BLOG: FOR ONCE A DREAM THAT IT MIGHT ACTUALLY BE INTERESTING TO TELL OTHER PEOPLE ABOUT Last night I was thinking about Stanley Kubrick and what a master mad scientist of filmmaking he was. How nobody but him could have made films as matchless as “Dr. Strangelove” and “2001”, because nobody else was so determined to make the most near-perfect movie possible that they’d sacrifice the emotional and physical well-being of their cast and crew in any way necessary—including risking the lives of the whole lot if that’s what it took—in order to do so. He was a master manipulator with little in the way of ethical scruples—but once turn off the camera and he was a genuinely, sincerely nice guy. As with Don Vito Corleone it was only business, nothing personal. Were the aforementioned films so great *only* because he was staggeringly talented or does this all hint that utter remorselessness and ruthlessness actually does help people get ahead in life (though of course certainly not in the afterlife, don’t get me wrong), provided of course that they have a lot of talent to begin with? How much of his success was just plain luck, irrespective of *either* ruthlessness *or* talent? We are talking about the film business, after all. I fell asleep soon after having these thoughts, and had a dream that I was in some massive indoor amusement park which was at least partly “A Clockwork Orange”-themed. I was curious about what I wound find in such a place but I actually paid for admission solely to find the restroom. This was a massive walk-through dark ride I was going on, you see—one which may have been the sole feature of the park—and according to the demented dream logic this world was operating by I couldn’t just turn around and find a bathroom somewhere in the halls behind me and there would obviously be one on the ride itself. I didn’t even think about that. So I bought a ticket from the stand in front and went on my way. If you’ve been on enough dark rides then you should know that they’re sometimes actually fairly well lit, and this was such a place. I could see where I was going about as well as I could in any normal office building corridor; the problem was that there were doors off to the side everywhere I went, and *every single one of them* was labeled with some odd, made-up word that often sounded vaguely like one you’d expect to see on a public restroom door. I don’t remember the exact words after waking, except that they were garbled approximations of “ladies”, “gentlemen”, “men” and “women”. Imagine that someone who didn’t speak English heard these words once five years ago and tried his best to remember them in retrospect but did a very poor job. (I didn’t realize it until some time after I awoke but this element of the dream is kind of appropriate when you consider that the droogies in “A Clockwork Orange” had their own made-up variation of English.) Finally, after wandering lost for several minutes in a very labyrinthian complex of such halls, I came to the entrance to the Clockwork Orange complex proper. There were seven doors you could enter through. I tried one—and found that all there was behind it was a little alcove or closet with a huge stack of brochures on the floor. I grinned and tried a second door. Here there was another small room with nothing in it but one of those dolls that repeats popular catch phrases when you pull a little string in its back. It was an Alex doll, and I don’t recall for the life of me what line from the movie he said. At this point I opened at least one or two other doors, maybe all of them, but the contents of the rooms behind them escapes me. There might possibly have been a somewhat larger room chock-to-the-brim with random useless gift store knick-knacks or something. The point is, there was nothing in the whole theme park. Because there is nothing to most any of them in the end, at bottom. It’s all just a cover for commercialism, or gets *dominated by* commercialism, like everything else in a capitalist society. I found my way back to the entrance, and then to the help desk, and, still grinning, asked the guy there where the *real* bathroom was. He grinned too and said that it was through this white door to the left of the entrance to the area. That’s the last thing I remember, but I think the dream ended soon afterward. Now here is the reason I told you about the dream. Obviously I wouldn’t want a place this frustrating to be built in real life. It would be trolling the public. And even a *fake* “A Clockwork Orange”-themed amusement park would be too tasteless and dangerous to propose for an instant: I would never deny that. What I want to know is, has anybody ever done something *otherwise* along these lines in waking life? You know, designed a theme park specifically to parody *other* parks, and more importantly modern western civilization in general? Don’t tell me it would be too expensive: do you have any idea how many millions of dollars go into filmic spoofs (which, unfortunately, do make quite a lot of money)? Those studios have to start out *somewhere*. I say go ahead and do this. It’s the morning and I’m still groggy and this may be a terrible idea but if you’re going to stick it to our culture—a culture where consumerism reigns and appearances are everything and service is nothing—then what better way could there be than for you to make children happy in the process? *Without*, of course, literally engaging in the same sorts of practices yourself. Surely no one would stoop so low as to *genuinely* charge somebody forty bucks for a pack of gum and call it a parody, would they? Heh heh heh. Heh. Heh?
Posted on: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 13:43:51 +0000
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