Una mala infinitud de razones determina los restos que se han de filtrar

"Esta realidad fantasmagórica es insalvable. Está constituida de partes en el espacio, cuya vinculación es tan poco necesaria que uno podría imaginar las partes ordenadas de otra manera. Esta se adhirió una vez a nosotros como nuestra propia piel y, del mismo modo, hoy nuestra propiedad todavía se adhiere a nosotros. No estamos contenidos en nada, y la fotografía reúne fragmentos alrededor de una nada." Sigfried  Kracauer. "Sobre la fotografía."

La clase de crítica

El profesor tiene el pelo sucio. Mayra lleva ya casi un año buscando su aprobación. No parece encontrarla del todo, ya que cada vez que ella interviene él contesta algo brillante pero sin ninguna relación. Mayra se siente atraída por lo que ella llama su magnetismo.

En un descanso de clase Mayra le hace un cumplido a otra estudiante acerca de su chaqueta, y acto seguido le pregunta que dónde la ha conseguido. En Alemania, responde secamente la otra estudiante, la cuál es alemana. Se oye una risita ahogada.

Mayra comienza a participar más y a hacer sus participaciones ligeramente demasiado extensas, porque lógicamente esto incrementa sus posibilidades de que el profesor la reafirme. El profesor, sin embargo, comienza paulatinamente a exagerar un rictus impaciente y sacrificado cada vez que ve la mano de Mayra levantada.

Las lecturas son fotocopias de las copias particulares del profesor. En los márgenes se pueden ver sus apuntes a mano. Mayra está inmersa en el pasaje en que un hombre aprende a hablar con el culo para un acto de variedades. Es gracioso al principio, pero el culo acaba hablando por sí sólo y exigiendo sus derechos. Al final el culo decide deshacerse de su dueño, haciendo que se le selle la boca y se le sequen los ojos. En el margen Mayra lee: clave. Mayra se siente indignada y a continuación tira sus llaves a la basura.

La amiga de Mayra le dice: "¿Qué te pasa? Estás como ausente." Están en un espectáculo de un ventrílocuo y Mayra observa asqueada como la mano del ventrílocuo se introduce dentro del cuerpo del muñeco. Mayra se siente confusa aunque sólo ha bebido una copa. Un hombre de mediana edad con corbata no aparta la vista de ella. Mayra teme que su ropa se transparente. Entra al servicio, se desnuda, se cubre la ropa interior con papel higiénico y se vuelve a vestir.

Los dientes del profesor están manchados de café. Mayra lo encuentra ahora repugnante. Ya no participa en clase, aunque el resto de las estudiantes siguen compitiendo por su atención. Quizás debería darle una oportunidad a su novio del instituto después de todo. Llega a la biblioteca y relee un poema del poeta favorito de su novio. Cuando llega a los versos "Parece que los ojos se te hubiesen volado y parece que un beso te cerrara la boca" aparta el libro de sí. Alguien está comiendo una crujiente manzana tras el silencio de la biblioteca. A Mayra le entran ganas de llorar de impotencia.

Mayra acude a la puerta del aula. Después de que todo el mundo entre, decide marcharse.

Mayra ha terminado su segundo visionado consecutivo de Chucky, el muñeco diabólico, en las cabinas audiovisuales de la biblioteca. Lleva cinco días durmiendo allí. Consulta el calendario y la hora. Ha llegado el día, y se levanta decididamente.

Mayra entra en mitad de la clase, y en lugar de sentarse se dirige a la tarima, donde se encuentra el profesor. En un tono exaltado le suplica al grupo de alumnos que no lo permitan, que esto es inhumano.  Les explica que ha estado planeando esto mucho tiempo. Tras dos segundos de silencio parece no encontrar más palabras y sale corriendo de la habitación. Los estudiantes se miran entre sí, medio divertidos.

Dos meses después el profesor recibe una carta. En la carta, Mayra le pide disculpas por su comportamiento. Le comunica que su doctor le ha animado a escribir esta carta y que ella ha accedido de buena gana. Por lo tanto, Mayra le ruega que tenga en cuenta su reciente cambio de actitud y que deje de una vez por todas de drogarla para controlar su mente. Mayra se despide con un cordial saludo.

Durante la misma semana un estudiante le pregunta por Mayra. El profesor le habla de la paradójica misiva en tono jocoso. El estudiante le sigue la broma de manera informal, ya que el estudiante obtuvo hace tiempo la aprobación del profesor.

In the beginning, there was no end.

Meshes of the Afternoon

"One of the few films that I remember fondly [laughs] is Meshes of the Afternoon and I saw it when I was sixteen, so thirteen years ago, and I saw it in school, and it really affected me, strongly. As I remember the plot is pretty cyclical and I’m sure my memory of it will be even more convoluted [laughs]. Am... there is this woman walking down the street in LA, it’s in black and white, and it feels immediately drugged or dreamlike, and... there are these stark shadows. Maybe some flowers in a gate, she goes into a house, it’s maybe her friend’s house, it’s not her house, and takes a nap and then what follows is a dream, but not quite a dream of... there is this malevolent kind of male figure, creeping in the corners, and doubles her... and then certain objects that, I can’t remember what, if they had any significance or role but they are early distinct; there is like a knife, a key, a loaf of bread, kind of like violent domesticity, and... maybe more flowers and maybe they are still outside. At some point the male figure appears to be this figure in a cloak with a mirror face, it was terrifying, to me [laughs]. But then other times I think it’s a, I can’t remember if we can actually see his face or not, but I think I remember that it was actually her husband or her lover that played him, and then they made the film together. Am, there is a scene where she is sitting at the table with herself, and... I believe she awakens, and then she’s still in the dream or realizes the dream is not real. Am... there is a death. She is killed, I read it as a suicide, at the time, she is looking at herself and, I can’t remember how it ends at all. 

Pulp Fiction

"So... am... the movie that I am, that I’ve always really loved and that I kind of can’t get over how entertaining and sort of just like infinitely visually rich for me is Pulp Fiction. I saw Pulp Fiction with my dad on cable tv in Colombia when I was fourteen, which was about a year after it had come out. I think at the time I didn’t go... I was too young to see it in the theater, because it was so violent, but my dad and I watched it together and we just really really loved it. Am, the beginning,I remember, well I have the soundtrack and the soundtrack has like a lot of the dialog in it and the dialog is really like clever and funny, and the, I love the opening scene because the opening scene really misdirects you about what the movie is going to be about. At first, there is Pumpkin and Honey Bunny and they’re robbing a diner. So you think, when you don’t have any information about the movie, you think that the movie is going to be about two robbers, am, like two, like Bonny and Clyde kind of people, but then, it kind of is, is totally about like, all these other people, and all these other kind of shady people in the LA underworld. And then, I actually, like I really don’t remember, I don’t remember the fragments of the movie in order at all, I just remember parts that I really love, because every unit of the movie is really visually striking in its own way, and, so like the,the all the scenes between Mia Wallace and Vincent Vega are just like so kind of weird and romantic and incredible, and I think like, when I saw it I was fourteen, and I just like found Mia Wallace to be like my model of femininity. I thought she was like so... glamorous, and beautiful, and cool, and I love how she talks to Vincent Vega, and how she kind of like punks him out all the time, and, he thinks he’s like this kind of tough (hiff?) man but he ends up being totally intimidated by this mobster’s wife. Am, I love when they go into the diner and they do the twist, they dance to Chuck Berry’s “Jack Rabbit Slims”, or no, they da- they dance to Chuck Berry’s song at “Jack Rabbit Slims”. The lyrics to that song are incredible, “it was a teenage wedding and the old folks wished them well... you could tell that monsieur really loved the mademoiselle, am, something something rang the chapel bell...” Ah.... I forget the lyrics, but it’s a totally narrative song, which is really amazing because it’s like, the Chuck Berry song becomes a narrative within a narrative within a narrative, and it’s totally superimposed into these people that don’t have any kind of familial relationships, so it’s just like, it’s totally disorienting and bizarre but also really like nostalgic and kind of funny and ironized and I just like love, that whole part of the movie, where, then like Vincent Vega  takes Mia Wallace home and she tells him about how she was in a trailer for a... for a Charlie’s Angels style show, called, “Fox Five” or “Fox Fire”, and like she says that she told the joke and she resists telling him the joke and then she says: what did... what did mama tomato, or what did papa tomato tell baby tomato when he’s squashed and, and she says “ketchup,” and she is so sexy when she says that... So she looks at him so meaningfully and then she goes, am, into the apartment and has the drug overdose, but it’s like, it’s really incredibly like, I’ve, a drug overdose is like really, you know, an incredibly like, ugly, and scary thing, but the way like, the way that it gets stylized is like amazing, and the way it’s sexualized, it’s just like, it’s just like this moment of total ecstasy, and the, the Urge Overkill song is like: “Girl... pum pum pum pum-pum, you’ll be a woman... soon”, and it’s like, the camera angle, and her dancing, I think it’s like the most beautiful scene of a woman dancing that I’ve ever seen on film, and it’s like, I don’t know, for me it’s just like... it has nothing... it has very little to do with like cultural context or anything, it’s, it’s like the beauty of this, like, they create this totally rapturous ecstatic environment and like, just like her, she moves with so much grace, but also with this kind of sense of irony, and... So, that’s like my favorite scene from the movie ever, and just for that reason alone I’ll never be able to get that movie out of my head. Am, and, what else, I really... the scenes between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson are really amazing, am, they’re really funny,  and like ah... this is more towards the beginning, this is definitely like before, Mia Wallace has the overdose, but,am, when they’re talking about what they call Big Macs in France, that’s really really great, and, um, yeah, the dialogues are like really... really hilarious. Am, but, there is like this certain point after Mia Wallace overdoses, where the latter half of the movie is just like all blood baths, and all of a sudden everything is, like this kind of intense stylized bloody violence, and I had never, what struck me was that, I think that like, in a certain way Tarantino was a kind of sentimental education in violence for me, I always was taught that visual violence was bad, and that I didn’t like it, and then all of a sudden I find myself like really really enjoying that kind of stylized visual violence, and learning to love like the choreography of violence,like when they accidentally shoot the guy in the face in the back of the car, and all of a sudden the back seat of the car is completely splattered with blood, it’s just like, it’s so satisfying and it’s so visceral. Am, yeah, I’m trying to, I’m trying to think what else, oh, and you know, there is just the whole matter that it’s a very circular movie and, I mean now, that kind of narrative is really common and so we don’t feel the originality of it that much, but, of course, a lot of it is stolen from Godard,and it’s very, it’s very much patterned after movies like Weekend, but the way he appropriates that makes it feel so fresh and makes it feel like, like a real tecni- like a real way of disrupting narrative conventions that felt like, really satisfying as the viewer that seemed to suggest that like but disrupting narrative conventions you’re [recording stops here.]

The Shining

“Ok. The most important thing when you are watching The Shining is to see the dust in the air. To be honest, like, ok. So, it’s a guy that has to take over this pretty much house is a place that no one can ever go to for like five months or so, in the dead of winter, in, Colorado or something. No one can ever, no one can go there, it’s completely isolated, you gotta think, it’s so big, no one is there, he’s only there to like, keep the thing going so they can run a ski resort in the winter -The dust that settles in that plays, because there is no maid or anything, they are not there to clean it, and you see al these isolated pieces of furniture in shots that are covered in dust and the light that comes through the window is so... mind blowing. Kubrick put up sheets, like sheets outside of the place that they were shooting at, and put like a thousand lightbulbs behind the sheets to get this dusty glare to come through, so when you see like the window shots, like, I mean, it’s all, but at the same time, it’s like an amazing actor performance, like it’s such an (?) movie, but at the same time you have this man, Jack Nicholson, the greatest American actor at that time [laughs in the background] or, whatever. The most like has the most energy on the screen if you’ve seen him, and he is, pretty much winging it, because they are not following the plot at all, I mean the lines that he says are not from the book or anything, they were rewriting the script. I don’t know. That’s why I think it’s a great movie. “

“Someth...”

“I don’t know what else to say. That’s... that’s... you wanna talk about specifics?”

“Am, I’m not supposed to intervene in this. But I’m doing it right now. Why does he kill them, or tried* to kill them?”

“To me, well, ok, anyway, I’m glad you asked that, because I feel that’s the point of the movie, what makes the movie great is that you don’t ever, you know, you are not supposed to ask that question. And that’s what makes the movie great, he just, I mean, it’s not about personal things, it’s about a particular kind of fucking horrifying feeling, that everyone feels and that comes across in this movie and it’s not a co- you never ask that question of why this man is gonna kill these... because it just has to happen because the hotel looks horrifying! Like it’s not a reason but, that’s not, like, no horror has personal feelings because all personal feelings can be explained and horror is just like something that is like [guttural loud noise resembling interferences in a radio -laughs in the background.] It’s just there. I don’t know.” 

Suicide notes

Single female, 21
My dearest Andrew,
It seems as if I have been spending all my life apologizing to you for things that happened whether they were my fault or not.
I am enclosing your pin because I want you to think of what you took from me every time you see it.
I don't want you to think I would kill myself over you because you're not worth any emotion at all. It is what you cost me that hurts and nothing can replace it.

Married male, 45
My darling,
May her guts rot in hell -I loved her so much.
Henry

Divorced female, 61
You cops will want to know why I did it, well, just let us say that I lived 61 years too many. People have always put obstacles in my way. One of the great ones is leaving this world when you want to and have nothing to live for.
I am not insane. My mind was never more clear. It has been a long day. The motor got so hot it would not run so I just had to sit here and wait. The breaks were against me to the last. The sun is leaving the hill now so hope nothing else happens.

Single male, 13
I know what I am doing. Annette found out. Ask Cara. I love you all.
Bill