Girls Against God

of the canon, bring in monochrome, a room full of formless black components. Hatred isn’t subtle, but it’s beautiful. Hatred is my pleasure dome.
Maybe Nicolas Roeg managed something that’s simultaneously subtle and challenging when he made Insignificance. In that film, made in the mid-eighties but set in the fifties, a series of characters meet in a hotel and act out philosophical and political issues of the postwar era. The characters are fictional, but the spitting image of fifties icons: a movie star looks like Marilyn Monroe but isn’t her, a professor looks like but isn’t Albert Einstein, a senator resembles but isn’t Joseph McCarthy, and a baseball player isn’t, but looks like, Joe DiMaggio. That they are fictional copies of real people seems at first disruptive and artificial, since they look like representations of Marilyn Monroe and so on, as seen in other films. Then that impression fades, and the gap between film and reality grows increasingly complex. The characters mimic the icons but act out completely fictional scenes in which Almost-Einstein and Almost-Monroe test out each other’s roles, and she retells the relativity theory with children’s toys, a flashlight and balloons. When it all ends with the hotel room exploding, all resemblance to reality crumbles. This wasn’t an event that really happened. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the plot of the film, either, aside from the time of the explosion, 08.15, the same time that the atom bomb was dropped over Hiroshima. It turns into an aesthetic feast, as toys, balloons, a flashlight and Almost-Marilyn’s body are dismembered, scorched, and liquefied. The film’s structure has managed to accommodate another disjointed footnote, another almost-character, Almost–Little Boy.
What explodes is primarily fictional. The film’s plot has unfolded in a hotel room built in a film studio. A hotel room is a sort of illusory, temporary home, perhaps in the same way that the film and the film studio are a temporary home to the production of an illusory reality. When the illusion-space is blown up and the room pulverised and drizzled in front of the camera in slow motion, it’s as if the film has blown the roof off the entire history of film. The illusory construction, the one that tells us we should foster real feelings for something that looks like reality but isn’t, is pulled apart. Little bits of wood and metal, pillow feathers, clothing fibres, flesh, drops of blood and bits of intestines float around the room in slow motion and find new places there, like food morsels about to congeal in aspic.
Maybe the film, with this blast, also expresses a primitive desire to transform reality into fiction. Not like the blockbuster films that transform death and violence into something beautiful in the service of a Crusader politics that romanticises war, but the opposite. Here the blast is something fictional and insignificant. Perhaps Nicolas Roeg is asking, could we have blown up something fictional instead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? If what we blew up had been fictional and the bomb also fictional, no lives would have been lost. The explosion would have had exactly the same significance to the world as the snow globe that tumbles from of the hand of the dying man in Citizen Kane. It would have been historically insignificant.
Could we turn back time and blast fictional Japanese cities instead of real ones? asks Insignificance. Could we live out our fantasies without needing to cross the line to where real people have to die? Is the problem actually our perception of reality and the cap it puts on imaginative expression? Can art’s insignificant explosions blast our illusions to bits?
This is the space I want to write in, the blasted hotel room, in the long echo that follows the moment the illusion is shattered, as everything that mimics what we’ve been taught to call reality is ripped to shreds and drizzles down around us.
In 2005, the summer holiday after I finish my undergraduate degree in Oslo, and with it all the university’s fossilised film classes, I travel to Japan. Not to Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but to Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital, known for its many temples, kimonos, teahouses and paper shops. I remember a residential area with street after street lined with small wooden houses, like a little village in the middle of the town. It’s impossible to look through the windows that face the street: they are hidden behind fences, plants, or shutters, and I glide through the streets without the company of my reflection, a little more invisible and less myself than I’m used to. I understand that Japanese people like to keep things to themselves. They’re secretive beings. They’d rather look down than meet my eyes, and more and more people here wear a white mask over nose and mouth, supposedly so as not to spread or receive other people’s bacteria or viruses, but also to hide. They swarm around Kyoto, unidentifiable and untouchable behind their masks, like a web without connections. Their history is a long chain of disappearances, erasures and reconstructions. There are so many reasons not to exist here, or not to exist completely.
I’m given a tour of a Zen temple in the middle of town. It surprises me to see the walls, ceiling and floor looking so spotless, because the temple otherwise seems very old, and I find out I’m right, the temple is old, but the building is relatively new. It’s demolished and rebuilt every fifty years. This is done to preserve the construction technique, because the craft is more important than the object it created, the temple. Maybe it’s also to avoid cultivating attachment to a material thing. Or to avoid cultivating the self, and obliterating the illusion of value?
I remember this now, many years later, as though my film writing has summoned it: I remember talking to the temple guide