Nicole Kidman, the post-modern Maya princess for the media age, has an amazing track record for playing women full of complex dichotomies that range both inside and outside the mirror of the image: TO DIE FOR (1993), DOGVILLE (2003), BIRTH (2004), and EYES WIDE SHUT (1998) are prime examples, each in its way a self-reflexive meditation on desire vs. the mechanations of reality, of the spiritual's derailment at the hands of sex. She's a hottie, tall and true, and heads above the rest. She lets herself be blankly led through life, snapping awake and lashing out like no one else, seeming to be both the best and worst actress at the same time, fearlessly sexual yet always remote, dissatisfied and in no mood to hide it or even change it. She slithers between moral extremes, from the shy twinkle of silent film virgins like Lillian Gish to the unapologetically homicidal sirens like Fu Fah Lo Suee. For a prime example, please see BIRTH and play close attention to the sex scene early on, and the long take of her face at the concert (above).
Now, hold that thought while we discuss Arab extremists and the "crime" of drawing their prophet, Muhammad. First, SOUTH PARK should be allowed to poke fun at anyone without fear of terrorist attack, but at the same time, we must bear in mind that the Muslim distrust of images has a sound grounding in "reality" - that is to say, they don't want to be hypnotized into a false reality. Consider them the opposite of Kidman's split subject. It's hard for us to imagine it--all media-hypnotized as we are here in the belly of the beast--but pretend you're watching a great movie and you're really into it and suddenly it's your life, there's no more dividing up your energy between fantasy and reality. Where the split world protests their government's atrocities by getting depressed and then getting some catharsis watching stuff blow up in Bruce Willis movies, the extremists are their own Bruce Willises. For them, perhaps, explosives are less dangerous than the seductive allure of the image, of desire-driven commodification aesthetics. Earthly death is nowhere near as terrible (for them) as the soul-eating vortex of the simulacrum. And who's to say they're wrong? Plato wouldn't.
TO DIE FOR tells the story of a girl who lives and breathes the desire to do the local evening news. She sleeps her way in, blackmails her way up, and murders all the way to the top, seducing poor Joaquin Phoenix into doing her dirty work. In DOGVILLE, we see the college education of the mediated celeb – the "slumming" of the elite, seeing how the other half lives and the eventual rejection of the townie mindset, with a bullet. This leads us to BIRTH and EYES WIDE, and the bitchy end-products of the social climbing. In EYES WIDE, for example, Kidman's wealthy uptown girl bristles at the fallow narcissism of her short, wealthy husband (Tom Cruise). He's 100% in the simulacrum and she at least has one foot outside it. All she has to do to set off her man is paint a picture in his mind of her fantasy ravishment at the hands of a lusty sailor and he's off tearing up the town, or rather, sauntering up to it and when it starts to tear back, running away like a little wuss.
Kidman's reality is that she just locked eyes with the sailor 'in real life.' She only imagines having the affair, a fantasy that no real sex with the man you've had a kid with can ever match. She accepts that and can live in both the imaginary and real levels, unlike say, Tom Cruise, who can't quite understand why her fantasy is so vivid in his mind. He ends up going to great lengths – renting costumes and taking cabs out to Long Island in the dead of night – to try and reconcile this split so he can escape the mirror, but even then he's too uptight and bound by desire to participate, because to participate would end the fantasy and thrust him into disillusionment and the real, which is actually what he wants but he doesn't quite know it. Sadomasochism and orgies are, in the end, perhaps truly enjoyable only as literature. When you make them real, something goes missing.
I guess it makes me mad because I've done the same thing. But thanks to Lacan and Baudrillard though, it makes some sense now -- the unconscious goes to great lengths to keep you hungry for succor at all times; Tom and I both made or make the mistake of confusing the real and fantasmatic levels. When our desire suddenly meets us smack in the face, we run away before we know quite what hit us. You may know the feeling: you're single and looking for love and suddenly you lock eyes with a beautiful creature from across the room. They walk over to say hi but before they even open their mouth, you run away, blushing! Why are you such a loser? You berate yourself all night, never perhaps realizing that the berating and longing are, themselves, the whole point. Once desire is quenched it inevitably leaves an empty taste on your soul's evolutionary tongue. Your unconscious knows this, so sabotages your every step.
Observe the photo still from EYES above: Nicole fixes an earring and looks over at Cruise in the mirror as he comes towards her, his eyes flashing himself a come-on like a narcissist in a candy store. Note that we don't see the sexy Cruise persona outside of the mirror-the figure in the far right of the image above seems like someone else, his arm lumpy, his nose big, his mouth slack--it's as if he doesn't even realize there is an outside to the mirror at all and so leaves it blank. Like many actors, he sees himself from afar, the way a video gamer sees his avatar so sudden proximity exposes his Brundlefly-like nature.The veiled contempt with which she observes the scene seems to indicate she understands this split; she's outside and inside the mirror; fully conscious of her unconscious.
Validated by his medical profession, Tom thinks there is only "this" reality, the one where he is rich, good looking and sociable. To even imagine a universe where money and social standing doesn't matter is beyond him, and the film is about him coming to grips with that, trying to crash a party out of his league and otherwise fumbling with the keys to physical gratification. Thus it's with ease that Nicole sends him hurtling through the Manhattan night; all she has to do is suggest the image in the mirror could be read in an entirely different way, as a mask; once outside the costume ball his mask – his medical authority, wealth and privilege – don't mean shit.
Similarly, masks, doubles, and mirror images are all evil concepts to a fundamentalist religion wherein reuniting splits and bringing everything back to a tangible, universal real is so important, especially since the fantastic imagery being force fed to them is not "theirs" per se, but the American dream machine juggernaut that streamlines all reality into a Wal-Mart /Starbucks strip mall. Thus the threats to the makers of graven images of Muhammad stems from this line-in-the-sand approach. "Make fun of us if you want, just leave this one thing unattacked." But of course we've lost so much in gaining all our cool shit, we can't even begin to understand that kind of deep devotion. We've forgotten we have a mask on and we resent being asked to take it off just as much as the fundamentalists resent us wanting to put one on their prophet.
you can notice abundant new and shatteringly depressing things: the dust and emptiness of the run-down pool halls and cafe arcades; the rickety realness of old phone booths, sun-faded scotch tape marks on pinball and cigarette machines, real coffee cups glittering with thumb prints, dirty spirits in the cigarette smoke; the terrible flatness of Parisian life witnessed through cafe windows; the narrow, sloping streets that seem to have no sky over them; provincial and ancient architecture encumbered with urban exhaust fume grime made so blu-ray clear in Criterion's excellent restoration that you can smell the unregulated car emissions, the inky tang of fresh newspapers, croissants, and coffee; the acrid haze of Gauloises, and most of all, Anna's big round head, shorn of her girly tresses in a smart bob, like a castrated Samsonette, crowding out the space at every turn, as if we can never quite escape the perfect isolation of her cranium.
("The Important thing is to Love") carries the torch of perversity with knowing references to all three of those aforementioned films, right up to having Georges Delerue do a kind of sequel to his unforgettable orchestral 
(1972), French actress Romy Schneider plays Nadine, a B-list French actress, hanging on by her nails in softcore (?) sex films. She can still look stunning in the right make-up and lighting, but Zulawski keeps her aging face ravaged by strange, pale, orange lighting; we can see the lines of anguish in the corners of her eyes, the world-weary drag of gravity and unfeeling exploitation film crews on her cheeks. Nadine's also burdened by the knowledge that she'd still be neck-deep in a world of prostitution and smack if not for the "Zorro-like" rescue of her otherwise ineffectual husband, Jacques, an autograph collecting cinephile played with intentionally irritating impishness-cum-starry-eyed self-loathing by sometimes-chanson singer 
films that have recently appeared in beautiful editions from Mondo Vision, L'important c'est d'aimer's style is form-fitted to the subtexts: voyeurism, cinema, the insanity that true art both requires and instills, and the spiritual purity of over-acting to a surreal degree. The camera moves in an around actors, leering over their shoulders like a pesky reporter. Often, the actors seem to be trying to get away from the camera, just to relax. They don't really acknowledge the camera directly, but they feel it watching, like a starlet on set might ignore a leering gaffer taping down the set around her. Who knows if this is what's happening? Is Zulawski deliberately annoying his actors to the point they're always about to storm out of the room? He'd still chase them
But not poor Erich, I have my memories and a very 
for the top row of my bookshelf--right next to Godard, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Romero, Argento y Fulci? N'cest pas? Do you feel the self-loathing? I am Jacques! Ach, wohin ist Klaus Kinski!!! Klaus, kommen Sie hier, bitte! Wir verrotten in der Hölle ohne Ihre Verrücktheit! 
is my guru. Yes, I know, that's a pretty bad choice for a guru.
wince. In that film Lansbury used her husband as the dummy while Palin is her own dummy and I dig that. I dig when girls rise up and use their sexual super powers for evil instead of good, and if they can't have their revenge on Seattle like Francis Farmer in that Nirvana song, then let them destroy all the side-burned swingers, angry lawyers, priests, parents, and homeless they can get their claws on! Hence my deep love for: 
, 
, 
, and so on (if you know any others, do let me know).
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