In my opinion, there is nothing more depressing than mid-november. At this point, you tend to be done with the sugar rush leftover from Halloween, and it's still too early to get properly excited about Christmas. The novelty of fall weather has worn off by this point, and now all that's left are bare trees and chilly weather. In Canada, we celebrate Thanksgiving at the beginning of October.
I read somewhere that a survey was done and February was decided to be the bleakest month. I think my childhood will have me always associating that time of year with glitter paint and cinnamon hearts. That prize will always belong to November.
There is, however, a certain allure to the decay that November brings. Part of the reason I restarted this blog was because I have that internet-generation tendency to aestheticize everything, and the information-saturated-generation tendency to want to over explain everything. I made a mood board on the Worn Tumblr a couple of weeks ago (inspired by the mood of the Malcolm McClaren song in that playlist), but I wanted to contextualize a bit more.
I was inspired by a lot of the ideas these images represented, but of course they share an aesthetic ground. If this was a therapy session and we were doing a word association game, you could include phrases like: coldness, detachment, facelessness, decay, muted colours. Or colors, if you're American.
The first image is from the Mad Men opening credits, moments before the black and white figure jumps out the building and falls to his death against a backdrop of vibrant ads he helped create, only to land securely on a sofa. Dang, aren't those opening credits chilling? Remember when the Simpsons parodied it in one of their recent Halloween specials? Remember how disappointing that episode was, as have most episodes been in the past decade? Remember when the Simpsons was the best show on television? "Kippers for breakfast, Aunt Helga? Is it St. Swithens day already?" Sigh. At least we have Mad Men.
But I digress. Those opening credits were the first thing I thought of when I watched Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin Feminine. In it, Antoine Doinel is a young idealist in the '6os, dating Chantal Goya, an aspiring pop singer (their characters had different names, maybe. I like to refer to them as Frenchy and Frenchette). When I started watching it, my roommate came in and asked what it was about, and I said "this guy is sitting at a cafe in black and white drinking coffee then a lady shot a man and now they're talking about Marxism" and she goes "Yep, sounds about right" and went into her room, probably to watch The Simpsons. But in all seriousness, what disillusioned youth hasn't felt the struggle between their ideals and their desires. Because Marxist theory is fascinating, but have you tried Vanilla Coke? Have I lost you at my new blog yet? Ok, next one.
Oooh, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind! That's a good one. You've probably seen it. You've probably seen the Mad Men opening credits too, but that didn't stop me from explaining it to you. I liked the idea of treating ideas - or more specifically, memories - as a commodity that can be erased if customer satisfaction is not guaranteed. I think this poster design is brilliant, with the eyes torn away like pages of a magazine. Like throwing a brick throw the windows of the soul.
Then there's Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale, in which a dystopian society picks a school class by lottery, puts them on an island, and tells them to kill or be killed, all in the name of fighting overpopulation. All autonomy is erased as the classmates are seen as mere bodies by the government, though of course the movie does what it can to depict each student's humanity. Like Clementine, the students here are practically faceless, as instead the focus is put on their uniforms. All the individual people are treated as a whole, in which they are viewed as an obstacle to a functioning society, which brings us to
George Romero's Night of the Living Dead! Yay, Night of the Living Dead! Come on, you don't need me to write about this one.
Jan Svenkmajer's Historia Naturae, Suita. This whole short film is cool. I wish I had seen it when I made my entomology zine a couple of years back. Anyway, I liked the look of the fish being reduced to its skeleton while still moving around and - ok, you know what? I started writing this blog post as a means to distract myself from an essay I have due tomorrow, but now I'm thinking I should finish this up and get around to that essay. You can see the whole thing on youtube, though!
