Hello, strangers!

Hello, stranger...

This is a private (from time to time) blog for my cinematic obsessions and scintillating (one-sided) reflections about movies. Feel yourself at home!

20 ianuarie 2021

Cvasimilitudini III.22 [Mirror, mirror on the wall...]

Screenshot from Puzzle of a Downfall Child (dir.: Jerry Schatzberg/1970)

Screenshot from Twin Peaks - Season 2, Ep. 22 - (Created/directed by David Lynch/1990 - 1991)

„The convention of the mirror, used throughout the series as the hackneyed trope signalling the reversal of inside and outside, appearance and reality, is given another turn: subjects are chillingly presented as no more than reflections of the mirror. As a reversal it is predictable enough in a series that continually played with generic and cultural codes. But as a double reversal, from inner depth to external surface and then from superficial image to superficial image, it is more disturbing, an index of evil: «the principle of evil is synonymous with the principle of reversal» (Baudrillard). 

The reversal doubles the identification of Cooper as romance hero, the only figure holding the playful fragments of the series together, and as metaphor of romance identification, staging the duplicitous play of coded images. While the former would have offered a way to close the series as a story of good’s triumph over evil, the latter offers no exit from a play of narrative surfaces that flicker with the ambivalence of evil”. (Fred Botting & Scott Wilson - Bataille/2001)