(This blog drafted back in November 2012, but held back to avoid spoilers)
I won't post this blog until after the show has been broadcast.
Lots of thought provoking aspects to consider.
The emotional conjunctions that create a seemingly mystical religious experience (which isn't - despite Derren's rhetoric - the same as a religious conversion!)
The failure to give due weight to poetic and symbolic realities - as if we are all irrational and stupid to want to avoid stabbing a photograph of a loved one with a knife in a satanic rite (when we don't actually believe in satan as an objective reality)
The potential hurt in our own sense of our love for the person - the blunting that is inevitable to allow such a mimicking of deadly attack (a photo REPRESENTS a person - so there is inevitable power in violence against such an image. We can easily imagine the meaning of tearing up a photo of someone, or dispoiling it with marks/scratches.)
What else? The imagining of phantom presences in an empty room, after planting the idea of a ghost.
The subconscious influence of a non-existent witness (a haunted chair that cuts down on cheating: the 'God-as-Policeman' usefulness in upholding morality - - - and the humorous cartoon of the Darwinian explanation of inventing the God-figure to watch us and keep us from disruptive actions to the tribe (such as infidelity)
The looking for patterns - faces - when they aren't really there (again linked to the survival advantage of glimpsing a tiger (or a shape that looks like a tiny bit of a tiger that 'might' be a tiger) - and reacting versus seeing the same and not reacting)
The perfume that wasn't there - and the low-frequency sound that supposedly makes you smell the scent of mint. - Used to demonstrate the power of suggestion in creating a sensory experience that the person believes they are actually experiencing.
The assumption of purpose and meaning in events - the projection of agency when it's not really there, because we start looking for it. THIS PART WAS THE MOST INTERESTING TO ME.
Like placebos, the mechanics of religious faith (such as intercessory prayer) no longer work when you can see behind the curtain. And it's sad in a way. There are some secular equivalents - the psychologically helpful non-religious version of the 'examen', where you reflect on your day (or longer period) and discern what has been life-enhancing and what has been depleting, using this to construct your own lessons to inform your onward path.
Wednesday, 20 February 2013
The River - paddling in Butterworth's strangely compelling world
(I drafted this blog back in November, but didn't want to post 'spoilers', hence left it as an unpublished draft till now)
Another blog I'll have to finish another time. So much to ponder in the Jez Butterworth play I saw today. Been dipping into the script since I got home, reminding myself of various aspects.
The Yeats poem/song seems so crucial to the overall theme - a folk myth about a fish that turns into a woman. Catching something - losing it (like the fish he caught when 7) or killing and eating it (a fish caught with a poacher's help in the one instance, and with lied-about skills learnt from a father - as a desperate ploy to get close, but through lying at the same time (since she actually hated fishing!) And the link with her father's death, like a fish flapping on the kitchen floor.
The girl at the end - was she from earlier in time: the preceding instance? Or was she after the others. The man's joyful expression seemed to suggest long-since lost happiness, giving me the impression that this was in the past - perhaps the first?
The sense of Groundhog Day style trapped repetitive story loops was strengthened by the seemingly impossible coincidence of the kamakaze robin. (the choice of bird - a flash of red?) Virtually the same words used over again, and the same unknown outcome (did the bird recover when placed outside and fly away - or was it dead?)?
The haunting glimpse by the blonde woman of some other laughing (and sighing) woman down by the river - a chilling and ghostly moment.
Her naked dive into the pool. Naked truth?
The bits that annoyed me and which seemed clunky - 'do you remember what you said then?' - this formula used over and over. But now I'm realising it must have been deliberate - an artificial bringing into the here and now of a (recent) memory - turning past actions and words into the stories we tell each other - the truths we must face, the bits we have to acknowledge and not edit out (or making truth into fiction?) Description of something rather than seeing it or hearing it directly (connecting with the sunset moment? Words painting the colours vividly for us, yet a distancing technique in context)
Another aspect that really struck me - how unconnected the man and woman seemed (and ditto the man and other woman) No touching. Talk of love-making, yet the opposite, in front of us, of any intimacy whatsoever. And certainly no hint of love! In either direction. A very strange atmosphere, a strange version of the male/female thing. Very unsettling! Not nice at all.
Us - the audience - our role in the piece. What we DON'T see and DON'T hear. The indirectness, the reliance on descriptive language - all that we get is a verbal conjuring up of the scenes we don't get to see - reports of past conversations, actions etc! There is a dissonance between what we see and what we are told - he has said 'I love you' to her, but we don't witness any hint of love in his body language or the way he interacts with either woman. The physical distance is palpable. Weird. Not naturalistic, heightened. The reports of love-making, with failure of intimacy (the looking away).
Reflections, water. Catching. Experiencing a sunset versus poetically (yet reductively) describing it - as always the same (the story with each woman - and more? - being always the same. No individuality?
Why is the face scratched out? Who gets the stone? Does anyone get to keep it? Was there a platonic real first form 'woman', with the later women mere shadows on the cave wall?
He says the woman in the scarlet dress didn't die.
Did the Other Woman leave, in the version we saw, or just go into the bedroom, never to emerge. (there is a discrepancy between the script and the staged version on this point - perhaps to protect the ambiguity?
The Other Woman impinged on the other time-frame, setting out the bowl and candles while the first woman is still on the stage. So black-haired woman seemed more memory-like, from the past. But it was a big surprise (complicating things hugely) when she asks about a pre-existing sketch of a woman in the red dress (the same dress? a coincidentally similar one?) with the face scratched out.
The scratching out of a face is an act that takes away individuality. It is also a destructive and violent action, seeming to stem from anger (or perhaps despair?)
Link between the women and fish - the people themselves trapped in a modern folktale.
Another blog I'll have to finish another time. So much to ponder in the Jez Butterworth play I saw today. Been dipping into the script since I got home, reminding myself of various aspects.
The Yeats poem/song seems so crucial to the overall theme - a folk myth about a fish that turns into a woman. Catching something - losing it (like the fish he caught when 7) or killing and eating it (a fish caught with a poacher's help in the one instance, and with lied-about skills learnt from a father - as a desperate ploy to get close, but through lying at the same time (since she actually hated fishing!) And the link with her father's death, like a fish flapping on the kitchen floor.
The girl at the end - was she from earlier in time: the preceding instance? Or was she after the others. The man's joyful expression seemed to suggest long-since lost happiness, giving me the impression that this was in the past - perhaps the first?
The sense of Groundhog Day style trapped repetitive story loops was strengthened by the seemingly impossible coincidence of the kamakaze robin. (the choice of bird - a flash of red?) Virtually the same words used over again, and the same unknown outcome (did the bird recover when placed outside and fly away - or was it dead?)?
The haunting glimpse by the blonde woman of some other laughing (and sighing) woman down by the river - a chilling and ghostly moment.
Her naked dive into the pool. Naked truth?
The bits that annoyed me and which seemed clunky - 'do you remember what you said then?' - this formula used over and over. But now I'm realising it must have been deliberate - an artificial bringing into the here and now of a (recent) memory - turning past actions and words into the stories we tell each other - the truths we must face, the bits we have to acknowledge and not edit out (or making truth into fiction?) Description of something rather than seeing it or hearing it directly (connecting with the sunset moment? Words painting the colours vividly for us, yet a distancing technique in context)
Another aspect that really struck me - how unconnected the man and woman seemed (and ditto the man and other woman) No touching. Talk of love-making, yet the opposite, in front of us, of any intimacy whatsoever. And certainly no hint of love! In either direction. A very strange atmosphere, a strange version of the male/female thing. Very unsettling! Not nice at all.
Us - the audience - our role in the piece. What we DON'T see and DON'T hear. The indirectness, the reliance on descriptive language - all that we get is a verbal conjuring up of the scenes we don't get to see - reports of past conversations, actions etc! There is a dissonance between what we see and what we are told - he has said 'I love you' to her, but we don't witness any hint of love in his body language or the way he interacts with either woman. The physical distance is palpable. Weird. Not naturalistic, heightened. The reports of love-making, with failure of intimacy (the looking away).
Reflections, water. Catching. Experiencing a sunset versus poetically (yet reductively) describing it - as always the same (the story with each woman - and more? - being always the same. No individuality?
Why is the face scratched out? Who gets the stone? Does anyone get to keep it? Was there a platonic real first form 'woman', with the later women mere shadows on the cave wall?
He says the woman in the scarlet dress didn't die.
Did the Other Woman leave, in the version we saw, or just go into the bedroom, never to emerge. (there is a discrepancy between the script and the staged version on this point - perhaps to protect the ambiguity?
The Other Woman impinged on the other time-frame, setting out the bowl and candles while the first woman is still on the stage. So black-haired woman seemed more memory-like, from the past. But it was a big surprise (complicating things hugely) when she asks about a pre-existing sketch of a woman in the red dress (the same dress? a coincidentally similar one?) with the face scratched out.
The scratching out of a face is an act that takes away individuality. It is also a destructive and violent action, seeming to stem from anger (or perhaps despair?)
Link between the women and fish - the people themselves trapped in a modern folktale.
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