Eat My Dust

Artifacts cohere and extend beyond the makers' conscious intentions. In despite of the author, we call for the Muses, and the genius of the race, and the disease talking.

But the knockabout phallus remains just a stage prop. (A mirrored stage, sans doute.) The unbalanced, unreasonable quotidian doesn't justify a belief in spirits as stubbornly motivated as id, ego, and super-ego, things even dumber than conscious intentions. Its evidence suggests a pond ecology, not a three-hander drama.

Well, that point's been well enough made in art often enough, with or without the consent of artists. For example, by A Certain Kind of Death.

In an appended interview, the directors claim they were moved to convince the audience to make plans for mortality, to not be caught by surprise. But their chief protagonist made his plans clear to the point of morbidity; he even diagrammed his burial space. And come the blessed event, his corpse is fobbed off by the assertion that his slot in the family plot had already been taken by the cemetery knew not who. It's unclear how the cemetery knew anyone was buried there at all, since there was no marker, and no memory, despite the earth being so freshly turned. The viewer suspects evasion — but what more could the body have done? Legal executors can be blandly stonewalled as easily as county officials.

Instead, their movie forcefully and coherently delivers the message: Why bother? When you're dead, you're gone. And when you're alive, you're going. Mortality begins at home. Ash intermingles with ash in air, earth, and the inchoate ambulatory flesh, the flush of life propelling us towards the porcelain Charon which oversees our passage....

So who really made this thing? I ask because I'd like to congratulate them. It'll make a great double-bill with The Death of Mr. Lazarescu or Forest of Bliss.