Subject: Who's afraid of the singing asshole?
NatDubuc@aol.com
Date: Sun Jan 30 2000 - 18:35:50 CST
Hey folks,
I am not quite ready to enter my dissertation topic so I will use the entry
for this month’s reading assignment as a warm up exercise. This short
commentary essentially focuses on how subjectivity ultimately leads to
objectivity in the context of John Waters’ film Pink Flamingos in relation
with von Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism. Hope you will
disagree with this observation and launch a discussion.
Who’s afraid of the singing asshole?
The remarkable event in Waters early films is the inevitable subversion that
the viewer faces. In a state of extreme disgust; in scenes like Divine eating
dog shit, the butler masturbating over an unconscious female hostage,
Divine’s son raping his date with a dead chicken, or then again the
contortionist performing the infamous singing asshole routine, one’s sense of
morality and emotion becomes almost obliterated. One can find himself
somewhat disoriented in his system of moral judgment to the point that one
may attain a level of tolerance that resembles that of the purpose of sheer
entertainment, watching the scene for itself and forgiving its connotations.
Waters accomplishes what very few have attempted or then again have been
able to achieve as a pioneer in methodical perversion. As an example, when
Divine seeks revenge over the filthiest couple alive by breaking in to their
house with her son and frantically contaminating it by licking surrounding
objects and ultimately, in this trance imitating orgasm, throws herself at
her son and gives him oral sex, the boundary of moral tolerance implodes and
by doing so another realm of sensibility is opened. Even though the sex act
does not reach completion in this scene, the viewer is nevertheless lead to a
plateau above that of initial fear and disgust. In System of Transcendental
Idealism von Schelling writes: " The nature of the transcendental mode of
apprehension must therefore consist essentially in this, that even that which
in all other thinking, knowing or acting escapes consciousness and is
absolutely non-objective, is therein brought to consciousness and becomes
objective; it consists in short, of a constant objectifying-of-itself of the
subjective." Subversion is so blatantly dominant in this Waters film that it
goes beyond subjectivity and overcomes the level by which the viewer is
primarily lead to the scenes to later find a plateau far beyond reaction.
Such as that of a trauma patient suffering from a life threatening injury at
which point the body shuts down its sensitivity to physical pain and a
mechanism of non-feeling kicks in.
"The ultimate ground of all harmony between subjective and objective could be
exhibited in its original identity only through intellectual intuition; and
it is precisely this ground which, by means of the work of art, has been
brought forth entirely from the subjective, and rendered wholly objective,
the self itself, up to the very point where we ourselves were standing when
we began to philosophize." -von Schelling
Fear not the singing asshole.
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