Street Pig

A sofa has replaced the bench that the council took away to prevent further disturbances. The drunks and hangers on and hangers out outside the battered old bike shop overflow from the arms of fake, pinkish velvet, squabbling over the embrace of the centre spot. Dogs gather round the seat front, hoping for a drop of sweet, special brew, or a vinegar crisp kiss, as though suckling on the belly of some obscenely fertile street pig. "Ahh, bless 'em," says a local, lamenting the loss of the bench, admiring the innovation of the street dwellers, and understanding the need for the succour of the sofa in the street.

Mindmap

A man walks down the street... It is hard to write about the real world - reality is unwritten. For as long as it is real. A man is crawling down the street, partially incapaciated by the singularity of experience... He rises now, given strength by the inscription of his crawl. His mind is alive with the crimes of the city, and young drug-running children scamper constantly across his mental map of the borough. They scuttle with a lope, like ailing monks limping their way to vespers in dens of iniquity. The forgotten, the excluded, the deprived, attend an illicit church.

E5 Lives and E8 Traits. E9 Dines.

A family of seven sit in the curtainless front room. The height of the ceiling, the size of the room, which is somehow narrow and deceptively small, all serves to give the window onto the street a disproportionate importance, like some unfortunate portal that relentlessly disturbs any domestic peace. The slightest shout from outside and the family flinch and the kids rush to peer out, hopelessly attracted, overflowing almost, from within their four bare indoor walls. It is not much more than cave life, hanging over the high street of deprivation.

Le Boucher (1970)

The man is society's butcher, the repository of the violence of the world. He hated his father, he waged war for fifteen years, he is the village's butcher! The blood flow, there is so much blood, and his life blood is reliant on the flow of blood. He does not rape, he kills his friend's wife. He provided the meat for that wedding. He wants the schoolteacher, the young headmistress, chaste, somewhat aloof, a hurt spinster, who smokes men's cigarettes and smokes them in the street. She has no lover but she is not bloodless - her bloodflow is repressed, his is strained and overstressed. Her contained eroticism. She wants to share the meat she got from him, with him, she wants his blood. Ultimately it is her restraint and surface bloodlessness that draws him, that flushes him out - he corners her, and she, in protecting him, corners him, and it is this that enables him to draw his own blood rather than somebody else's. She cares, she hides the lighter. She protects him from the consequences of his own violence, that is of him but is not him. She endangers herself for him, and this enables him to draw his own blood. His is a victory, he is a hero, he fights with the world's violence, and in suicide he wins. He ends the killing, overcomes it. The pulsating light of the lift down to purgatory is crimson red.

Litter Struggle (quickly, there I am in an adverb)

The literal quest for the real is subject to no mean difficulty. In language we are straining to convey the reality of our experiences and the world around us. We repeat, 'literally', that, 'basically', things appear to us 'blatantly'. Conversely though, affirmation comes not from individuation, but from a kind of wanton generalising - a fullness of reality is seen in things we judge to be 'totally', 'completely', 'wholly', or 'absolutely' something. We put great emphasis on the authenticity of experience, the first-hand sense of it, but have to resort to its quintessence as the symbol of wider field of meaning to give it value. It is the old catch 22, that I am meaningful only in so far as I mean the same as everyone else, and therefore struggle to mean anything distinct at all. There is also the denial of this danger of oblivion-through-commonality. Many things that happen that are deemed to be inexplicable are described as 'random'. "What a coincidence!" The very idea that there is some sort of recognition of an incidence of two disparate things coming together, negates their disparity. Coincidence is a nonsense. Or rather, coincidence is the problem of perfect sense. It is the way in which perfect sense must be denied, held at bay, the way we must expel it from our communal psyche into the realm of the random and haphazard, for fear that in recognising its wholly contiguous nature we would annihilate our individuality. We all have our own i-pod so that we can be identically individual in listening to our 'personal stereo'. The duality inherent in the notion of the singular. Singular from what? Many have sought the perfect minimum of meaningful reflection. Sancho Panza happiest in the company of only his ass. Don Quijote himself, best able to expound his individuality to Sancho Panza alone. Tristram Shandy's most singular autobiography, a self-referential chaos. The iconic cigarette, the smoke and mirror of the lonely mind. Consider the problem of 'celebrity', so often a condition in great conflict with 'personality'. A mob-rape of the locus of desirability. The superstars of the forever more infinite finite galaxy of our empty-me players! Infinity to the power of infinity. Nothing - you lose. Music to the tune of my choice.

The Single Man

Paradoxically, the single man spends more time looking over his shoulder than the coupled. Looking at the past, at what has passed, and what passes. The single struggles to hold on to things, to stop and enjoy anything, to really be anywhere - he has no anchor. He drifts onwards, forwards, sideways - a spectator of the passing of time and experience. The predicament can be likened to the inability of one eye to take the measure of distance or appreciate dimensions, and the way we become tired if too long is spent looking one-eyed through a camera lens. What he may feel he has is opportunity, the opportunity to choose to grasp something. Being adrift, he can stray into another vessels wake, clunk together with another hulk in harbour due to his singular mass. His lack of perspective allows him to telescope in close to a target subject at the blink of an inclination. And he can imagine the target to be as large or small, near or far, or one dimensional as he wishes. He can draw and arrange his world, what is in the fore, what is in the rear. But the ties are weak, and at any point the currents may carry him off or leave him behind, unanchored as he lies.

Les Bonnes Femmes

The film excels in its representation of a sinister violence of the everyday, and of the gross irresponsibility of a new, individualistic and thrill-seeking post-war European society. There may also be the suggestion that the very kind of romanticism stimulated in this oppressive and frivolous social context is ill-fated, somehow formless and apocalyptic. Ultimately it is the disillusioned dreamer that is murdered, arguably having been driven to a dangerous margin in search of a more meaningful alternative to the everyday froth and stasis of parisian life. And it is there at that margin that she is eliminated. She is eliminated in the same way that the life of the animals at the zoo has been eliminated - they have had their essence throttled out of them by being put behind bars, and for Chabrol there is little doubt as to who are the more primitive in the scene where the women and Jane's companion taunt the monkeys. The film's depiction of this sort of animal hedonism are uncomfortable and dizzying. At the same time, the girls sit out their time in the shop like animals in a cage. The idiotic dunking at the pool is childish and cruel - it is the way in which the characters infantilize themselves and others, the women literally held under water and stifled. Crucially, it is at this point that the murderer sees his opportunity to intervene at what is for him a particularly favourable, suffocating moment. The murderer is the predator waiting to pick off the straggler from the pack, following at a distance on his motorcycle steed, and his victim hangs back because of the vacuousness of the pack and its pastimes. There is a parallel to this sinister pursuit - the overweight, past-it companion of playboy Marcel rather scandalously tries to cop a feel of Jane whilst she petts with Marcel - a little bit out of order, but harmless and pitiful overall, even amusing, we might think. However, this is the very same sinister game. It is the amoral pursuit of a kind of wreckless pleasure in a world where faith in higher human morality has been lost. The superficial comedy of him holding in his stomach takes on a dark, symbolic significance in the light of the physical violence of the film's climax. What seems an embarrassing lack of dignity is actually the enforced conforming to a tyranny of pleasure-seeking youthfulness. The murderer also suddenly reveals behind the composed and seemingly adult exterior a totally juvenile and inappropriate sidew when he blows raspberries in an elegant restaurant, similar to the garish Marcel. The murderer's manner of seduction is childish trickery, and his repertoire of talents displayed at table rapidly descends into crude obscenity. In the opening scene of the film, there is effectively a stand off between the motorbike murderer and the automobile dandies - they are all equally salubrious predators who only differ slightly in tactics, whilst the violence of their intent is the same. They are equally culpable in their lack of responsibility. And fused into the film at the very outset is the theme of the new materialism, a manifestation of empty physicality at the level of society. The Cadillac, the motorbike, the brands of domestic appliances displayed in shop windows. It is a society of the image, of the material. Note also the supposedly 'good catch' one of the girls lunches with, whose parents she meets, under strict instructions of exactly what to say about what according to a set of rigid petit bourgeois social conventions. Her fiancee maybe more serious, more safe, but she must become an automaton to fulfil his family's social expectations. The fiancee himself rattles off the lines about Michael Angelo like some kind of deranged, compulsive incantation - symbols of high culture have been reduced to inflexible tokens of class etiquette. Implicit, then, is responsibility in Chabrol's cinema, as he declines to make work of pure entertaining spectacle, using his spectacle rather to disconcert, both thematically and through visual discord and excess. See how we enjoy ourselves, he says, it is the pleasure of selfish exploitation and animal savagery. The final scene echoes a warning, the glazed eyes of a woman fixed looking into space over the shoulder of a besuited man, with his plump neck penned into a shirt collar, but seen as faceless, animal flesh all the same, dancing with his lobotomised prey under the alluring mirrored glint of the revolving disco ball.