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Finally finished watching Wake Wood, just in time to have to take it back. It amuses me somewhat to note that I spent last week watching pretty much any other damn thing instead, probably because I knew a small girl was going to be killed by a dog within the first five minutes (this is part of the premise, and thus not a spoiler, in my eyes. Also, guess what--her parents bring her back from the dead! Shit goes wrong, it's a party). Tonight, OTOH, is the double release of A Dance With Dragons and Rec 2, so I foresee shopping in our future.
That being said, I liked Wake Wood quite a lot, particularly in terms of the weird rural magic angle--they use farm equipment to make what look like incredibly old shamanistic/druid rituals more practical, which is really off-putting, as are the passages involving Aiden Gillen's job as a vet. Of course, the idea of someone coming back "wrong" is an old one, but the trope hasn't palled for me; it's old because it's genuinely archaic, and seems "true", rather than because it references/has been referenced in a million other films. "Is the soil of a man's heart really stony?" I asked Steve, idly. "Depends on the man," he replied.
There's a lot that's useful and disturbing in narratives which revolve around grief, generally. Even for A Tree..., since part of what I've been wrestling with is the fact that Reverend Rook starts the book off thinking he finally got Chess genuinely killed; yeah, Ixchel keeps telling him different, but he already knows she lies. So I was watching Wake Wood and thinking about the mechanics of mourning, those moments where you actually forget what's happened for a minute or two, and then feel twice as bad. Or when you have to just reject every memory, the good as well as the bad, because it's like picking at a green wound.
Objectively, for example, I know that I probably have "good" memories of my grandmother from before she died (somewhere, if I dig real deep), as well as the five or so years' worth of good memories I once had of being with my second fiance A. But it became necessary for me to completely extirpate those memories before I could move on, and I truly don't miss them. When I think of her, all I remember is the crazy, degenerated version of herself she was just before I heard about her death; when I meet him socially, he barely seems like the same person at all. I have a real life now, and he has no part in it.
But in both of those cases, I'd stopped "loving" that person before the big break. I have no idea what it's going to be like when my mother dies. I flinch from the very idea. Or Cal, Jesus...the idea of him dying before me, versus the idea of what it'll be like for him when I die. These aren't cliches, they're trauma, tied up with a big bow. Nothing which revolves around questions like these can ever be easily dismissable out of hand, unless you're some sort of sociopath.
Aaaanyhow. I need to do some actual work today--start packing, for example. Writing would be good, though I'm not sure if it's going to happen; slush, at any rate. Though I guess even just thinking about things is a variety of writing...
That being said, I liked Wake Wood quite a lot, particularly in terms of the weird rural magic angle--they use farm equipment to make what look like incredibly old shamanistic/druid rituals more practical, which is really off-putting, as are the passages involving Aiden Gillen's job as a vet. Of course, the idea of someone coming back "wrong" is an old one, but the trope hasn't palled for me; it's old because it's genuinely archaic, and seems "true", rather than because it references/has been referenced in a million other films. "Is the soil of a man's heart really stony?" I asked Steve, idly. "Depends on the man," he replied.
There's a lot that's useful and disturbing in narratives which revolve around grief, generally. Even for A Tree..., since part of what I've been wrestling with is the fact that Reverend Rook starts the book off thinking he finally got Chess genuinely killed; yeah, Ixchel keeps telling him different, but he already knows she lies. So I was watching Wake Wood and thinking about the mechanics of mourning, those moments where you actually forget what's happened for a minute or two, and then feel twice as bad. Or when you have to just reject every memory, the good as well as the bad, because it's like picking at a green wound.
Objectively, for example, I know that I probably have "good" memories of my grandmother from before she died (somewhere, if I dig real deep), as well as the five or so years' worth of good memories I once had of being with my second fiance A. But it became necessary for me to completely extirpate those memories before I could move on, and I truly don't miss them. When I think of her, all I remember is the crazy, degenerated version of herself she was just before I heard about her death; when I meet him socially, he barely seems like the same person at all. I have a real life now, and he has no part in it.
But in both of those cases, I'd stopped "loving" that person before the big break. I have no idea what it's going to be like when my mother dies. I flinch from the very idea. Or Cal, Jesus...the idea of him dying before me, versus the idea of what it'll be like for him when I die. These aren't cliches, they're trauma, tied up with a big bow. Nothing which revolves around questions like these can ever be easily dismissable out of hand, unless you're some sort of sociopath.
Aaaanyhow. I need to do some actual work today--start packing, for example. Writing would be good, though I'm not sure if it's going to happen; slush, at any rate. Though I guess even just thinking about things is a variety of writing...
