way to the surface like a telltale heart, all obstacles and consequences and torpedoes be damned.
Imagine, though, if we literally had no control over what we wrote, that books were just sometimes literal aggregations of private thoughts we fear others might know, or whose discovery we suppressed, even from ourselves?
It would probably produce a much more interesting literary landscape than I see when I usually pick a book at random off a bookshelf at the library or the bookstore and start reading. Humans are, for evolutionary reasons, herd animals, who even when outcasted, are hardwired not to piss off the wrong people. Maybe even a hermit cares what others think, or may think, when he puts quill to parchment.
The director David Cronenberg once said words to the effect that we’re all obligated in our real lives to be good citizens, but conversely in our creative lives the inverse is true. Sadly, I think a lot of people can’t shake the Good Citizenship Chip even when alone, even when laboring under a penname. But who knows?
It’s hard to know exactly what this critic meant with their words, though I think he or she (probably he) meant to say that Oliver Stone shared too much of his own sexuality while making Natural Born Killers. There are all these strange sexual grace notes in the film (for lack of a better term) that bubble up to the surface and don’t seem to have much to do with the plot. Just off the top of my head I remember some strange nipple-twisting between Tom Sizemore and Juliet Lewis, as well as some erotic asphyxiation between the Sizemore character and a prostitute at a seedy motel.
Are these Mr. Stone’s personal paraphilias? Should they not be up on the big screen? Does it matter? I don’t have the answer to any of these questions, though they’ve been running through my mind, so I might as well share them with the one or two people who may stumble upon this blog entry in the next decade or so.
Anyway, the only answer that I can half-produce to the questions above is a bit convoluted, but here goes: Yes, Oliver Stone (and Spike Lee and David Lynch) are rare directors who throw private elements of their ids on the screen, and I find it fascinating (if not always enjoyable) to see what’s going on deep inside someone else’s head, if only because one just does not see it very often. Even directors with the reputation of auteur usually present their hobbyhorses or personal obsessions in such a way as to conceal as much as to reveal. Very few people in any artform are willing (or even eager) to show the worst parts of themselves. An even smaller group can’t seem to help themselves. Their darkest parts pound their way to the surface like a telltale heart, all obstacles and consequences and torpedoes be damned.
Imagine, though, if we literally had no control over what we wrote, that books were just sometimes literal aggregations of private thoughts we fear others might know, or whose discovery we suppressed, even from ourselves?
It would probably produce a much more interesting literary landscape than I see when I usually pick a book at random off a bookshelf at the library or the bookstore and start reading. Humans are, for evolutionary reasons, herd animals, who even when outcasted, are hardwired not to piss off the wrong people. Maybe even a hermit cares what others think, or may think, when he puts quill to parchment.
The director David Cronenberg once said words to the effect that we’re all obligated in our real lives to be good citizens, but conversely in our creative lives the inverse is true. Sadly, I think a lot of people can’t shake the Good Citizenship Chip even when alone, even when laboring under a penname. But who knows?
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