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| Film Poster |
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (continued)
I've really wanted to put these thoughts into words ever since I saw the film, then read the book, and created the
first blog post. These thoughts, though, are challenging. Not in a good way challenging. I just don't have a mechanism in place to share my feelings in writing or other places. But, I do my best. This is a bit long.
I mentioned, that the reason why this collection sank deep in me is because the author killed himself. Depression and especially long term depression that leads to suicide is not a game. It's not something to praise, and it's not something to tease about. It's often misunderstood, though.
In that way, the Brief Interviews in the collection are misunderstood. Each interview is distinct, some are short, and some can seem downright immoral in the perceived normal sexual sense. In the book, they are presented in question/answer format with the question notated by the letter “Q.” In some instances, where the interviewer is exasperated by the interviewee, the question is notated as “Q...”
In the film, the main character is portrayed to be a woman and a handful of the interviewees are close to her, or exist in her daily life. These interviewees happen to be her professor, a student wishing to discuss an essay, a classmate, and her ex boyfriend. The film is more than just questions and answers, it tries to connect the interviews, instances, and relationships to create a maze of stories.
The first interview, known as BI #14 in the book, is a bit comical. “It's cost me every sexual relationship I ever had,” it begins and sets the mood. It's straightforward just like the rest of the stories are. In this case, the interviewee speaks of his uncontrollable urge to scream a phrase while experiencing an orgasm. The phrase in question, “Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!” makes it fun.
The first interview convinced me to continue watching the film. It waded through other stories, some varied on relationships, break ups; the usual themes
people discuss when discussing the collection.
My second favorite interviewer, BI #42, details the working conditions of a bathroom attendant.
Bathroom attendants... never knew that job existed. The detailed retelling of the environment, from stark white bleached shoes to the human waste smell that followed the bathroom attendant made me sit up. The sounds, the smells, they clouded my synapses. It's a disturbing portrayal of workers in the service industry. It is real.
The realism in the Brief Interviews and the other stories in the collection is what clicks. Watching the film, reading the book; creates a landscape that made me want to look away yet kept me glued to the narrative, to the story arc, and the disturbing plains that are called the human dark side. Dark side, what does that even mean? Is this dark side everyone talks about the black hole in the hearts and underbellies of people where everything just disintegrates into subatomic particles?
Is this
dark side a culmination of loneliness, alienation, fear, despair, mockery, misunderstanding, guilt, shame, failure, and judgment where one becomes something that is neither dead nor alive? That dark side is discussed in BI #46 where the narrator explains that rape victims and Holocaust survivors have something in common. That these two groups share the realization of
knowing the dark side intimately. In the book, the interviewee goes into an analogy of rapes, feminist perspectives on rapes, Victor E. Frankl's book
Man's Search for Meaning, and violence and degradation of rape.
The interviewee changes the subject of the analogy bringing the relation of the abused person closer to his person. In the film, the interviewee does this too, repeating several lines of the rape until he discloses that he is the abused person. Abused, degraded, every bit of him is lost in translation from his corporal self to his psychological self. Yet, the interviewee
knows something about himself; he experienced that dark side.
See,
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men isn't just about men's different sexual thinkings. It's also about that perceived dark side. It's about the unexplored darker side of depression, too. The author suffered from chronic depression that led him to commit suicide. That fact is the only way I connect to these stories. I had to read this book, because through it I've come to understand a bit of my lows. I now
know something about depression; about the choice I make every minute to stay in this reality as opposed to joining David Foster Wallace and other notable writers.
~~~
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