Stop Making Sense

My ebook, By The Time I Get To Venus, was published this week. This post was going to be a primer for it, but then it got me thinking.

Look at this...




I first saw this video about ten years ago. It blew my mind with its acute strangeness.

I don't speak Japanese and at that time I was unaware of the Kikkoman brand of soy sauce. With no frame of reference, I supplied my own, shifting set of ideas as to what the hell it was going on. It made me laugh, it creeped me out and the tune got stuck in my head.

A decade later, I know about Kikkoman soy sauce. Also, a friend who speaks a bit a Japanese explained that there is some play on words happening with the 'Show you!' bit in the song, which I can't quite remember now. Context has crept into this little animation and although I understand it a bit better, I don't quite enjoy it as much as I did.

The tune still gets stuck in my head, mind.

 Now, look at this (be careful, its absolutely terrifying. It's from The Shining)...





The Shining is one of the scariest films I have ever seen and this scene is without doubt the scariest scene in any film, ever.

Why?

Well, again, I think its to do with its inexplicability. Poor Shelley Duvall is having the most horrid day imaginable and just when she thinks it couldn't possibly get any worse she sees... something... in a room at the end of a corridor.

We have a long shot from her point of view... What the hell am I looking at?
Then, crash zoom; Christ! What the Hell Am I Looking At!?

And, she's off. Shelley's got homicidal Jack Nicholson shaped problems right now; how can she be expected to deal with this shit too?

I've never read the Stephen King book that the film is based on. I gather it strays quite far from the direction of the novel. But, one day on the internet, I stumbled across someone explaining the context of the bear in reference to the book.

I stopped reading the piece there and then. I didn't want to hear it. Just to know the fact that there was an explainable context to this scene subtly changed it for me. It lost a few degrees of its chill.

The reason why I find it powerful is the lack of context.

So, I'm rethinking the primer for By The Time I Get To Venus. I'll blog about it soon, but it might be as well for those who are intrigued to just to read the book cold. It will provide its own rewards, I promise.

You can never get back a lack of context.