Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Funny Games

Firstly, I must thank you Elizabeth for spelling my name correctly. Secondly, I must take a small moment to defend those I have traveled with and grown up with: drug addicts, punks, potheads, drunks, sexual deviants etc. I grew up in not in middle class America but in poor America which is a completely different world, where those things you speak of being glamorous yet contemptible aren't really anything, they just are. They are the reality of your best friend coming over with bruises and a shaven head, the smell of meth cooking next door, eating cheap popsicles in an apartment without air conditioning, watching your cousin do rails off the kitchen sink while your parents were working and going to grad school, stray dogs...That is not freedom, that is imprisonment.
Those bored kids trying to gain acceptence whereever they can have never seen a slipped needle that left an abcess the size of my fist. We have to cut everyone some slack in this situation though. For those of us who have seen it all we are jaded and it's well, normal. For others who have not seen it all, it's exotic and forbidden. No one is at fault. I was speaking of the traveling lifestyle and those who embodied it when I referenced the "boys i mean are not refined" where there is a definite difference.
Now to Funny Games. In European folklore, as well as in Southern and slave lore it is believed that if the devil knocks at your door, as long as you don't let him cross the threshold or invite him into your house you still have control. However the moment you invite evil into your house you have surrendered all control. These beautiful young, polite men came asking in gentle tones for eggs. Something so harmless, their entire bodies swathed in white even down to their spotless gloves. You will notice that even after the most brutal acts there is not even a fist mist of blood on their white clothes.
Evil won't come in an ugly form, there is nothing seductive about that. Evil can't reasoned with, can't be bought, or once you have let it in really defeated completely. Because even if you manage to get it out of your house, it still knows where you live and will tap lightly on your window with a sweet grin and a beautiful countenence. It kills everyone you love, even if you are the one who let through the door.

No one can protect you.

Perhaps this sounds a bit melodramatic...but it's like the sheriff said in "No Country for Old Men" : "There was this boy I sent to the 'lectric chair at Huntsville Hill here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He kilt a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn't any passion to it. Told me that he'd been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. "Be there in about fifteen minutes". I don't know what to make of that."

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