Final thoughts often best, or best known
By KATE BELGRAVE
I had a brawl with yet another half-read turkey last week.
The hopeless little man in question tried to take a swipe at the budget film-of-the-hour, The Blair Witch Project. Or rather, he tried to take a swipe at my peers by taking a swipe at The Blair Witch Project.
He tried to make a point that other somewhat misguided commentators have tried, and failed, to get off the ground.
He tried to suggest that the fundamental premise of Blair Witch - that film students lost in a forest while shooting a minor documentary would want to film their own sufferings, including the moment of their grisly demises at the hands of an unidentified, murderous bush-dwelling phantom - was more evidence, as if we needed it, of a downward moral slide.
His point was that only dangerously self-centred, callous members of the Real-TV generation (a group that I am in fact some 10 to 15 years too old to be part of) would think to keep the cameras rolling on themselves even as they were running for their lives.
"That's how important they think their stupid little lives are," this person observed.
"I can really imagine kids like that doing that for real."
So can I, but the point that should be made is that everybody wants to record destruction and death - particularly his or her own - in some way or another.
The fact that (relatively) youthful persons make films about filming the bad days is not proof that the ethical end is nigh. It is simply proof that people record their best and worst moments using the prevailing technology.
The medium might be new but the inclination is not. Nor is it new to hear the results of this very human leaning described as art. All your heroes have a crack at it, perhaps because they know their final thoughts about themselves are the only thoughts about the next guy's life that others truly want to hear.
There is also, I guess, the fact that dying gives you a certain licence to indulge yourself in yourself. People are unlikely to tell you to stop thinking about yourself when you're on your last legs.
To think of the wanna-be artist picturing his or her own death is to think of Sylvia Plath, abandoned by hubby and sick with rage, getting up at 4 am, before her children woke, to write the cold, nihilistic, fantastically egocentric poems of Ariel.
She knew exactly how famous they would make her, too. In an utterly mental, but oddly observant, letter to her mother she wrote that those poems would make her name.
It is also to think of Dying: An Update - a fairly kinky piece that American essayist Harold Brodkey wrote about his final months fighting Aids.
More recently, it is to think of the strange, somewhat drawn-out series of columns John Diamond published in the Times about his battle with cancer. There was something more than a tad disturbing about this lengthy, very detailed chronicle of physical and emotional decay. It was as though you had been invited to pull up a front-row seat at a series of deliberately botched executions.
You got to watch the condemned man win several very-last-minute reprieves and then, as he was strapped to the chair again, suffer the agonies (burned flesh, fried hair) of a half-successful electrocution. There was something a little sickening about Diamond's grim, very personal outpourings.
Still, you get the feeling that he knew this last awful chronicle was worth persevering with. It was a good call - those columns made him more of a name.
<i>Diary:</i> Kate Belgrave
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