The Insatiables

BERLANT: Yes. There is a moment at the end where she’s like, “Oh my god.” I think I told you this before, imagining the bad version of your movie, what would it be?

BORGLI: “I realized all along, I just hate myself and I need to love myself more.” I don’t know.

BERLANT: Or even worse, it’d be her encountering somebody who has a real deformity and then she’s like, “Oh, my god, I’ve robbed you, and you have the real pain and I don’t.” And it would be her opening a girl’s school.

BORGLI: Oh, yeah. Learning from the mistakes and becoming a better person.

“What is art?... Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that none the less reflects the true meaning of life—love and sacrifice.”

Pattinson’s work here, while leaning a bit hard on nervous tics and a drawling accent, is affecting and memorable, his childlike demeanor all the more heartbreaking for his inability to communicate his terror of the world around him, or the pain it inflicts upon him. The Rover fills in the things not worth knowing, and leaves vague some of its most interesting traits, but it still works as a portrait of what survival looks like on an abandoned planet. By and large, it looks like hell.

In recent the last years, I’ve been increasingly obsessed with the certainty that it’s only through fiction that true empathy can emerge. The only actual way by which I can access your mind, your thoughts, is through fantasy. In this interview we’re just exchanging some rational thoughts that move around the surface of our minds. But through hypothesis and elucubrations fiction allows me to try to conquer your imagination and make visible what’s in your mind. I may fail to get in there, but it’s free to fail—it’s just fiction.

   A common reading of Cure sees it as a tale in which a vague, diffuse social anger is given free rein, unleashing the murderer latent in the ordinary citizen. Lash resists this interpretation, and I think rightly, not only because it closes the film’s strangeness down on a rather pat, misanthropic thesis that doesn’t seem to do justice to the disquiet the film produces, but because, as he eloquently writes, ‘A lesson that Cure keeps teaching us […] is that an explanation cannot guarantee us relief from whatever it is that drove us to look for one.’ Kurosawa himself has resisted readings that take Cure to be an allegory, whether for late-twentieth century Japan or contemporary society in general. But beyond questions of authorial intention, Lash shows how this sociologising recourse is itself an avatar of the very impetus to restore actions to the order of efficient causes that repeatedly comes up short in the film itself. The book’s most extended thematic discussion concerns the philosophical questions of intention that the film raises, especially in scenes in which the murderers are at a loss to account for their actions: ‘even if we cannot coherently conceive of a world in which it was never possible to find an answer to the question of why somebody did something, the reactions of those that Mamiya hypnotises give us a glimpse into such a world.’ As far as the conclusions that might be drawn from Cure are concerned, Lash stays on the side of the negative and the minimal, and he’s wise to do so.

This is an interiors blog now...

I have had no mentors and have never learnt anything from anybody. I have done everything through paper, all my idealism comes from there, from the historical avantgardes of the early twentieth century, from Don Quixote, from Seneca, from the failure Stendhal . . . Everything I’ve earnt has been spent on books (and music): a small fortune for someone without much money. And I’ll spend even more if I feel all right and can keep going: I want to give everything back to the publishing industry that it’s given to me. I can’t help myself, I like writers, publishers, booksellers . . . Like John Waters, I also think that being rich means you can go into a bookshop and buy whatever you feel like, without thinking about the price. Let’s not forget that he’s the author of the unforgettable phrase: ‘We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.’ By the way, I prefer his books to his films.