Bildungsroman

I wasn't sure what I was going to get last night in El Topo. In the audience, I was sort of hoping for a cross between that iconic 1952 Life photograph of an audience watching a stereoscopic 3D movie and Hunter S. Thompson debauchery/Jack Kerouac life-fire. A trifecta of energies all converging on the one moment I decided to see a midnight show for the first time. It's perhaps appropriate that I always found blogging a little solipsistic and navel-gazing, and yet in my forray into it, I'm expecting the experiences I'll attach to it will be like Dana Birmbaum's appropriation of Wonder Woman - getting rid of all the superflous and honing in on the power in the moment of change.

A Clockwork Orange was showing at the same time and seemed to siphon most of the late-night show crowd to the downstairs theatre. Upstairs, I was wondering if I might have the theatre to myself. I did, nearly. There was an older man accompanied by a friend/mentee in his 30s. The older man told his friend that "This is just one of those movies you have to see in life." (I couldn't have asked for better approval, right?). We might have been a troupe of 7, save for a movie aficionado couple who seemed to also believe this is one of those hallmark movies - that is until the movie was adjusted to the screen a few moments before the lights went down. It was not, alas, film, but pixelated DVD. The couple stomped off to join the Kubrick crowd, iritation about the unprofessionalism (I guess) of trying to get the film centered on the screen wafting back to me and my 5 companions in the form of "I can't believe this. I used to work in a movie theatre, and I just would not put up with this..." Or perhaps they wanted to purity of reeling film. It must have struck a wrong chord.

Suffice to say, my eavesdropping of the advice from the older man wasn't needed in order to appreciate the movie. It was a Western, a bildungsroman (albeit with the parallel journeys of a child to a man and the journey of his father/master to enlightenment/purpose/meaning/peacez), an allegory. Goaded and abbetted by his female companion, the main swashbuckler character tries to forcibly accede to the position of greatest master through finding the other four masters' greatest weakness (and here, too, the protagonist is helped by his woman companion). He can find the sweet, soft-spot of weakness in each until the last man, who is gray-dreaded, nearly naked, without a gun and only a butterfly net (Le Petit Prince?). He shoots the old man, but the old man's last words are "You have lost." This is only the first half. Or rather, this is the prelude to the rest of the story. The rest of the story I suppose is about letting go. Spent of the power of his weapons to divine himself into the position of greatest power, he becomes like one of the masters (here: a sort of Jesus/Buddha hybrid) he has initially killed, whom he later finds in a viscous bath of yolk and honeycomb, gently curled on his side like a man-fetus.

The film is so thick with allusion that it's hard to contain it of dissect it - this is the stuff theses are made of. Suffice to say, he later helps cave dwellers (who have various deformities from incest after being locked in the cave for generations and who have taken/mistaken him for their prophet) extricate themselves from the darkness. Garbed in monk's cloak, he happily takes the task of helping to free the people who have saved him - and falls in love with one of them.

I was thinking/worrying this morning that perhaps we do things/occupy ourselves to get away from ourselves - something a friend suggested to me. That the sitting and being might be too psychically difficult. But then, the protagonist of the film finds purpose not in his own journey, but in the path where he gives of himself selflessly and fully, expecting nothing in return. It is at that point that he can love, that he can laugh, that he can find a robust, enduring purpose. That's a little neat-knot-and-bow to the issue of meaning, but the movie isn't that banal or trite. In the end, the main character is bereft of his most important life's work after he frees the cave dwellers and they're massacred by the townspeople outside the cave. Pounded by grief, he self-immolates (like a Buddhist monk) at the same moment his lover births his child - like the phoenix could rise from a different place than the ashes of his fire.

But, all along, it's the journey. It's the journey that is literally ignited again in the birth of the child - whatever you take that child to be.

The rest of these posts won't be so reaching and feigningly erudite, but in thinking of doing, I cannot extricate it from being.