At a lecture on Music and Emotion yesterday, a researcher emphasized how our music tastes get fixed quite early into adulthood. No one really knows why, he proclaimed, but we all know why, don’t we?
Time passes and we evolve, we progress, we expand, we listen to genres that might once be anathema, like jazz, but he is right. We are stuck. I am stuck. To the music when I was young, when within the desert of all those mortals, oppressors, destroyers, or just boring adults, some semi-gods would speak to us, for us, their songs of our dark grace.
What they became, dead, fat, happy, sad, men, women is irrelevant. They are still intact in our memory because we are fixed in it. We do not want to see them as they are. It is for this that 20000 Days on Earth is as brave as it is accomplished. By resisting making a biopic, it shows the most intimate respect to one of those semi-gods, still living his life as art. And he, in turn, does not disappoint.
Constituted as a day’s journey, the film is flawless and beautiful. The playfulness and poetry that runs interminably through it, through both the images and the sounds, is a superb example of pure Structuralist Cinema as I perceive it: where the subject matter is fully reflected in the visuals, in the content and in the structure. With focus on the present and with the past present only as an abstraction and fragmented, this is the genius of this film. The cameos from various collaborators are exciting, spirited and thoroughly enjoyable; their short conversations succinctly colouring in tone what these relationships were and are. How much research and respect must lie behind this for the idea to succeed. For us old, stuck goths, the brief encounter with an ever transfixing Blixa Bargeld is the end to an unfinished conversation we were so long waiting for; Warren Ellis is shining as a character even larger than the protagonist himself; and all this, without any fake illusions of a great artistic existence, but only showing their constant effort for it, love for it, need for it and the banality of it.
It is no coincidence that out of all the propositions, Nick Cave accepted only this one. The same way he chose the present, not a glorious but near death past. He is the present, while we are the past.
You see, there is a trend among us, old, stuck goths, to label as sold out whoever from that past had a popular breakthrough; or did not die; Utterly unfair, this seems to me just a desperate attempt to cover our own guilt; for, less or more, we are the ones that didn’t keep the Life as Art promises; the ones stuck in a past that we chose not to make a future; the ones that compromised or changed minds because life can never be pure, because as we grow older we get hurt more, or we love more, inevitably hurting and loving someone outside our solipsistic selves.
Whether the new songs speak to us or for us is what is really irrelevant. Because he - he doesn’t need us. As no artist should. It is us who need him as a junkie, in distress, playing with death because we do not want to face ourselves becoming normal. So, I am glad he let us in, somehow, on his 20000th day; through an elegy to constant creating and not through a eulogy of times past.
So, here he is, in full glory, one of the semi-gods that made us in his image, walking the earth, just for a day, for us, to snap us out of our past delusions. And for this, I love him still and even more.
more info:
www.rottentomatoes.com/m/20000_days_on_earth/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/movies/in-20000-days-on-earth-nick-cave-is-on-the-move.html?_r=0
http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/events/packed-lunch-podcast.aspx
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