"If you don't have money on LSD, buy a color TV" Henri Bergson hated cinema because it contains the main deception - static turns into movement, emptiness into meaning, dead into living. And all this is only because our brain is deceived and the flashing of points is able to turn into a single line. Noe brings the illusion to apotheosis, although the viewer’s brain as intelligence does not interest him at all. And he immediately emphasizes that he is not interested in how you are viewed, how you instantly read metasenses and decipher symbols. He said, This is the book of the dead. If you haven’t read it, here’s a short story.” The fact that you read the full version will not add any meaning to the film. Just like the fact that you read and can read. Noe is not going to please the "ego of the intellectual and the moviegoer," nor anyone's ethical inclination. No fables, no morals. He just needs you for three hours as a set of receptive options. Maybe Pavlov was also looking at the dogs. So Noe looks on the other side of the screen at us - at his living playground for a visual experiment.
Movies and drugs are synonymous to Noe, and he even tries to make them interchangeable. Can visual exposure, our eyes and our ears open doors where only chemicals are allowed? In part, this is already the case, we actually look at fast-moving points, see whole worlds, dream, and thus enter altered states. Godard said, “If you don’t have enough money for LSD, buy a color TV.” Noe takes this part of our interaction with the cinema to a certain limit. I do not think that the topic of drugs here plays the same role as in Requiem for a Dream, On a Needle, etc. – that is, it does not imply them as a repressive principle, an instrument of destruction and, especially, a social evil. It’s just that what happens beneath them is a highly subjective experience. And then there is the most interesting question that Noe solves in the film. Can art convey a subjective experience rather than a representation of it? Can we even get into another person for a second, their body and brain? Ways to convey pure subjective experience with minimal distortion in the literary discourse of the 20th century were sought by many: Wolfe, Joyce, and Proust, their name is Legion. And he's looking for Noe, putting us in the wretched cars and the kilns of the crematorium. And he asks Alex at the campfire, “How do you feel?” They burned you, they burned you.
Around us, as a sum of receptive abilities and physiological reactions, Noe jumps like a shaman with a diamond. The whole film makes a rhythm: hence the clubs, the modern analogue of tamtams; an impossible stroboscope, and even the rhythm of blinking eyelids. And the duration of the film, it is also focused on achieving a trance state: boredom and rhythm, boredom and rhythm, boredom and rhythm. And he will get his way, even if you do not like and disgust, the pulse will increase and the pupils will dilate, where he expected. Hard documentation is partly motivated by a desire to convey subjective experience. But man goes further and seeks to convey an experience he cannot have: the experience of dying. And Noe does not lag behind, and does not stop, and seeks to convey both his and his extra-subjective experience. So we're floating over Tokyo, not because we're a spirit that's left behind. This is the perspective and perspective of not the dead, but God, the demiurge, the creator and the creator. And a moviegoer. We always watch movies like this, because there is no parallel editing in life. In principle, Noe is not doing anything new, he just brings our familiar viewers to a certain visual limit. Impressive limits.
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