Le salaire de l'idiotie

Le Salaire de la peurⁱ is -- other than a transparent vehicle for the director to exposeⁱⁱ his own wifeⁱⁱⁱ, very much in the Deep Throat tradition^iv -- such a humongous, monumental pile of inept nonsense as to shatter any possible containment vessel.

Consider, pars pro toto, this much : when for inexplicable reasons^v some dangerous explosive had to be conveyed hundreds of miles by truck, and two trucks were sent (for security!) on the same road, and one went slow and then fast and the other fast and then slow and so on and so following, when this pile of utterly-not-al-mente pasta finally came to the obvious "dramatic peak" of the fast truck being behind and "can not slow down" while the slow truck was doing "no more than 5km/h" it was NOT the obvious solution to simply drive the slow one off the road for five minutes. Because yes, you can have roads as bad as not having them, but that doesn't change the fact that this film was made by (and for) idiots, which is to say on the basis of fixed categorical designs they're not at liberty to alter -- much like worm can't jump from apple to apple, much like tea can't jump from cup to cup, just so Henri-Georges Idiot can't think it'd occur to anyone, let alone experienced truckers, to simply take the damned thing off road for a little bit. Because this totally never happens ever, and so on.

It is truly a great loss to humanity that the ethnically French were ever permitted to make movies ; they're worse than the Germans at it^vi, and they don't even have the excuse of producing the machinery. Stick to writing novels or pulling on your dicks^vii or whatever it is you're doing, fellows. This cinema business utterly isn't for you.

1. 1953, by Henri-Georges Clouzot, with Yves Montand, Vera Clouzot. Uncharacteristically rendered in English as "The Wages of Fear", which is actually what it says. [↩]
2. Let's understand something together. What do you suppose is the selling point of pretense ?

   Consider the evident case of cars, more specifically the advertisement for them. Say you're an advertising creative, and you're to make the ad for the customer's car. Do you see why you'd bother even proposing a piece like they do these days, so utterly pretentious you could splice the ad and the cars randomly in any other combination and nobody'd know the difference ?

   They had elections here recently, and the local twerps evidently hired some "experts" from fucking Florida, because lo and behold, there were briefly a whole bevy of cans of soup advertised, all in the exact pantsuit fashion of "proper" advertising, which is to say so pretentious as to not have any relation to the item advertised whatsoever.

   You know, intuitively, somehow through the fact of aculturation among the idiots (which you flatter yourself with delusions of immunity from -- but they're delusional, thoroughly) that it wouldn't be proper to try and advertise a guy whose name is Winner in the vein of "hey, his name says it all". Because that'd be reference to fact, and reference to fact is verboten in pretenselandia, altogether and completely forbidden.

   It's what people of my profession call a taboo -- it's not merely forbidden to speak such things, but even to notice them! For instance when a local fellow by the name Piza was proposed the slogan "Vote for algo! Vote for Piza!" he couldn't turn it down ; nor anyone in his team could point and laugh at the sheer ridiculous imbecility of it. To point at the failure of this pretense'd have been almost as bad as saying nigger!

   Think how the pretense works : it's not ok to point out the unflattering relation between a guy whose name is indistinguishable from pizza in this language, the involvement of cheese and electoral advertising! And, because this is the big whoop, and it's also not ok to notice this ; I don't mean in the public manner the notice's here given, but privately. People whose business is to manipulate the unspoken and unspeakable biases in the minds of random streetwalkers (ie, advertisers, Skinner-box flautists) nevertheless actually detrimentally rely on the in-turn-unspoken assumption that the power of the taboo protecting pretense is going to be so great it will actually prevent the ill effects! Even if they're not language-mediated at all!

   So what is the selling point of pretense ?

   Consider the case of american football, say. This game, such as it is set out, is entirely built on the overwhelming nature of kinetic momentum and the considerable difficulty of acceleration ; it's a sort of "thermodynamics proposes but kinetics disposes" dressed up for people's play. Yes you can pick up a ball, and yes you can run on your two feet as fast as they'll carry you, but no you can't take it from here to there because there's a dozen other dorks just like you, spaced just like so, and it just dun' work. That's the whole idea of that sport, such as it is, and in terms of getting fundamental realities through thick orc skulls you can't even say it's an entirely wasted exercise ("yes you can shoot a gun and yes you can have the oldster empty that safe but no you won't make it out with it" -- as important a lesson as you could hope to bestow upon 20 year old "independent" schmucks).

   Now imagine that some kids somewhere engaged in this game for the sport of it, which is to say for their own private enjoyment, without the adults goading them into it and without trying to impress whoever enough to get no-academic-strings-attached scholarships or whatever the hell. And among these kids... one could fly. I mean literally, he could just spread out his wings and fly away.

   Evidently football no longer works, not like this. If the linebackers or whatever they're called can't rely on the guy having to make with his feet, the whole thing's gutted, period and full stop. So the kids will, necessarily, counter the reality of the flying kid with pretense. Conventional as all pretense, the idea will be that "flying is not permitted". And the kid with wings is more than welcome to choose : either be excluded from playing the game outright, or else acquiesce to the fundamental pretense : he's not going to use his wings. Notwithstanding that not using wings (which you have) when they're useful is a little nutty ; and preferring cerebral concussions instead is nuttier still -- he's not going to use them.

   What is then the selling point of pretense ?

   That's right! Pretense provides security! If the non-flying-football pretense is bought, security from the sudden, unmitigable doom of "well, he just flew off with the ball, sorry, we lose" is available.

   If one advertises the car in such a way as to make no reference whatsoever to any specific, factual characteristic of the car in question -- then security from the very factual and rather inescapable characteristic of all cars (namely : that they can be driven into walls) is also available!

   That's why it seems a little off when some inept, noobish advertiser breaks the pretense convention and purports to discuss the car specifically, as it is. This is why representational rather than aspirational advertising looks like the handywork of illiterate yahoos, of "putin doesn't understand how the world works" orcs that don't really get it : say what you will about the actual car, it can't be said it can't possibly crash. Whereas in the world of dreamers...

   You see ? The selling point of pretense is security.

   The correlate of the need for security, however, is exposure. I am a man who doesn't worry much about cunt, specifically because I'm surrounded by it ; the cunt in question doesn't worry much about rape, specifically because it gets raped on the regular ; adult women worth plenty of dough aren't afraid to walk the "bad part of town" at night decked in streetwalker shoes & cvasi-dresses because... they do it! The adult women worth jack shit who aspire to my slaves' position and imagine idly pretending to it is not only "almost just as good" but also "how you get there" in the first place... those are afraid of the dark, and of dark alleys and of random bywalkers. The chronic masturbator isn't fixated because he sees too much sex stuff, but because he sees too little, and by consequence imagines way the fuck too much!

   Pretense is a figment of imagination, and the surest method to reduce imagination to silence is by exposure to reality! Which is why the teenager in the piece blushes under the tan : she's exposed, well and thoroughly exposed to the elements, such as they are, and therefore her needs of pretense are nowhere near JAP level.

   This is generally the benefit of exposing the female : she becomes less annoying! And this is conversely also the disadvantage of protecting the female : the more protected she is, the more insufferable her imaginary security needs satisfied through unbearable pretense actually become! Which is why the woman slapped now and again is infinitely more pleasant companionship than the woman never slapped ; and which is why no rough-and-tumble pioneer ever encountered a civilised fellow from the metropolis so that they each left the other with the impression -- that the Westerner's overpolite or that the Easterner's overconceited, but always the other way around ; and which is why orphans, especially survivors of rapeorphanages, make infinitely better successors than the genuine porphyrogeniti scions.

   Ultimately, this is why a safe world is the ugliest, smelliest, most disgusting shitsandwich man could ever put together for himself. So now you know. [↩]

3. Vera Clouzot spends the whole reel barefoot and abused like the lowliest of pre-war creole whores -- shoes are like spice for her, and never a kind word, not ever.

   She is, supposedly, deeply and unquestioningly in love with an idiot whose chicken-like chest is half covered in a sagged-out wifebeater (laugh not, it's visibly the deliberate trademark), one who can at the very most be bothered to open the door of the truck she's clinging to so she faceplants into the dirt and we can admire her cunt from behind. Add to this paragon of masculinity (as per the lights of un certain regard) that he falls in love at first sight with some older vagrant that stumbles into town and you have French wartime faggotry entire. This is what Alain Delon spent his "career" such as it was trying to cater to, a sort of inexistent, imaginary "ideal" male put together out of a rooster and a broomstick.

   Ridiculous as it may well be -- ridiculous as it indubitably, quite factually is -- nevertheless it beats the alternative, and by a fair distance. [↩]

4. What, you thought you're the first who came up with coercing the significant other to degrading acts whose recording memory she can't control ? D'oh.

   Consider the fundamental ambiguity that's at the basis of human sexuality : is the man lying or isn't he ? Who controls the relation between fact and word, between deed and label, between thing and symbol, and, more importantly, much more importantly -- what's yielding this control signify ?

   So yes, the question very much is who gets to decide whether "she meant" what she did and what she meant by the doing of it. See ? Not only your "deepest, darkest" whatever weren't even yours, specifically, but they weren't either deep or dark! They were anything but that, fully understood since the beginning of time by beings that were there to birth it. What now ? Gonna kill yourself ? 'Cuz that's how logic works at the age of 11, I'm sure. [↩]

5. It is absolutely never the case trucks carrying unsecured TNT must be driven fast. There exists no such circumstance nor could there exist such circumstance. [↩]
6. Between Vivre sa vie and Irreversible you have the history of nothing entire! [↩]
7. Really the best part of the whole 130 minute strip of wasted reel is the three second scene of the negress showering naked outdoors. Here :

   

   This was originally going to be a gif, because she is beyond feline, I have no idea how black girls manage to dance even while they shower with their back to the camera, but they do. However, while

   ffmpeg -i twof.mp4 -ss 00:26:33 -t 00:27:01 -r 25.0 negress%4d.jpg

   very happily extracted a few hundred frames and the Gimp is more than willing to Filter > Animation > Optimize for GIF (which makes frames transparent in all the spots where they've not changed from the previous frame) and then Floyd-Steinberg the whole kaboodle into a 256-color indexed palette, nevertheless the result, while smooth as butter, weighs a shade over 150 Megabytes. This probably has to do with the 960 x 720 resolution involved, which puts me against the wall : either delete frames, scale the thing down, or give up.

   I'm giving up, you get to see a still instead of the half minute's worth of swaying hips. I apologize. [↩]