The scarcity of narrative forces the viewer to fill-in-the-blanks. Like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story (which I always hated – why make the reader write the book? And which ending is the definitive ending? What really happened??) in its infuriatingly obtuse and abstract construct, it offers hints and nudges, but no real directive. If you’re looking for answers here, you will come away disappointed. The essence of tease and release, the game at its most obstinate and inane. I would feel worse about it were there not other demons with which to duel. Confined by the frames and threatened ever by the cropping, it is a claustrophobic place to reside. It is, by my own design, a trap. A cage with the illusion of freedom, and plumage that grows more faded with the passing of time. This story is yours. Write it as you would have it written. Or better yet, listen to the words of James Baldwin:
“Now, from this night, from this coming morning, no matter how many beds I find myself in between now and my final bed, I shall never be able to have any more of those boyish, zestful affairs – which are, really, when one thinks of it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation. People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.”
“Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”
“Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.”
“He looked at me and I saw in his face again something which I have fleetingly seen there during these hours: under his beauty and his bravado, terror, and a terrible desire to please; dreadfully, dreadfully moving, and it made me want, in anguish, to reach out and comfort him.”
