Breaking the Waves
Keith Brecher
Keith_Brecher at brown.edu
Tue Mar 25 12:03:27 CST 1997
At 02:15 PM 3/24/97 EST, J.Stewart at wellcome.ac.uk wrote:
>The title also refers to a key scene in the film, where Bess is literally
>standing on the rocks as the waves crash on and over her. It is the point
>of her crisis in faith -- whether to do what Jan has just asked her to do,
>that is to make love with other men in order to save his life. She returns
>from this moment of crisis determined to forgive him from the terrible thing
>he has asked her, but he has had a medical and emotional crisis (he tries to
>commit suicide, and then is rushed back to the hospital because his brain is
>worse) and is literally dying.
>
>Clearly, there are lots of metaphorical meanings of the title as well.
Though BTW is a great film, I'm sick to death of discussing its title. Did
you see Emily Watson at the Academy Awards last night? I presume the guy
she was with was her husband. He seemed like a sort of caricature of the
prototypical English boys' school student, as though he'd walked straight
out of IF... or something.
Moving on, though only peripherally related to Ruggles (via Burroughs), I
recently saw CRASH and I feel compelled to post something about it. The
film made me feel as uncomfortable and weird as Cronenberg intended, but I
wondered, as I have with certain adaptations of plays like Polanski's DEATH
AND THE MAIDEN, why he bothered filming the novel. It does not seem to add
substantially more to Ballard and the novel was a lot more fun.
I'm not sure what Cronenberg is up to these days, but his work lately has
been a falling off from his early stuff. CRASH was not as horrible as NAKED
LUNCH, but neither was it the promised return to the salad days of SHIVERS,
RABID, and THE BROOD. Speaking of SHIVERS, I always thought somebody ripped
somebody else off with regard to the similarity between that film and J.G.
Ballard's novel HIGH-RISE. Cronenberg was quoted as saying he had not read
anything by Ballard prior to reading CRASH several years ago. I guess it's
the zeitgeist that's to blame.
One final thing about Cronenberg. Has anybody had a chance to read the
lengthy FILM COMMENT interview with him? The great auteur sounds bizarre
and strangely self-important. He keeps quoting existentialist philosophers
and describes a film in the works called eXisTenZ (I think I have the
capitals wrong). In this interview, I thought Cronenberg sounded like a
college freshman after an intro to Existentialism.
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