Jul 31, 2007

L'Aventura


Antonioni's L'Aventura was more character study than story. Several young couples stop off at an island; one of the women disappears, we never find out what happens to her but we do find out what happens to people deep in their ennui. How quaint all that seems now. One can hardly imagine the power of such disenchantment.

Now, we have science to tell us that the hearts of all animals, save humans, beats about 1 billion times. Then, the organism stops, whether humming bee or whale. One billion beats. That's the outside bet.

Then add the fashionable new Copernican principle, from which you can say humans have 5,100 more years on the planet and about 46 more years to reach Mars and set up shop or else we probably won't survive and so peter out with barely a whimper. Then throw in Iraq and the relentless desire to kill and be killed; the prospect of dirty bombs, Israel denying refugees from Darfur, the murder of an Oakland journalist; and global warming of course and lead poisoning and diabetes and the 30-year-old just named head of Australia's preeminent dance company, killed in a crosswalk by a truck....

There's so much and so many that you think, 'okay, uncle, maybe I'll cash in these cards after all and see what I get next time.' House wins again.

And if you don't believe in next time at least you'll be back in the ONE, you hope, the one and only, back in pre and post personality, without body, credit cards, mind, or memory. In the meantime, I am beginning to see the sweet end of the good lama, slowly sweeping a street.

But what I wouldn't give to jump into Antonioni's Aventura and sit around a rocky island lamenting this and that.

No comments: