Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Finger in the Hand

Identity is fresh on my mind. If you haven't seen this movie, I'd highly recommend you see it.

I can do a brief synopsis of its story. But I'll be giving away, hell, I'll give it all away; I'll say the whole story. So if you don't want it to be spoiled, then don't read ahead.

This movie is great—it's the stuff I eat up. The basis of it is ten people get stuck in a motel from varying things happening that bring them there. The beauty of it is that they end up where they're at mostly because of each other. A car gets a flat tire from one of those high-topped shoes. The car got it flat from a woman, who passed by where they were earlier, opening up her briefcase and the shoe flying out.

When the man gets out and tries to fix the flat, his wife gets out. While he's fixing up the tire, she sees her son from the window. She sits there and looks at him, and stares at him. She backs up, and then she's hit by a limo passing by.

The limo ran into her because the driver was getting a cell phone battery out of his passenger's bag and his eyes weren't on the road.

He gets out of the car when he hits her, and they get in the limo and take her to the motel they pull into. The owner of the hotel tells him to drive up to a hospital and get an ambulance (the phone wasn't working). He drives, and as he's driving, he finds the woman whose shoe was the one that caused the flat tire, causing the limo to hit the man's wife. Her car dies, and as the limo driver's passing, she gets out and waves her hands wildly so he stops and picks her up.

He drives on. She tells him that there's a flood up ahead, and no way through. He doesn't listen, saying he needs to get to the hospital no matter what. His limo gets stuck in the flood because of this, and another car is approaching. He gets out and asks the two people for their cell phone if they have one. They don't have a cell phone, so they get a lift and go back to the motel.

Soon they pull up to the motel. Then another car pulls up in a little while too. It's a police car. The officer gets out and says he has a murderer in his car, and he needs a room, it's an emergency.

From here on out, the ten people are killed one-by-one. First an actress dies, then another, another, and another.

The murderer himself is killed. The motel owner's baseball bat is lodged in his throat, and protrudes out, his head up and dead.

Then they think the motel owner was the killer. The cop says it's him and says it often.

From here, more people die. It's found out that the motel owner isn't even the motel owner. He was actually a man down on his luck who came upon the motel. He says when he came he found the real owner face down in a pie (I forget which kind, exactly) and so he put him in the freezer, and a car salesman came in and wanted a room. From there he had been the owner.

They tie him up.

It's found out soon that what's going on at the motel isn't even real. A man with the last name Rivers (his first name escapes me right now, might be good to find it) has been convicted of murdering many people at a motel years ago. He was only a child when it happened. From there on out, he had split personalities. His psyche was torn into many persons, and his psychiatrist explains that his identities are fighting each other out so only one can become Rivers.

The limo driver, who used to be a cop, comes to the forefront. Before this happened, he was looking at driver's licenses. He had found that everyone had something in common—their names were all names of states, and they had the same birthdays. Suddenly, as he's looking, he's with the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist tells Ed what's going. He gives Ed a mirror, and he looks in it and sees River's face. He asks what the hell is going on, and he's told about River's identities fighting each other, and that one of them is the one who killed all the people at the motel those years ago. And he must kill it.

Then he's back at the motel again. Paris, a whore, is in the cop's car. She finds papers of information in the cop car. It has that the murderer was a murderer, but the cop, too, is a murderer.

A scene is shown recaping how the murderers got free. It shows one of the murderers using a knife hidden in his clothes to stab through his seat and stab the cop driving the car. From there they get out, and the fake cop puts on the cop's clothes, and puts his fellow fugitive back in the back of the car.

Ed, the limo driver and ex cop, finds Paris and tells her it's going to be all right. He goes off to kill the fake cop acting as a cop, and a shootout occurs. They both end up shooting each other at once, and they fall down, Ed stooping and walking away, then falling. Paris comes over and asks him where he went, what he saw.

Paris, once a whore, had decided to go to California to grow oranges. It was what she was going to do.

Ed tells her with his dying breaths that he saw her at the orange patch. Paris tries to help Ed up, but Ed knows he's going to die, and knows he's dying, so he doesn't let her.

Paris takes a truck and is off. What comes is a very memorable scene of her driving in the truck, singing Bob Dylan's, "I Want You." These scene continues to haunt me, and is so beautiful. Whenever I hear Bob Dylan's "I Want You" I remember this scene.

It shows Paris's eyes, wet with tears, and then River's face, fat and bald, and he's singing the lyrics just like Paris, and his eyes are watery.

Since Ed had killed the personality that supposedly killed all those people at the motel those years ago, they had stayed River's execution orders, and he was being driven off to an asylum. His psychiatrist is in the car.

Paris gets to California, and is using a small rake to till her soil. As she's tilling, she finds a motel key in the ground. It says one. All throughout the movie, when someone was killed, they'd find a key with them.

Her lips start fluttering, and it's really beautiful and racy. Seeing this part made my heart race, and my whole body scream.

Paris's lips flutter, she lets out moans. She turns around. There's the kid standing there with a garden tool in his hand. The kid that had watched as his mom died in the beginning, that'd been around the whole time.

It shows quickly scenes of the various people dying again. We see him at the window as his mom gets hit with an evil smile on his face. There's him with a knife. There's him pushing a man into a car and getting hit by it. There's a music that's clanking playing as this shows, steel and cold. It bangs in a ding with each showing of the kid and how he killed.

And then it shows him by Paris. And then it shows Rivers saying, "Please don't. No."

And then his psychiatrist opens the fence of the back. He asks him what's wrong. River's face tightens. His face contorts. He puts his chained arms around the psychiatrist and kills him.

The boy puts his hand forward and kills Paris.

The car scuttles off in a desert. Screeches to a stop.

It ends with a boy whispering an old rhyme (which I need to find and put at this point).

I think what makes this movie so good is how it was the kid in the end.

This movie also gives me an interesting story idea.

How often have you thought life is a dream? Doesn't it seem like it sometime?

Putting God into this picture: what if we're just multiple personalities of God? What if everything is just his imagination?

Now implement this movie into it: what if one of them is raging for supremacy. One is fighting for control.

It's an interesting thought, isn't it?

This is the way I am. I have an intense imagination at times (as any writer should).

As I've said before, what ifs are for stories. I need to write a story about this.

Okay, enough about that movie. Just thinking about how that kid looks when he's about to kill Paris just makes me shake in a way, and relive the moment all over again.

In short, see Identity. It's absolutely worth it. At first it just seems like your run-of-the-mill horror story, but then at the end it just ascends this. As I said, I think the images of the kid being the personality that killed them all, and that end sequence showing him as he killed all the other identities, is what made this movie so memorable.

How could a kid do something like that? A pure, innocent kid?

It's because it's inside of him.

It's inside all of us.

The movie also reinforces my feeling that there's sides to everyone. Like a coin, only so much more. There's different sides of us all over. It's also good for the imagination—something I never want to die in me. It's been hooked up to an iron lung lately, but I'm nursing it back to health. I don't want it to die. I want to always feel there's something better than this banal reality out there; that there's someplace I can go in my mind to push it all away.

I've said in the past my philosophy is Naturalism. Naturalists believe life is bad. In every facet. And they often show pessimism. They don't believe in family, church, God, education, society. They only believe you live to die, and life is a bitch, and that's it.

Really, who in the world could say they're just one philosophy? I can't. Every single day I'm changing, I'm becoming different and I'm influenced and moved around. It's something uncertain, and whatever I feel like I feel like. I went through a period of time where everything seemed faded, used, gone. That was when I posted particularly depressing things, and I had a conversation on the internet with people like Josh. These conversations were long excursions of me moaning and telling how I feel, and how I see things, and how they seem purposeless and how I wonder why things have to be the way they are.

Now I'm more along a Realist edge. Realists believe life is all. It's good, bad, beautiful, wonderful, terrible, monsterous, wasteful, useless, awesome, just good really, just fine really. It goes on and on. Realist books often don't have a climax nor do they have an ending. Read something like Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That's an example. I also remember a book by someone-or-other Crayne (sp) called Red Badge of Courage. That's a realistic novel, and is considered a classic by some. I'm thinking it's about war and so on, but I can't quite remember.

Other times lately, I'm more of a Romanticist. I am heavily in touch with whatever you want to call the need for love is. Or whatever you want to call escapism in the form of a need for physical bondage, coalescion. It may be just "young lust," to quote Pink Floyd, but whatever it is, it's what it is. And I see that.

All I know is that I'm not just one certain philosophy. It changes all the time.

I don't know much about other philosophies at this time. I plan on learning all about them, maybe taking a philosophy class in college. But I do know something about Existentialism. It says that what affects us around us is what makes us what we are. I believe in this, too, and also the notion away from this: that we'll be what we'll become no matter what touches us and affects us. I know these two things go hand-in-hand, but I see that both could be what we are. I mean, we seem to have this certain will inside us to do what we do, at times. So I think it goes both ways.

Moving on, today has been interesting. Last night I didn't write my 2,000 words, but I was so tired. I think I should be writing more of my "The Nobodies and Moana Jane" but I just don't feel like it. Tomorrow I need to force myself to write more of a story, though. I need to keep the pressure on my writing and keep it serious if I'm ever going to be a real writer, or at least a writer in my heart. But it's been pretty hard lately. I'm losing my will again in everything, but I keep pushing myself up. Right now I feel some emotion, and that's when it's good to write more of my stories. But I'd rather just sit here self-examining myself like I am now. Plus I want to keep writing entries in here (I'm writing in a text document of my own right now) and keep it and read it sometime when I'm older, just so I can remember. Remember what? Remember me. Or whatever I am now.

Tonight I feel in a simple mood, which probably is coming through in how I'm saying things. In comparison with my long post about monsters (which I turned into my newspaper column this issue) this writing isn't as eloquent or anything. Maybe it's just because I don't feel much for words today. I'm just splurging out whatever's on my mind right now and getting down my needed quota so I can go to sleep. It's probably lame like that, but what can you do. I'm dry on writing lately. It's not writer's block, it's more along the lines of I feel reality eating into me, and it won't go away and leave me alone, and I don't see any reason to fight it by writing extensively.

Or maybe it isn't like that. I don't know. How would I know? I'm too damn confused as it is. I'm just looking at my navel right now and it's really not making sense, but what can you do.

To think there used to be an umbilical cord there. To think I used to be a small little fetus. To think I was born a simple way and a simple reason.

They say birth is a miracle. They say lots of things are miracles. I beg to differ. It beggars belief to think that.

We've scientifically found how birth works. All it is is genes meshing together, the dominant ones taking dominance, and meshing together to create what soon will be a child. The cells replicate and replicate and brick by brick, nucleus by nucleus we're built. A sperm and an ovum forming together is what makes it. How is this a miracle? I don't see it. It's just chances coming together to do what nature's designed for us to do—to carry on our life in our offspring. Simple as that, easy as that, blah blah blah. It's not a miracle. Since when is a man ejaculating into a woman's vagina, and the man's sperm traveling on a great, wonderous odyssey to the woman's ovum to combine and turn to a zygote and make a fetus, then a baby, then a child, then a teen-ager, then a man, then an old man, then a dead, lifeless body, dead from its natural twirl on things, only heightened in life by the good conditions lived in? How is that a miracle? It isn't.

It's the natural way of things. A circle. It spins and spins. It's one of life's gears. It spins and spins and it keeps going over the ground it's already gone over. There's no sharp angles to it, there's no splendor in it. It's mostly what it is. And I'm fine with that. Looking at life in this light it's simple. You live. You die. It's all good, and you gather ye rosebuds while ye may.

When I think about it, I'd actually rather not know how a baby is formed and created. I'd rather have it be told that it's actually something amazing that my imagination could fashion.

Something like a baby is formed when God uses his hand on some lifeless tissue and gives it life. But I have long not believed in a God (at least, I haven't sat there and cared if there isn't one or not), and so that's not possible. With being able to know and understand things, and look them over from many angles, I've seen that it's not anything like this. The creation of a baby is simple and isn't anything amazing.

This is good and bad. It's good that I know how life is created, and it's good that I understand it. But it's not good that it's so without splendor. You see, I've always had a love for great and good things, things that aren't so humdrum and boring. And mundane. I like to hear a story well told, and I like it to be weird and multi-layered and messing with your mind. I like things to be as compelling as they can be.

And none of the world's like this. Most of it, anyway.

There's a lot of kid still in me, and I plan to never let it die. It's the kid in me that sits down here in the very first place and writes and likes it. It's the kid in me that picks up a book and reads it and enjoys it. It's the kid in me that keeps me alive more than anything else. It's not this society, it's not anything else. It's my love of innocence and my love of imagination and my love for the weird and strange and what could be but isn't that keeps me going. And at the core of this, in its fundamental eye, is writing. Writing is all of these things and much more.

The feeling of creating something, of making something that is entirely my own and isn't this humdrum reality is an enthralling feeling. The feeling that I can say fuck you to life and escape with words is a great feeling. And the feeling that I can be quiet about it and I can adapt to the way this world is is also a good feeling.

When life's about being a slave to this world and how it sees things, that's when I'll know anything that was once me has died. When it's the Silence of the Lambs, and all the lambs have been killed and shot and slain and maimed, that's when I'll know I've died. When imagination has been ripped away from me, ripped off like a tight-held piece of clothing, that's when I'll know reality has won.

When there could be when there was, when there shall be when there could.

Don't deny yourself the feelings that you most love. That you most cherish and hold and cuddle. Mine's a baby that I won't let die. Mine's a baby that's not going to be dropped. I plan on never dropping it, even as much as this world really kicks you were it hurts. I'll surround myself by things reminding me that this world isn't so bad if you can just adapt and find solace away from it in the most quiet way.

There are no flowers on your grave,
there are no chains.
There I keep chanting for the forgotten names.

What sustains thee also kills thee, stabbing in thine heart in thine vein, It wrenches forth a steel-cold hand. A machine is thine owner, and thine throne. And whereupon thee stand, thee can see it all be. And when a heart doth stop, and when it doth be unattuned, and the world a painting red smeared, let the blankness of the page be thine home. Whereupon written shall be stone. And thereupon shall be written evermore. And thereupon shall groan the dead deceased, with scorn, "evermore." And a murmur shall overturn all woe and pain, and all woe and pain shall be exhumed, whilst inhumed be thine whole.

We suck young blood. Mosquitoes we are, and leeches we be, and maggots oft we agree. Young is the lamb, and the pig, and the cherry tree. And young is the blood we breed.

Shall I suck dry the leaves? Shall I suck dry you of all beings?

Who should know but the sustainer and the killer, the thing which is. And so it is seen the existence. And shall it be? And so the existence is we.

There's other things to say. I'm just too tired to say them.

I believe it's time to sleep.
Comments (0)