Igor Mantsov. Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous
Igor Mantsov

Date of publication: October 27, 2004

A miniskirt , a revealing blouse, brightly painted lips: if a woman with a five-year-old child hanging on her arm looks more like a lover than a mother, she is reconfiguring our visual apparatus. The ones who react most sharply to violations of the rules are grannies who do not have a free choice of role, who for some time now only mothers : “Bitch!” If she were without a child: with a friend, a man, or on her own, it would be easier to “not notice” her and not to interpret her. Having arbitrarily recoded the canonical image, putting pleasure above duty, she abolishes hierarchy and tramples all humanistic values ​​at once.

This is where the concept of "disgust" is captured. It's impossible to look at this directly. Why, don’t we know that motherhood does not cancel desires? We know, but on the street, being social animals, we try not to notice it. “To be disgusted” simply means to turn away . But to turn away means still remembering the reason, keeping in memory its vague image, its cloudy outline . Be curious, dream, catch with peripheral vision. Grannies, who have only debt left, cannot bear the memory of past pleasure. And at the very first second a man is blinded by the reality of the impossible: the temptation is presented in the most frightening way possible. The balance of the world seems to be lost forever.

In the late Soviet dictionary "Aesthetics" there is no category "disgusting". There is the base , the ugly and the terrible , and the first is defined as the “extreme degree” of the second and third and as the “sphere of human unfreedom . ” All three words have been profaned and disavowed, and become the basis of our everyday jargon. "Disgraceful!", "Horror!" and even “We are fed up with your base instincts!” - all this is no longer “aesthetics”, but a dialect of the domestic market. Of course, no one is stopping our man from growling something like “Disgusting guy!”, hissing “Disgusting!”, and yet the same-rooted original term seems more productive than its cluttered counterparts. After all, the word “disgust” is not some abstract definition, it is anthropologically determined, generated by turning the head, every minute. It's time to take vital words away from the scribes and Pharisees and return them to the people.

The trouble with our art is the dominance of political correctness, the flip side of which is domestic insanity, both spontaneous and conceptually organized by literate comrades. An extreme and illustrative case is Valery Todorovsky’s film “The Lover ,” which is very popular with the post-Soviet intelligentsia, and most importantly, can easily be reduced to the original scene presented above. So, a woman with a child lured two men at once, but as soon as the game began, that is, the painting left this game and died .

A very interesting balance of power! Like the grannies on the Tula street, mature men only remember past pleasures . Moreover, having completely surrendered to the idea of ​​duty , the heroes never cease to find out which of them is the real father of the child. Everyone dreams of taking away this difficult burden, this honorable and responsible duty of fatherhood from their opponent. For pity's sake, even in the most odious works of Soviet socialist realism such a sophisticated, such a mocking suppression of nature - by the idea of ​​obligation - is not noticed. However, there is no escape from nature; nature takes its revenge. Since the image of heterosexual seduction is removed from the plot, the World has to end with homosexual seduction. A responsible viewer is forced to interpret the endless litigation of the characters as a transference of attraction, as a camouflaged flirtation. Without meaning to, Todorovsky taxis onto Vladimir Sorokin’s highway. This is how political correctness and the provocative “openness to the abyss” turned out to be identical. Both strategies are extremely dependent on what the country has not overcome Soviet _ Soviet is when peripheral vision and “disgusting” are denied. When a person is forbidden to turn his head and peek out of the corner of his eye. Soviet - reduction of degrees of freedom of the head.

In the 60s, a painting called “Disgust” was made by Roman Polanski. But now it is more appropriate to turn to his other masterpiece, the film “The Tenant” made ten years later . I watched “The Tenant” in the early 90s, in the VGIK workshop of Yuri Arabov, and I clearly remember only my reaction to the episode where the main character throws himself out of the window in despair. It seems that it was Polanski himself, and he failed to crash the first time. Then the crippled man with piercing eyes repeated the suicide procedure. He hobbled to the entrance, crawled up the stairs to the top floor and jumped again. So, my reaction consisted of unprecedented laughter. Throughout the film, the hero was pitied, which is why the initial suicide was read in the mode of warm sympathy. However, repetition unexpectedly reversed the previous strategy of perception, proposing as the norm something resembling extreme forms of cynicism. The new author's discourse was so disgusting that perception instantly switched to peripheral vision mode. That’s why I don’t remember either the treasured episode or the film as a whole: only the feeling of liberation and the accompanying sudden happiness. Just a minute ago, balanced and sad, now I was simply sliding out of my chair onto the floor, writhing with laughter and delight.

What was it, how to understand it? Cynicism is a kind of therapy, a way of total alienation of the hero. By turning into its own parody, suicide blocked sentimentality and empathy. And as soon as the hero became a stranger , the viewer felt his difference with him , at the same time throwing other people’s problems off his shoulders.

On the contrary, Russian films such as “The Lover” or “Cuckoo” affirm the idea of ​​​​politically correct equality in the spirit of “no one is a stranger to me.” In “The Lover” this hypocritical liberal fantasy is brought to the point of absurdity, the heroes of Yankovsky and Garmash look at each other as if in a mirror: they slept with the same woman, lay claim to the same child, are equally polite and patient. Thoughts, feelings, reactions - everything is unified in accordance with the stereotypes of intelligentsia consciousness. O brave new world!

The picture could have been saved by serialization in the spirit of “The Tenant”: men again fall for the same, new woman, the matter ends with another child, whom the rival twins lay claim to with equal grounds. Among other things, in this way it would be possible to achieve an unhypocritical alternation of duty and pleasure, inevitable, like the change of seasons. However, in order to cultivate disgust , a sense of humor and basic sobriety are required.

The American film "Alien vs. Predator" once again demonstrated how far our so-called democrats are from the original source, that is, from Western democrats, and why our "masters of discourse", essentially deep provincials, are not allowed into decent Western society, despite the "Kodak" ", ambition and pompous appearance. The plot is as simple as the truth. A group of researchers led by a crazy professor lands in the ice of Antarctica to examine a mysterious religious building. Very soon all the men, including the heroine’s charming boyfriend, die from the paws, claws, teeth and fins of terrible creatures. It turns out that the creatures are of two types. Firstly, the superior race, the Predators, are humanoids from a distant galaxy, hiding ugly slimy faces with three jaws under steel shells. Secondly, giant reptiles, Aliens, which Predators fly to hunt once a century. From time immemorial, human flesh has been used as bait for reptiles.

Left alone, the heroine quickly discovers... her irrelevance. The reptiles had already had enough and multiplied, the alien master got the taste for exterminating them. In the twilight of the stone labyrinths, disgusting mucus squelches loudly, nightmarish limbs come off with a roar and whistle, jaws clack; in short, a disgusting spectacle of the highest order. The unfortunate mulatto, whose role is naturally assigned to an actress of dull appearance, a supporting character , feels superfluous, and that’s good. The authors presented an absolutely alien story from the lives of absolutely strangers . If in the first, brilliant “Alien” by Ridley Scott, phallocentrism, male aggression and feminist disgust for them were encrypted in the image of a plastic slimy monster, then here the mission of the saber-toothed Alien is radically rethought: what does a stupid black woman mean to him in comparison with an intellectual Predator! Moreover, the Predator, whose pleasure consists of galactic flights and reckless hunting, does not need a woman. The heroine is not a mother, not a wife, and not a victim, but some kind of disgrace to humanity. He even risks his life just because he gets underfoot. All the more unbearable will be her subsequent longing for these “real men” who do not need her.

"Alien vs. Predator" is a witty commentary on "The Affair." It’s funny to read an American action movie as a fantasy of our heroine, who dreams of strange saber-toothed men tearing each other to shreds because of her. Just can't wait! Ours are friends. They are homely, earthly .

Practice shows that taming strangers is impossible and that liberal generosity has a downside. The unsinkable television KVN amazed with the endless curtsies of the so-called witty students to “Alexander Vasilyevich Maslyakov ,” their general. And so they will bend before him, and so on. And one more time: with triple servility, with an affectionate joke. In exactly the same way, our cheerful, precocious democracy masks an unprecedented reverence for rank. Sincere love for your superiors is when duty is organically combined with pleasure. The categories vile , terrible , ugly fit here perfectly.