Ben’s Reviews > Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film > Status Update

Movies—the truly great ones (and sometimes the truly bad)—should be a drop in the overall fuel formula for your life. A fuel that should include sex and love and food and movement and friendships and your own work. All of it, feeding the engine. But the engine of your life should be your life.

Black tee. An image on the front—grainy, me on the toilet, clutching the toilet paper wad. Scowling at the lens. And around the image, in a circle, was: “Tool Fucked the Shit out of Me at the Palladium and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt.” Lmao oh man this book just gets better and better.

Van Gogh did have true, crackling genius inside of him. But it didn’t save him, and despite what I always believed about how absolute geniuses must view the world and move through it, unencumbered by sentiment or responsibility, van Gogh didn’t look to his genius to save him. He wanted to live in—and be saved by—the world.

Does anyone act more like an overserious senior citizen with time running out on their chance for immortality than someone in their twenties?

Show your kids Irreversible, Salo or The Last Temptation of Christ before you show them any silent film. Even the benign ones are unintended windows into stuttery, subconscious terror rhythms.