Gomorrah

Gomorrahⁱ is so utterly authentic it's beyond superlative. Quite so, exactly, is what things are, and quite so, exactly, is why things are this way. My habitually critical mind finds no space to object, no nook to hang rejection by, no cranny to stuff with acid. It's smooth, round and smooth, definitively correct. It's what it is.

The only problem, of course, is the habitual backfire : the piece is transparently intended as pantsuit agitprop, its desired functioning is something in the vein of "plox moar hysteria". The obvious wish of the makers is that upon viewing it, the viewer concludes something like... whatever, the pantsuit commonplaces are really too disgusting, too objectionable to ennumerate. You know what I mean, I'm sure.

Yet it fails in that intent. Just as transparently, just as painfully, obviously, ineluctably. I can't imagine who'd watch Gomorrah and not conclude, upon being told by the stupid cunts at the end how "the Camorra killed 4`000 idiots in the past 3 years, almost one every three days" anything besides... well ? What'd you say ? What did you say, even if not outloud, what was the true voice in your heart of hearts offering ?

"Good!". Right ? How do I know that ? Well... what else ? What could it possibly say ? What else is there ? That purported viewer'd have to be a muppet bloodless beyond the requisites of survival, it'd have to be some sort of transexual, a virtual being, inexistent, a figment of juvenile imagination to come up with anything else. Turn it as you might, the only possible takeaway goes along the lines of "Fucking serves them right!" ; and then further, that the only problem's they're not killing nearly enough careerwomen, nearly enough government employees, nearly enough policia cientifica and all the rest of such refuse. The significant problem with the Camorra isn't that it kills people -- it's that it's killing not nearly enough and quite evidently not really the right ones (a point not exactly lost on them either, hence Toto Riina).

The kids who "don't like being under people" ? Bang. Fucking offensive morons, I don't recall sense vindicated by cinema quite to the degree the mowing down of those monkeysⁱⁱ achieves. The woman who "won't betray her husband or her child" ? Bang. Sacrifice is what it is, not what they pretend it to be.

A good fucking start, in a word ; if the remaining, retarded brother had any life left in its fetid corpulence at all it'd never have permitted this thing be made. In fact, the pantsuit morons cluelessly making it wouldn't ever have been able to even conceive it, nor anything even remotely like it.

The end is nigh, how shall we put it, the end is nigh once the barbarians at the gates do indeed seem to have much more of a point than the supposedly civilised defenders under siege, cowering inside, behind walls and wordage.

Sic transit.

1. 2008, by Matteo Garrone, with Toni Servillo [↩]
2. As exactly opposed to these other monkeys. [↩]