Image and illusions.

I've watched a couple of films in the past couple of days that have got me thinking about some things. One of them was Instinct, with Anthony Hopkins playing a man who'd lived with gorillas for some time and had become like them. He ended up in an asylum for the criminally insane as he'd murdered some men who'd killed the gorillas, and he had himself gone crazy. But one of the things in the film that struck me was that he was able to talk about the illusions that we live by in society. At one point he pins down the therapist, gags him and threatens to kill him unless he's able to tell him what he'd taken away from him. He finally understands that it's illusions, and he's released. I've had some interesting thoughts about illusions myself, on similar lines. It occured to me that in fact Hopkins wasn't criminally insane at all, but the rest of the world was. I think in all my therapy I still come back to that one, which I knew 25 years ago - probably 45, in fact.

The other film, which I just watched, was One hour photo, which was about a man who lived by a set of values that sent him pretty much round the bend. At the very start of the film he talks about people taking photos of things they want to remember. "Nobody takes photos of things they want to forget", he says. Then we see the way a marriage deteriorates when a man has to live up to an image his wife demands. It points out the illusions of material success, and the image so many people want to convey of their lives to others. It got me thinking about the nature of my own films in the videos I'd made earlier in this blog. I noticed, watching them back, that I had focussed on stuff. It reminded me of my own father's cine films from the 60s, when he took film after film of his possessions. And here am I doing the same thing! How bizarre...

Why should I want to do that? It's because we're conditioned to sell ourselves in this society. We're shamed into thinking that if we don't have stuff to show for our lives, then we have no value.

Bummer, indeed. Because when we get the stuff we understand the worthlessness of trophies, but of we don't get the stuff we feel like failures, feel unattractive and so on. At least that's if we buy into the idea of it all, of course.

The photo thing also reminded me of one scene in Instinct, when Hopkins realises that his camera is getting in the way of his relationship with the gorillas. He realises that he's not really looking at them at all, as he's just seeing them through a viewfinder, so he ditches it so he can properly "see" them, which of course he does.

I remember reading, years ago, how "nice" guys take photos of their loved ones and such. How photos keep us from the moment, making us observers rather than participants in life. That's why I stopped taking photos for a long time, I guess. All art means having to become dissociated from the subject, doesn't it? In that way it's artificial. An illusion, again.

And photos - snapshots, anyway - are forms of attachment to a moment that are kind of unhealthy, when you really think about it. How more can we not be present, than to take a photo of a moment to just look at it later? It's like watching a televised version of your own life, rather than simply savouring the moment and letting go of it. It's like trying to capture a moment, like capturing a bird.

And all that happens then is that it kills it. Sure, it seems to be a moment, all the same, but it is in fact lost. It's like taking a photo of lovemaking or something. What more effective way is there of destroying something priceless?

In that respect, I suppose you could say that photos take our souls in some way. I found that when I used to do modelling and acting in stuff like commercials. It's like whoring out one's love and beauty. Then something gets lost.

Perhaps it's the illusions again.

Image and illusions. Strange things, indeed.