In the press packet for the film, Franco’s grammar-challenged director’s statement speaks of Ballard as “an outcast we can all relate to,” a man who embodies “what is inside all of us.” Let me remind everyone that in addition to having intercourse with corpses, Ballard at one point burns a baby alive and later dons a wig “fashioned whole from a dried human scalp.” Franco makes every lagging high schooler’s mistake of believing that the success or failure of a narrative is contingent upon his ability to “relate” to it, a facile apprehension of literary character, and especially of one as depraved as Lester Ballard. There better be nothing remotely relatable about this aberration, nothing of him “inside all of us,” or else civilization would everywhere be a daily hecatomb. The appeal of Lester Ballard—and of literary characters as various as Job and Achilles, as Medea and Raskolnikov—lies precisely in the opposite of our preparedness to relate, or to “identify,” as students like to say. Ballard doesn’t confirm our own human identity, doesn’t serve as an echo chamber for our own selfhood; rather, he upends our conceptions of ourselves, upsets our cozy belief in the relative similarities among our species, and reveals to us what breeds of lethal otherness crouch in the dark.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 20:22:35 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015