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One Hour Photo ::
Saw One Hour Photo with Robin Williams tonight. It starts with him in a police interrogation room and then we’re on a psychological thrill ride, increasingly wondering just how sick this very likeable man really is and how he got to be that way. Recommended.
Yesterday’s entry about remembering who I am brought to mind both Radiohead’s Amnesiac album (couple of tracks on there I just love) and the movie Memento, which is one of my all-time favorites. I was thinking about Memento, then on the way to my friend’s, my iPod got to Todd Rundren’s “Bag Lady” from Hermit of Mink Hollow, and then One Hour Photo deepened this line of thinking further.
That song and these two movies all portray characters on the fringes, whose sanity is very much in question - but they raise the pointed question, are we really all that much more sane? The homeless bag lady has for one reason or another fallen into or chosen abject poverty in the most affluent society in the world - but if we see the concrete imagery of her physical poverty as a metaphor for spiritual poverty, how different are we, really? The protagonist of Memento has a baffling form of amnesia - but how much of what we remember about our own pasts is objective and how much is choosing to remember events in ways that only reinforce what we want to believe about ourselves?
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