Analysis Numero Uno.

Cassandra Walker
Film & Literature 11:00 M/W

You Cannot Kill, What Still Lives In You

A three-dimensional buzzing squared object is placed rigidly before our eyeballs. It is endless, ever-changing, bright, dark, and bright again. It is a rainbow of our weaknesses, a black hole of our desires, a lollipop of wonder. It is our schizophrenic mother, our tulip tasting sister, our drug fiend half cousin from our fathers third “white-bitch” marriage. Our blood lines, our indecent exposure, our blacked out nipples that dance with our angles. We sit before this thing, this antennae-ey button filled THING, and watch our reflection through its buzz. And subconsciously, we are connected to whatever is placed before us, because, well, we are in it. The remote is not our savior, dear friends. Turn it off, and we’re still turned on; our mirrored image still waves back. We are media. We are shock value. We are lab rats, on the tip of my televisions tongue.

There is truth to convulsion, but pain can be pleasure. Writers, like Santa’s, are connoisseurs of the trade. They want you wide-eyed, like Allah just smacked you for all your previous assumptions of culture and the human condition. In order to do this, one must probe. One must spare a lamp to the comfortable shadow that hovers over all of existence. One must dig, too deep, one must breathe too much. And one must take that cable, and shove it down the throat of humanities outlet. Ta-da! And a magic trick of sorts is birthed. A greater truth is revealed, and pigs can fly.
Memoirs hold a certain power, a je ne sais quoi; a story that involves a nodding head, a hand of approval to denote any whispers of “this would never happen!” Primally appalling, and plucking at the mass amount of night-time lids, a massive light awakens. Wide-eyed and drooling, raw, real, and un-cut is born.

Augusten Burroughs does this well in the film titled, “Running With Scissors.”

Mentally tickled, we are brought into a world of chaotic and topical events bursting with sexuality and awkward behavior. Immediately the viewer is introduced to Augusten’s narcissistic mother who requires all eye sockets on her when reading a poem she quite obviously deems brilliant. Augusten is sucked into her vortex; her little puppy, another wagging tail. Enamored and very willing of her attention, Augusten is nothing short of a slave to her vanity and dream. He licks her wounds with the same saliva he uses to tame her hair; his father, seemingly non-existent. This particular mother-son bond is also found feeding on the pages of Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, the opening line stating, “She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seemed to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.”

Our hopeful ideal of what a therapist “does” and “is” is completely smashed with the creation of the character Dr. Finch, who finds it strangely appropriate to dope up and ship out Augusten’s only blood tie. Throughout the course of the movie, we watch her progression of dead head, until she is nothing short of a lifeless delusion wavering before Augusten’s shell shocked eyes. This checked-out nature is found interweaving amongst all of Dr.Finch’s children, as well as his lonely and homely wife. Burroughs creates a cult-like theme; the leader being Finch and his “PSYCHOtherapy,” leaving the viewer to question the true nature of creative counseling.

Both “Running with Scissors” and Portnoy’s Complaint challenge our sexual comfortability with in depth snaps and speaks of masturbation. The “masturbatorium” slivers dryly from Finch’s mouth during a session with Augusten and his mother, leaving them to laugh awkwardly at the absurdity of it, only to find that he is quite serious. He then offers a tour of it, discovering his daughter sleeping in the same bed he jacks off on. Lovely. If that’s not attractively atrocious, I’m not sure what is. Alex, of “Running With Scissors,” is unstoppable in the talk of the wonder of his wang. He is immersed in it; drowning and suffocated by the touch of his c*!k like every naked, moaning woman imaginable dwells inside of it. Alex states, “If only I could cut it down to one hand job a day, or hold the line at two, or even three! But with the prospect of oblivion before me, I actually began to set new records for myself. Before meals. After meals. During meals!”

Both authors tackle similar issues in similar fashion. By breaking down the viewer to their biased and gut-shaken core they are able to feed bits of sadistic humor (and truth) in spoonfuls. Using comedic subtleties and absurd undertones makes for a fluffy safety net, and a smoother swallow.
Gulp up.