Setsuled's Journal

Damn. 4:40am. I guess you can't teach a dog new tricks. He has to have chains nailed into his limbs so's he can be a living marionette.

I'm trying to adapt my sleeping schedule to something closer to Trisa's, who I'll be staying with in San Jose for some time starting to-morrow. Yesterday, I managed to wake up at 11am after having gone to bed at around 2am or so. I was quite proud of myself. Guess I got too comfortable--now I can't sleep.

So I ate some oatmeal and watched some 100 Scariest Moments show on Bravo featuring various celebrities and critics talking about said moments. I was intrigued by the presence of Peter Jackson, Rob Zombie, John Carpenter, Clive Barker, a couple Buffy cast members (Tara and Drusilla), and Jennifer Tilly, among others. I was a bit thrown by the presence of the Coors Light Twins, but, still.

They were talking about The Exorcist, which, if I remember, was at number four (entire movies seemed to count for "moments" somehow), and they were all talking about how that movie absolutely gets you. That it's so unpredictable, that it crosses boundaries that you would've never expected it to. It was when John Landis was saying how you completely bought into the girl floating off the bed that I recalled seeing the movie in the theatre a few years ago and noticing how the entire audience seemed completely unaffected, half-bored even. There was frank laughter whenever the little girl cussed and, yeah, that sort of thing is played for laughs in modern movies.

More and more, I think people are going to see movies for self-contained realities that have no intimate relationship to their lives--at best, they can jive with the opinions in the movie.

I went to see A History of Violence again on Thursday and my love for it increased greatly. Because this time, the only people in the theatre were me and a perfectly quiet old man sitting in the back. The first time was on a Sunday night with a young El Cajon crowd that sounded as though they clearly belonged in the Deuce Bigalow theatre. You know homophobia's bad when guys in the crowd are referring to a sex scene between a man and a woman as "gay."

Without those chattering voices around me, I was able to settle into the movie and approach it on its own terms a lot more easily. The wall with multicoloured light cast on it was now a clear window to a reality, playing in my senses.

When I was telling my friend Marty about my experience first viewing the movie, and the assholes in the crowd, he said, "Where's the bomb when you need it?" It was such a perfectly Morrissey thing to say, and he was right. You know, I spent a good part of my adolescence wondering about how Stormtroopers might be real, complex souls, only to find out now, when I'm older, that they may have been soulless clones all along.

It always feels like a misfortune on so many levels when I notice that a large group of humanity living nearby is hopelessly stupid. Bill Maher mentioned on his show last night that only 15% of Americans believe in evolution.

And every day is like Sunday . . .