TRICK OR TREAT!
TRICK
Japhy Presents the Top Costumes of 2003
The Metrosexual: Put on a mud mask, manicure your nails and wear your favorite Diesel jeans and Burberry jockstrap! Finish it off with some lip glass and a really tight t-shirt and be everybody’s favorite media-coopted fashion statement du jour! This costume is not complete without a quintent of nelly stereotypes following you around making catty comments.
Deviled Angel: Show that you too understand how binaries are meaningless in our post-millenial world by dressing as both an angel and devil at once. People will stare at your halo and horns with bemused enlightenment as you free them from the chains of moralistic duality.
For Couples: Pimp Bush and Ho’ Lady Liberty: Um, this one is pretty obvious, right?
Elliott Smith: Buy a knife, attach it to your chest. (courtesy of Justin)
Falcon Pornstar: Recession hitting you bad? Go naked and give lots of blowjobs to people. Not only will you make LOTS of new friends, you’ll save a bundle on your costume!
TREAT
The scariest movie of all time.
Have I got a tale for you. It involves, ghosts, reincarnation, a mysterious necklace, a gentleman’s agreement gone horribly awry, death and death again, a push up bra, madness and obsession. It is the obsession that is most terrifying, so terrifying in fact, that it leaves us, and the man caught in its grip, dumbstruck.
Can you guess the movie, I’m refering to? If you haven’t figured it out, highlight here: It’s Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. If you haven’t seen it, get thee to a cinema.
The following has lots of spoilers in it.
More than any monster movie, it is this movie which fills me with terror and dread. Movies with blood and gore are fun, but the whole thrill comes out of knowing that you made it out alive. When this movie fades to black, you aren’t so sure.
Scotty (James Stewart) is asked by an old friend to investigate the odd behavior of his wife. Scotty follows the woman (Kim Novak) who is, in fact, not who Scotty has been told she is at all. She is an actor, and her audience is Scotty. The rouse is ludicrous and complex, the machinations of a madman, but the result is that Scotty falls in love with the woman, whose fate, literally scripted, is to jump off a belltower, the one place, Scotty, who has a fear of heights, can’t go to watch her.
And then, after months in an asylum, getting well, Scotty sees a woman on the street who looks like the woman he loved. He doesn’t know that this woman is in fact the same woman, but she does, and as she quietly acquiesces to his demands to transform her into the woman she used to be, we find ourselves lost in a dizzying fall into obsession and love, until they become the same thing.
What makes this movie so amazingly creepy is that we, the audience are not let off the hook that we are voyeurs to this drama. When Scotty watches this woman, we watch her. His obsession with the image is our obsession. It’s primal, it’s perverted and there is no release. A nun appears in the last seconds of the film and blesses the woman who has just fallen, a second time, for good, but she does Scotty, and she does not bless us. We are not absolved of the sins we have commited as passive viewers, needing, like fiends, more images, more and more, to satisfy the unsatisfiable: The desire to recreate a moment of truth, that was always, has always been, a lie.
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