Stranger on Earth

Link to Vol. 1:   http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.com/2014/01/lars-von-triers-sex-therapy-nymph.html This is just the sort of movie that you wander into fully expecting to find Jamie Bell of Billy Elliot fame as a whip-wielding S&M master. Welcome to Vol. 2 . After the sex-o-rama of Vol. 1 , what other nasty surprises can there be, you ask? You get 40 lashes (or 39, according to Seligman) in perverted Roman fashion for asking such a dumb question. This is Uncle Lars’ house of fun we’re talking about. To start with, there’s the Catholic church parallelism. In the chapter “The Eastern and the Western Church (The Silent Duck)”, we’re asked to examine the (Western) Catholic penchant for sadomasochism (what do you know, Christ’s martyrdom is mentioned), and in the meantime, Joe gets herself strung up like a Christmas turkey when she hooks up with K (Bell), an exclusive S&M expert with a fetish for authentic leather horse whips, rope knots, face-slappi...

  Uncle Lars is up to no good again. I’d caught wind of Von Trier’s latest sex-heavy project as far back as early 2012. Even then, without having read a thing about its plot, I knew it’s to be something explosive. The title of course speaks volumes, but in the hands of the Danish nut-job, you just know you’ll be in for a cracking good trip. And then there’s the cast: Charlotte Gainsbourg (who’s known for having pulled off some sick stuff in Von Trier’s Anti-Christ ), Willem Dafoe, Christian Slater, Stellan Skarsgard, Jamie Bell (oh cripes, there goes Billy Elliot), Uma Thurman, and last but not at all the very least, the infamous head-case that’s Shia I-plagiarise-my-apologies LaBeouf. So there you have it: every single one of them talented individuals, regardless of your opinions of them. What in the world are they doing jumping into bed with Uncle Lars? You just don’t say no to Uncle Lars when he comes a-knocking. This is the devil-in-disguise who brought us scathi...

Link to Part 1: http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2013/01/the-deceptive-voice-of-remorse-kazuos.html   In the climax of the novel when Sachiko drowned Mariko’s kittens in a river, Etsuko tried to comfort the child on the riverbank. Mariko was reluctant to move to America with her mother and “Frank” (whom the reader never met). During her attempt to console Mariko, she utters the following puzzling words: “If you don’t like it over there, we can always come back” (173, italics mine). This may not sound out of the ordinary at first, but she goes on when Mariko looks at her “questioningly”: “If you don’t like it over there, we’ll come straight back. But we have to try it and see if we like it there. I’m sure we will” (173). Her language here indicates she has assumed Sachiko’s role, speaking and acting as the child’s mother. In the following chapter, Etsuko “confesses” to Niki that perhaps Keiko’s suicide by hanging was her fault: “But you see, Niki, I knew all...

“The world of gods and spirits is truly nothing but the collective unconscious inside me.” – Carl Jung, On the Tibetan Book of the Dead What appears to be supernatural and surrealistic in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore  does not have to remain that way once we accept that in Murakami’s fictional world, the natural and the supernatural often cross paths and become one single unity. In the previous three entries on the novel, I have extensively discussed its relation to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex . But here I intend to explain why the supernatural should in fact be deemed natural, and how this reasoning is a direct reference to the theories of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel, both of whom are mentioned in the novel. Carl Jung’s psychological theory on the “collective unconscious” (the notion positing that all humans – regardless of race and culture – share a psyche containing “latent predispositions towards identical reactions” [1...