poliphilo | Will There Be Any Stars In My Crown?

Have you re-watched Rope yet? To me, Rope is all about dealing with the body, how trippy it is, whether or not it is what we are, what it means. The corpse hidden in the chest is the body, the dinner party going on above it is life. (This also links in with the gay subtext - Brandon and Phillip must never explicitly articulate the truth about the corpse.) Of course the corpse is also a kind of illusion, like the illusion of the movie without cuts - once it is hidden beneath the glimmer of the dinner party, who's to say it is really there? Is it a constant from cut to cut?

A few times I have woken up with a jolt in the night, acutely aware of how strange my body is - an arbitrary machine made of meat, almost unfathamobly weird. For a while I'm confounded by the fact that I inhabit it, before I wake up a little more.

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No. I watched Torn Curtain last night- a movie I tried very hard to like, but without much success.
Hitch wanted Shirley Maclaine, but the Studio insisted on Julie Andrews and he gave way- a terrible mistake. Julie's character is supposed to be a passionate pilgrim and she plays it as little Miss Nice.

Paul Newman is pretty dreadful too.

So I will prioritize Rope. It's there on the shelf
along with all the other movies we bought in a frenzy of Hitch-mania. I guess I'm moving it to the head of the queue.

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I haven't actually seen 'Torn Curtain', how naughty of me.

Hope I didn't spoil Rope by pushing my interpretation of it! You should enjoy it.

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I watched it this afternoon. Your thesis deepened my enjoyment.

But I prefer Strangers on a Train. Rope, for me, is a remarkable experiment that doesn't quite work. I can't, with the best will in the world, accept Jimmy Stewart as a gay sophisticate.

But it was brave of him to try. I understand (from the commentary) that Cary Grant was Hitch's first choice, but he turned it down because he didn't want to be associated with "it".

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I fell in love with Rope first, so I kind of have a thing for it. And yes, Jimmy Stewart... His machoness does make for some ironic possibilities though. But it would have been a thing to see Cary Grant in the role. Montgomery Clift was also supposed to play Brandon, and also didn't want to be associated with 'it', but I thought the casting for Brandon and Phillip was excellent as it was.

One piece of trivia I always find intriguing about Rope is that while the cameras weren't rolling the rest of the cast treated the woman playing Mrs Wilson like she was actually a maid, and mostly ignored her. So rude and unthinking!

I think Strangers on a Train has more of a contemporary appeal, too, because it depicts a world where Bruno can get around comfortably enough being gay and Guy can be a big macho tennis player-turned-politician in his world and not be particularly bothered by Bruno, until their paths cross, and suddenly Guy is associated with 'it' (amongst other things) and becomes consumed with guilt and secrecy. Today, as a male celebrity, Guy would already be dogged with gay rumours, and if I were doing a remake I'd play on that...although Hitchcock loved his innocent-men-wrongly-accused to get wrongly-accused all at once during the movie in a big trippy onslaught of Catholic guilt.

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Clift would have been good.

Ailz and I were talking about who we'd most like to have seen in Stewart's role and she suggested James Mason. Ah, yes!

Poor Mrs Wilson. Actually I think she gives what is probably the best performance in the film.

Both films gain some of their charge from "it" being unmentionable. If they were remade today you'd lose that dimension, but maybe gain others.

I'd love to see a contemporary movie about a gay star who tries to pass as straight.

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WIth me, it's my hands that remind me I inhabit a weird machine.

Fingers are strange.

You said it so well, that we inhabit "an arbitrary machine made of meat." Choprah says something similar, and says that our nerve endings are the way we interact with this realm. He says we wear our bodies.

Teeth, tongues, eyes, noses, hands--God, we're strange. But made to experience and locomote as much as possible here.

(Sagan said we are "festooned DNA," a creepy description. Unsettling.)

I, too, find that I feel most foreign to my body when just waking up. And that's also when I have sudden jolts of interesting scraps of ideas, usually insights. It's like I went away, then had to come back home.

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halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com

(Sagan said we are "festooned DNA," a creepy description. Unsettling.)

this sounds like Sagan, I can almost hear him saying it. Why do you find it creepy? I thing it sounds...accurate. Unsentimental and accurate. Interesting too that often our bodies betray us long before our spirit - or whatever it is that exists within us - is ready to head out. To wherever it goes.

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I thought it seemed creepy because it appeared to leave out any spiritual component. Also because it made me picture DNA without a body but walking around...

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Our man Holzer gets very cross with Sagan. He says Sagan was a man who clung to materialism the way other people cling to religious dogma,

I had the quotation all lined up, but now I can't find it.

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I had the quotation all lined up, but now I can't find it.

If the quote was in that big book, it may take years!

I have been sitting here reading all the near-death experiences on the website I found here.

They are fascinating. Some seem very real to me.

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I'm sorry to have messed up yet another reply to you today, just cluttering up your good post...

Here is the correct URL to the NDE, and if you go to the bottom you can go back to the index or forward.

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How very remarkable.

This is sort of how I imagine it to be.

I like it where he says that the physical world seems as unreal from the spiritual dimension as the spiritual dimension does from the physical world.

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I read several more of these accounts, and they are very interesting!

How is it that the guides seem to know about the person's life, and that they have to go back, but they sometimes review their past lives as if they DIDN'T have to go back?

If these guides are omniscient, why do they bother with the life review? Maybe since they have this chance to give the person some lessons?

So many people come back talking about love. One person said she was told "love and knowledge" were the only things we could take with us.

Another mentioned that small, quiet acts were mentioned and acknowledged much more than the man's active church life. (No surprise there!)

Here's one I found riveting.

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Why, if we're surrounded by so much love, do we still behave to one another in such unloving ways?

When we're in spirit we know that Love is the only true reality, but as soon as we take on a body we lose that knowledge. What on earth is going on?

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That's a very good question: it's almost like the body has an agenda of its own.

The more I wonder about things, the more confused I get.

Reading account after acount of NDEs on that website made even the afterlife begin to sound less than spiritual--and some of the guides seemed almost testy:

One overdoser was asked by an irritated voice, "Well, do you want to stay or go back?"

Like a weary parent.

I do think I'm most riveted by the guide in the center of the light. Many people said they wanted to stay with him. One woman was even fascinated with the weaving of his robe--she wondered how one could weave light.

That feels sort of true.

I think that even if I had one of those experiences, I'd just go right back to my badness the minute I got possessed again by my obstinate body and brain.

(I worry that I might start brooding about a lake of fire and, bang!--just like lucid dreaming--there I'd be. Locked out of the light. I do have a morbid imagination. I hope there's a powerful guide around to help me out!)

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I like the idea of a testy guide.

I'm reminded of the movie A Matter of Life and Death. David Niven is hovering between the worlds and is approached by his spirit guide- who turns out to be an 18th century French fop.

It's striking that no-one comes back reporting having seen devils and hellfire. This suggests that the hellfire is strictly imaginary but the beings of light are in some sense real.

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An eighteenth-century fop! I love it!

:) :)

There are negative experiences, but they are rare--I easily found this page by Googling negative near death experiences.

I think, as you said earlier, mental problems play a role.

Y'know, I've been thinking--there apparently is a hell, just as advertised. And, just as advertised, it includes a "separation from God"--although that's impossible, actually, since everything is God to begin with.

The system, I've been thinking, isn't infallable.

Therefore, insanity is the real hell, both here and There.

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These are horrible.

But I guess it would be kinda implausible if all NDEs were positive.

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I find some specific things weird sometimes - when I was waiting for the school bus, it was my knees. I used to look at them and think 'those aren't possibly a part of me!' And then I would touch them to make sure. And at school a favourite conversation amongst my friends was 'Aren't noses just so weird when you think about them?'

I guess it's like words - if you think about any single word for long enough, it becomes unbelievable and alien.

What freaks me out sometimes is the thought that what we conceive as our body is actually a bunch of stuff that's happening in our brain - our body is out there, but our interpretation of the data we get from it, what we feel, actually goes on in our brain, our sense of our body is an illusion and our actual body is this abstract thing out beyond us.

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