Today is the fourth day since the end of school, which was on Thursday and which also marked my last day of exams - the exam was precalculus. In a wild come-back victory, I managed to maintain my scraped A for this quarter while also pulling up my cumulative year-round grade to an A, to a 95.somethingsomething to be exact, and so that will be the only grade that colleges will see - which is an almighty relief after some of the stress that has plagued me this year over my interim B's.
I'm back on the employment warpath, and my efforts are being triangulated toward Mayberry, where I'd really like to work, and Harris Teeter, where the hiring manager was really nice.
Apart from that, my mom and I are just going to hang out for the next few days until my dad is finished with one of his classes (his exam is on Thursday, I think) - I'm going to have Stormy over, and we're not going to watch "Chicago," (that is, if I have any say in it).
Speaking of movies, I finished my third Fabrice Luchini film as part of my campaign to practice watching French films without subtitles over the summer in order to improve my hearing comprehension skills. Why am I targeting films which cast M. Luchini? Partially because he seems to be cast by alternative-style directors, which is sort of interesting to see in other cultures - also partially because I found him to be a very charming and skilled actor in the relatively-recent film "Paris," and, particularly in some of his earlier films, I find him to be rather handsome. However, in "La Discrete," which is the one that I finished last night, they cast him into this awful role: His girlfriend breaks up with him at a train station and he decides to take revenge on all women (the idea is given to him by his publisher) by picking a girl at random, making her fall in love with him, and then ditching her ruthlessly (and publishing a diary-form account of it, to add insult to injury). Whereas a Hollywood film of this sort would have a happy, gloopy ending, where they eventually fall in love and he discards his plans to live with the victimized girl, this director didn't have any such ending in mind. Suffice it to say that it is not a feel-good movie. But the more I reflect on it, the more I think that it was well-done for what it was - the director took an absurd situation and had it played out in the most realistic way possible - no gloopy endings in reality (not saying there aren't happy ones, but there's no gloop, ladies and gentlemen).
Next, my dream last night was not of great consequence, but I've taken to chronicling them as I've found that the more I record them, the more of them I have, and the more vivid and interesting they are. It may have been of greater consequence had I written about it earlier this morning when it was still pretty fresh in my mind, but alas! - that is not what I did. In any case, the dream was definitely influenced, I believe, by my increased absorption of film recently, and it included a jumble of a lot of stuff. For example, I was watching part of "Mean Girls" last night with Heather, and one of the characters, Janice, manifested in my dream (she's the artsy one who was dressed like a goth stereotype) - in the dream, she was waking up and singing - I was watching in the third person, and I remember being tremendously affected by her joy. That was all of that part of the dream. In the next part, I was at some film festival out in a hilly, reddish landscape (I can't really describe it much better than this because these are the only attributes I remember - perhaps it was reddish because the sun was either setting or rising the whole time?). There were different tents where people were camping and also where movies were being shown, all grouped together on the hilltops. An actress who had played the antagonist in one of the thriller/mystery films when she was younger was attending (I don't know if it was a real film or a fake one, but I don't remember the title in any case). In the dream I recall seeing her arrive, walking to where some of us were congregated outside of the tents - she must have been famous enough for me to recognize her instantly, because I was immediately filled with a mixed sense of intimidation (remembering her role, I suppose) and admiration (remember how well she had played her role). It seemed like she was one of the special guests who would be introducing the films before they were played. I spoke to her while we were waiting for the tent to be opened and found that she was very easy to talk to (which I didn't expect, for some reason, from a celebrity) - she was a few years older than me and had a soft, rather childish voice. Eventually one of the wizened directors opened the flap of the tent and beckoned everyone inside, where it was cool and dark and blessedly air-conditioned. At one point of the dream, I was looking around the tent for a boy who may or may not have been my boyfriend/husband...it got fuzzy after a while, and then I woke up.
Now, to comment back on the last post I made, where I was speculating about that universal quality that good horror directors tap into: my dad supplied a really insightful answer the other day when he was driving me to the seniors' graduation ceremony (where I would be functioning as a junior marshal). Somehow R. L. Stine came up (the Goosebumps author) and my dad asked me if I had ever tried to write a horror story - I told him that I had when I was little, because I was more into that sort of thing back then, but had not for a long while because writing a good horror story is quite difficult, if you've never tried it before - and he said that I should, now that my writing skills are somewhat more honed than they were when I was 6 and 7. To which I replied that I had indeed been sort of sitting on the idea because I had been contemplating the universal quality of horror that directors and authors tap into to produce good work.
He was then curious about the conclusion that I had come to, and I responded rather lamely that I thought that the fundamental fear that people grappled with was the concept of something behaving in a way that it should not, or something having different characteristics than it should. He nodded, and then explained the thing much more eloquently using Kabbalistic principles (the Kabbala or Cabala refers to "a system of esoteric theosophy and theurgy developed by rabbis, reaching its peak about the 12th and 13th centuries, and influencing certain medieval and Renaissance Christian thinkers. It was based on a mystical method of interpreting Scripture by which initiates claimed to penetrate sacred mysteries. Among its central doctrines are, all creation is an emanation from the Deity and the soul exists from eternity," according to dictionary.com). Like the definition says, this branch of theology is noted for believing that creation occurred in emanations - I think that there are ten of them. In any case, and he didn't explain this fully so I had to guess the middle part, my dad started referring to these emanations as "husks" of God, which leads me to believe that the Kabbalists viewed these emanations as expansions of holy light that were somewhat retracted upon the Fall of man, which would leave creation as a sort of husk without the holy light that had filled it. My father then hypothesized that, according to these principles, any "husk" or incomplete version of a thing can be viewed as "bad" or frightening now because it is associated with the husk of creation caused by the Fall of man. This is why a skeleton is frightening on a fundamental level, or a corpse, because it is the husk of a human being. Ghosts are also husks of human beings, and I think that the husk idea can be further applied to masks or any other thing which hides something, or seems to hide something, since it is an empty, storage husk in relation to whatever it is hiding. For example, the dark is a husk that hides whatever horror a child imagines to dwell in it. The fear of spiders is a husk for some deeper fear that was pushed off on spiders (this is a theory explored by the Psychologist Scott Peck in one of his books). As for the fear of death, I don't think that one can get any more direct than that, and so I don't think that that fits into the husk theory - it sits by itself in the realm of homicide films, along with the fundamental fear of pain.
So, why are the "Exorcist" girl's gymnastic feats so frightening to people? I think that it is because the way that she descends the stairs is very inhuman (which is sort of obvious because she's possessed by a demon at the time) - in fact, if you look up the stunt on youtube, it is famously described as a "spider walk." So, not only does she function in this scene as the husk of a little girl who's been inhabited by a demon (she has that going for her almost the whole movie), she also has these spider characteristics (or a spider husk which is hiding her little girl characteristics) associated with her, and given that spiders are things that a lot of people are afraid of, it is an effective image to plaster over a little girl and frighten people with. If you've watched any zombie movies, or really, any ghost movies where the ghosts are moving fast or crawling for whatever reason, the modern filmmakers are fond of making them move with these jerking movements that immediately evoke the image of a spider. This really disappoints my mother, because she is a zombie-film puritan and she thinks that zombies should only be allowed to walk with their arms outstretched, moaning, "Brains...." As for me, I could care less - live and let unlive, whatever they say.
And on that terrible joke, I've run out of steam.
