"Fatted on such morsels, you proceed without protest to the larger delights of robbing-meets-surfing and Reagan-meets-flamethrower, which somehow donât seem thrown together; itâs more like they were always floating through the collective unconscious, waiting to be turned into art."
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If the Buddhist art is meant to guide us to enlightenment, it just as often reveals the blood, beauty, and mystery of earthly life.
By Jackson Arn
January 2, 2025
âMandala of Jnanadakini,â a distemper-on-cloth painting from the late fourteenth century.Art work courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
There was more flaying than I expected, though not necessarily more than I wanted, at âMandalas: Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet.â Any visitors going to the Metâs exhibition in search of tranquillity will find a fifteenth-century flaying knife, a pair of flayed cadavers embroidered onto a rug, and another flayed cadaver, with colorful guts stretched like caution tape around a palace. They may find tranquillity, tooâjust not the cuddly sort that American pop-Buddhism advertises. For the Himalayan monks of the early teen centuries, the ideal setting for initiation was a charnel ground, where people left their dead to be eaten by wild animals. If religion canât help us amid the stink of rotting flesh, what good is it?
A millennium ago, India was still a Buddhist headwater. Various schools flowed north and east, to China and Japan, but one, Vajrayana Buddhism, left its richest deposits on the Tibetan Plateau. Itâs a nice irony of this show that remoteness can speed up transmission: the Himalayas were uncrossable for a quarter of the year, but travellers needed to get through all the same, and many of them spent months near the southern side of the mountains, waiting out the snow and soaking up Buddhist culture. By the thirteenth century, Vajrayana was close to extinct in its own birthplace, and Tibet, the ex-satellite, had become the new center. Ideologically, too, remoteness worked to the schoolâs advantage. Its leaders stressed Tantric chanting, ritualized sex, and other secretive practices, but, as Christian Luczanits suggests in an eloquent catalogue essay, they could be flashy about those secrets. Some of the most ravishing works here were painted in distemper on cloth, so that they could be rolled up, transported anywhere, unfurled, and re-hidden the second they started to dazzle.
Sound complex? It is, but one thing this mandala definitively isnât is bulky. The shapes seem to slide soundlessly against one another; the in-between spaces are loosened up with gorgeous floral squirms of green thread. Even when I squint at the little reproduction in the catalogue, I get a sense of a complexity that has been captured without being tamedâtoo big to belong to any single person, least of all the one who paid for it.
If I were smarter, or stupider, I would try to use the rest of this review to settle the question of what Tibetan mandalas (not the only art works here, but the most striking) were used for. I can take some comfort in the fact that not even the Metâs experts agree on an exact answer. At a recent conference hosted by the museum, an eminent professor claimed that they could be understood primarily as meditation aids; in the catalogue, another insists that âthere is no basis for this interpretation.â There is plenty of basis for the interpretation that mandalas are symbols of the divine cosmos, designed to teach initiates about the real thing, unless mandalas are vessels in which the divine resides, nothing symbolic about them. They are teachers and icons, maps and billboards, propaganda for the Buddhists who create them and also for the kings who fund them. The most famous ones donât even exist, since they are studiously destroyed as soon as the monks finish making them from sand.
âPortrait of a Kadam Master with Buddhas and His Lineageâ (c. 1180-1220). Art work courtesy Michael J. and Beata McCormick Collection.
Mandala-gazing calls for a buffet of prepositions, an âatâ that is also an âinâ that is also a âdown upon.â Youâre meant to start along the edges and proceed clockwise, passing the pictures of monks, deities, or patrons in their neat squares. From there, go inward, to a circular plate on which a four-gated palace rests. Generally, each gate is guarded with a pair of prongs that suggest a vajra, a Buddhist scepter; make it past these and youâve broken into the home of the main deity, who sits at the center, circled by lesser deities while waving a weapon or, depending on the version, embracing a consort. You can imagine each layer stacked on top of the previous one (three-dimensional mandala models are arranged this way), so that the farther in you move the higher the image pokes out of the picture plane. Inward becomes upward.
Either way, you are doing with your eyes what Buddhism says you can do with your life: proceeding from outer to inner, base to noble, ignorant to enlightened. The crawl from one to the other matters as much as the enlightenment itselfâskipping the charnel grounds isnât an option. Observe no fewer than eight of them at the outskirts of a single eleventh-century Nepalese mandala. Greenish jackals feast while birds nibble on skulls, and why shouldnât they? Theyâre part of the cosmos, too. The red surrounding this mandalaâs central deity is a Buddhist symbol of purity, but also a reminder that purity starts with the flesh and blood that everybody gets for free.
Even if you know nothing about Buddhism, even if youâre in no mood to learn, this show would be worth visiting for the eerie loveliness of the color. One mandala, depicting the goddess Jnanadakini, has barely a crack to show for almost seven hundred years of existing. The colors are all pomp and hot splendor: red grabs hold of softer pinks and jades and apricots and makes them burn. Slower to strike, but no less sensational, are the abstract patterns of frantic, curling lines you find throughout, as though Himalayan artists of the late fourteenth century had somehow visualized brain coral. When line and color work together at full tilt, as they do behind the walls of Jnanadakiniâs palace, the patterns get so dense that they could almost be solid fills. Peace is made to feel like a state of faint, cheerful vibration. âBiography of a Thought,â a huge mandala painting that the contemporary Nepalese artist Tenzing Rigdol contributed to the showâs atrium, is pat by comparisonâblue is just blue, solid is just solid, and taking this all in after marvelling at the real thing is like washing fine wine down with syrup.
Distemper doesnât survive seven centuries unless someone is guarding it from breath and sunlight. One point on which all the Metâs experts agree is that mandalas werenât made for mass gawking: most Vajrayana initiates journeyed through them with an experienced master as a guide. That was probably a shrewd move on the masterâs part. Imagesâthe good ones, at leastâare always richer than their official meanings, which is why so many religions police or ban them. In a distemper-on-cotton mandala from 1800 or so, the deity Ekajata resides in a palace guarded by corpses and surrounded by smoky darkness. Thereâs an obvious progression here, from smoke to body and body to divinity, but maybe it leads from divinity all the way back to smoke, which gets brighter and livelier the longer we stare. Thick clouds seem to push out beyond the rectangle theyâre in, and beyond any bounds anyone might try to place around them. Religious art could have been doing so much more with smoke this whole time, I thought as I looked. Fire and water have hogged the spotlight for too long; smoke has its own glamour, its own deathless wriggle. In this mandala, whether the monks approved or not, it gets the starring role it was born to play. âŠ
Published in the print edition of the January 13, 2025, issue, with the headline âEnlighten Me.â
In âThe Texas Chain Saw Massacre,â Feeding Your Family Comes First
By Jackson Arn for The New Yorker
It begins with not one, not two, but three prologues, each spiked with a different kind of horror. First, a scrolling text suggesting that this all really happened to the âfive youthsâ we are about to meet, even though it didnât. Second, glimpses of cadavers in oily Caravaggio light, culminating in a long, sociopathically calm shot of the ruined graveyard where theyâve been dug up. Third, footage of solar flares, combined with reports of nationwide disaster. What the sun has to do with anything on Earth will never be explained, though it seems significant that when we meet our five fatted calves theyâre talking about astrology. (Seventies horror movies, from âJawsâ to âInvasion of the Body Snatchers,â were full of chirpy, vaguely countercultural types.) We also learn that they are driving to the little town of Newt, Texas, out of concern for ancestors who were buried in that graveyard, because what could be more virtuous than caring for your family, in death as in life?
link to full article (full text under the cut)
Being such a decent bunch, the group stops to pick up a hitchhiker, who turns out to be twangy-voiced, obsessed with meat, and deranged. His family once worked at the local slaughterhouse, but their jobs have been automated into oblivion, leaving them with nothing but nostalgia for their old day-to-day. To turn a cow into food, he says, âthey take the head and they boil it, except for the tongue, and scrape all the flesh away from the bone. They use everythingâthey donât throw nothing away!â Explaining all this to a van full of permed, bell-bottomed city kids seems to excite him almost as much as it disgusts them, and it may disgust you, too. But in the world of âThe Texas Chain Saw Massacreââwhich may, even fifty years on, just be the worldâkilling and looking out for your family are so closely tied as to be almost the same.
Famous horror directors tend to get pestered for origin stories. Being polite people, for the most part, they usually oblige, which is how I know that an elementary-school bully named Fred Kruger beat up Wes Craven, the six-year-old Alfred Hitchcock was sent to an actual jail cell, and little Brian De Palma used to visit the hospital where his father worked to giggle at the gore. When Tobe Hooper died, in 2017, having directed several worthy films but only one âTexas Chain Saw Massacre,â various juicy-sounding bits made the rounds. Growing up in Austin, he met a doctor who mentioned a Halloween mask made from human flesh. An aunt in Wisconsin told him about Ed Gein, the killer who converted corpses into lampshades. Years later, he was on the U.T. Austin campus the day an ex-marine named Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the clock tower and murdered passersby with a hunting rifle. He was rattled by the image of his mother having a lung removed.
The implication of these kinds of stories, or, at least, of the mediaâs demand for them, is that horror requires some deep psychological wound, that youâd choose to spend your life scaring people only because something scary happened to you first. There may be a dribble of truth in this, though nobody seems to demand similar explanations from, say, action directors. Itâs especially ironic in Hooperâs case; few modern horror films are less interested in psychological backstory than âThe Texas Chain Saw Massacre.â Weâre told next to nothing about the victimsâ relationships with one another, or their lives back home. No childhood trauma lurks behind the killers the way it does for Norman Bates or Michael Myers. If any -ology helps us understand these people, itâs sociology: assembly-line slaughter makes the underclasses deranged; technology makes them irrelevant; unemployment makes them hungry. Scarcity underlies almost everything the characters do, whether theyâre killers or notâlike that other stagflation classic, âMad Max,â this is a story about precious fuel and the lengths some people will go to get it. The youths discover a household of cannibals because their van is low on gas and they hear a generator somewhere. Later, one of the cannibals takes care to switch off all the lights in his storeâpower bills being enough to âdrive a man outta businessââbefore going off to feast on the alternative energy source he and his family have discovered.
Scarcity was an apt theme for Hooperâs film, which cost something like a hundred and forty thousand dollars to make, and features a community theatreâs worth of small-timers and first-timers. The shoot was probably illegal a dozen times over: the narrator who reads the scrolling prologue text had to be paid in weed, and the art director, unable to afford prop animal carcasses, drove around picking up actual skulls and roadkill. A graduate student named Gunnar Hansen was cast as the masked, lumbering Leatherface, the cannibal familyâs designated executioner. Since there was no money for a backup costume, he wore the same clothes seven days a week, for up to sixteen hours a day, while the weather hovered around a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. I get the sense, listening to interviews with some of the actors, that they consider the rest of their lives a vacation.
The filmâs first half hour strides curtly forward, doling out the who and the where and the what, with occasional twitches of lyricism in betweenâa dead armadillo by the side of the highway, say, or a long, mournful shot of the van as it drives off to certain doom. You canât learn about how this film was made without gagging, but you canât watch the results without marvelling: not one frame or line or sound effect goes to waste, since Hooper couldnât afford any, and this gives everything a tautness that you sense somewhere in the gut before the mind catches up. Throwaway lines about barbecue and cuddly animals and planets in retrograde are, naturally, not throwaway at all, a point the script makes comically obvious when Franklin, who uses a wheelchair, asks his sister Sally, the only youth whoâll survive, if she believes in astrology. She replies, âEverything means something, I guess.â
Decades of bickering about the violence in the filmâsome viewers insisting that itâs too bloody, others that most of the blood is in our imaginationsâhas distracted from its visual beauty. This seems important to stress, since beauty, along with sociology, is what Hooper gives us in lieu of direct answers. When one of the youths walks through the cannibalsâ house, she finds a room full of remains, some animal and some human. Itâs an astonishing sequence, only two minutes long but seemingly an hour, scored to the clucks of a caged chicken, and stuffed with closeups of skulls intercut with the womanâs face so as to suggest one about to become the other. Whatâs astonishing isnât only the lushness that Hooper finds in this deathly place. (Iâve thought too much about a certain shot of sunlight shining through a translucent bone.) Itâs the fact that we seem to be looking at decorationsâthat, somewhere between killing and eating, these people have spared the time to make their house look prettier, for no other reason than to make their lives a little less miserable.
So far, I havenât really talked about why âThe Texas Chain Saw Massacreâ is frightening, but in scenes like this it becomes not only frightening but haunting. The usual things weâre invited to take comfort in during a horror movieâthe stability of the household, the loved ones who live thereâare here just another piece of the horror. Who, we might ask, is this filmâs true villain? Does it even have one? Leatherface does most of the killing but takes no obvious pleasure in it, and in any case Hooper instructed Hansen to play the character as mentally disabled. The hitchhiker does seem to relish the cannibal life style, but notice, too, how well his attentiveness to his grandfather, who seems unable to walk, contrasts with the way the city kids tease Franklin for a similar condition. Toward the end of the film, it is the hitchhiker who drags Sally to his elder and invites him to kill her with a hammer, apparently because the frail old man enjoys this kind of thing and could use some excitement. In how many other films is the most frightening act one of the few compassionate ones?
Extinction seems likely for these cannibals, but, a half century later, âThe Texas Chain Saw Massacreâ has sired a vast brood of art-house and grind-house films. Stanley Kubrick, a superfan, must have been thinking of Hooper when he conceived of those moments in âThe Shiningâ when the ghosts drink and dance. I sense more Hooper, by way of Kubrick, in Jordan Peeleâs three films so far, with their knack for scattering little clues about racism and surveillance and consumerist apathy as though the monsters onscreen are representatives of much looser, deadlier forces. I also canât help but wonder if Cormac McCarthy, decades away from âNo Country for Old Men,â was paying attention when the hitchhiker explains that the slaughterhouse has switched to killing cattle with an air gun. (De Palma, at some pre-âBody Doubleâ date, certainly was.)
On the grind-house end of things, Hooper is still celebrated, when heâs not being reviled, for inspiring an avalanche of hardware-store butchery and final girls. The second trope is a curious one, because in nearly every later film to make use of it the female lead is rewarded for being clever or kind or virginal or brave or, if sheâs Jamie Lee Curtis in âHalloween,â all of the above. There is no obvious reason that Hooper chooses Sally to survive the carnageâher brother is the far more likable, fleshed-out character. She gets lucky, and that is all. When the cannibals are preparing to kill her, there is an unforgettable closeup of her wide, bloodshot eye, which is both the window to the soul and just another potential source of energy, like gasoline, itself just the remainder of million-year-old plants, which get their energy from the big, yellow fireball in the sky. Everything, in this grim astrology, means something, and that something is fuel. And, at that point, there is nothing to do but run, very fast, to the highway and hope that the pickup truck on the horizon brakes for hitchhikers.
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When art historians write their books on the early twenty-first century, âimmersionâ will appear on every page. No word better sums up our quixotic hopes for the visual, uniting the lowbrow (video-game headsets, van Gogh warehouses), the highbrow (Yayoi Kusamaâs infinity rooms, James Turrellâs light installations), and the middlebrow (Alfonso CuarĂłnâs Steadicam jaunts, James Cameronâs 3-D extravaganzas). Immersion bombards and overpowers; it commands the viewer to surrender. At heart, itâs a prayer that we can spend a few moments in a state of pure attention, the sort once rumored to exist in monasteries.
-- The Sphere and Our âImmersionâ Complex by Jackson Arn in The New Yorker
Vittorio Storaro, Conrad Hall, and AgnĂšs Godard have all turned to art history to draw visual inspiration for their films.
I have an idea! I want to create a giant painting and project a moving silhouette on top of it and communicate states of minds. I have a corresponding idea that I want to take still images of the silhouettes on the Painting and display them beside the projections. I was in the shower when I had this idea. I am very excited and want to investigate and realise this at some point. Â
