One from a number of shoots I did before lockdown. I’m sifting through over a hundred, made between then and afterwards, for a book project which will be about 50 pages.
It’s going to be a bit of a paradoxical creation. Which is something I seem to dig. Even before these strange times.
Last night I had strange dreams. Of course watching Dead Ringers before bed, and for the second time ever, didn’t exactly help that situation (I saw it in the theater in 1988, when I was a junior in college, and swore that while I respected it, I never wanted to see it again – how getting older thickens one’s skin!). I dreamed that there was a horrible secret about a family I knew’s lineage. They had owned and killed people, for amusement, literally the way that Thomas Becket was murdered, with a sword right to the head, splitting the skull. This bloody, brutal history was discovered in some large, semi-underground building that they always kept locked up tight, by someone they had hired to do research on their family line for them. In another wrinkle, they had put the body of their father, dead for a while, in this building. I could see his skull on a table along with a bunch of dusty, disorganized papers and boxes. It was cloudy. The building was grey, with black marble areas encircling it. The light cast into it was as grey as the building. Dim. Dusty. Grey.
The building of family secrets was being dismantled. It was not a piece of the family’s history that they wanted exhumed and exposed to light, so to speak. The fact that one of their recent dead was in there also raised questions – why was he not buried somewhere like a normal person? What else were they doing now with death? One of the sons pretty much disappeared from any conversations in the regular house because he was so ashamed that his family was associated with these acts. He was embarassed beyond words. No one would ever deal with them in the same way again after this.
I remember feeling astounded and horrified. But also amazed that the investigation was going through without anyone in the powerful family attempting to stop it. Maybe I was thinking about some kind of demise for the current administration in power. Ugly things brought to light, crimes, family ones, that can no longer be hidden.
Hmmm.
Before I went to sleep, I realized that one of the brothers in Dead Ringers killed the other, because he believed what his lover told him that if he left, his brother wouldn’t allow him to come back. The tired old “Woman Ruins Man” thing. One with 3 uteruses, no less. It had to be one that was a “mutant” for that to happen. Blah.
Odilonvert 