
The strangeness of a situation where the guests shed their own identities for pleasure, and take such a child-like pleasure in the birds they imitate, seems to be the starting-point for Cole’s meditation on the vanity of identity—our tendency to puff the self up through philosophy, cultural frippery, and the “monkey see, monkey do” mimicry of formal social codes. The brainy humor of the piece comes from the gap between highfalutin’ concepts like “the Heideggerian conjugation of the personal” and the “shameful poetry” of our “inadmissible passions,” which punctures the high-flown diction in the form of homey “yups” and “kiddos.” Franju’s magician suggests the sleight-of-hand it takes to make us forget those few genes that separate us from the apes, but also the conjurer’s ability to reveal our sense of what’s true to be a trick, pulled from thin air. “They seek the truth too far from themselves, while it is right near them”: up a sleeve, behind the mask, in the cup you’ve just sipped from, there on the screen.
1 comment:
That text just gets richer and richer each time through for me, too.
Ah, but the amazing thing that i for one overlooked on many viewings of this clip is that he doesn't drink from the champagne flute before he collapses!
The truth is right in front of us, indeed.
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