Cormac McCarthy: On the road to hell

Cormac McCarthy, the author of The Road and No Country for Old Men, on the human race's future, life and writing in general:

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It's more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it's just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there's a problem you can take to bed with you at night.

People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're going to write something like "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Moby-Dick," go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble. But people tell me from time to time that my son John is just a wonderful kid. I tell people that he is so morally superior to me that I feel foolish correcting him about things, but I've got to do something--I'm his father. There's not much you can do to try to make a child into something that he's not. But whatever he is, you can sure destroy it. Just be mean and cruel and you can destroy the best person.

Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way. Things I've written about are no longer of any interest to me, but they were certainly of interest before I wrote about them. So there's something about writing about it that flattens them. You've used them up. I tell people I've never read one of my books, and that's true. They think I'm pulling their leg.

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Theatre review: Sofaman

Sofaman is a collaboration between Singapore’s The Necessary Stage and The KnAM Theatre from Russia. This intercultural, multilingsofaman_smallual collaboration incorporating soundscape and multimedia focuses on the fundamental questions of today’s postmodern life: what are people looking for? Is the material progress made under the canopy of the globalised and capitalist marketplace that the world has become—billions of consumers, cogs in the wheel of capitalism—enough to satisfy our human yearnings?

The play involves a storyteller and the characters of his stories. The storyteller is the title character who sits on a wheel-chair like contraption and wears a white oversized headgear with a little light in it. He tells stories to a man with a suitcase. In turn, the man with a suitcase exchanges stories with him. But the play comes to life through the stories of the sofaman and the characters that dwell in his stories.

As the play progresses, a Singaporean woman and a Russian man fall in love but they quarrel about where to settle down. Their expectations from life are different, as different as summer and winter (snow). A Western woman develops a bond with a Malay Singaporean who has speech difficulties. Crossing barriers of language, they touch each others’ souls, give comfort to each other. How does it happen? Why does it happen? That is what the play seems to make us to think about.

The play’s characters, set in a mall (or a marketplace), remind us of our disjointed, cold urban lives. Their lives—full of chores, some travel but no family bonds—remind us of the perils of urbanization and how it can create vacuum in our souls. At the same time, the man from Russia, who presumably comes from a less urbanized setting, is consumed with the warmth and opportunities in a new, hyper-urbanized location (read Singapore). It is the juxtapositions of these two worlds—and the conflicting expectations of its inhabitants—that form the core of this drama. The play successfully brings forth the idea that love and rootedness, no matter how much progress we achieve in terms of materialism, will remain the eternal magnets for human souls.

In a way, the play recognizes the ills of life under capitalism. As German economist Sombart observed in the 19th century, even though capitalism enhances productivity and creates a higher material standard of living, it also cause loss in quality of life, robbing people of inner peace, of their relationship to each other and to nature and of the faith of their father. The play might not advocate people to overthrow the capitalist system but in a way it does question the illusions it perpetuates. It portrays the waking of workers (characters) from “thingafication” or “reification” (a construct by 20th century Hungarian philosopher and economist Georg Kukacs), “the inability to see that the human relations created by capitalism were the results of particular historical conditions that could be changed by human will.”

In well over 80 minutes, the play takes us through a surfeit of images and sounds and emotional landscapes of different shades. The audio-visual work is brilliant in the production. But this sometimes takes away from the emotional impact of the story as it interrupts our continuous dream.

This is a complex production and directors Alvin Tan and Tatiana Frolova and writer Haresh Sharma deserve full credit for weaving this intricacy in a presentable, less abstract avatar. In the cast, Siti Khalijah is outstanding but other actors such as Elena Bessonova, Dmitry Bochanov, Vladimir Dmitriev, Julius Foo and Jean Ng shine too. And the cameo by Charlie Chaplin is certainly a casting coup!

Performed in English, Russian and Mandarin
Get your tickets at www.sistic.com.sg

Dates:
5 - 7 Nov & 11 - 14 Nov 2009, 8pm
7 - 8 Nov & 14 - 15 Nov 2009, 3pm

Venue:
The Necessary Stage Black Box
#B1-02 Marine Parade Community Building

Tickets:
$27 | $22*

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P. N. Balji: On journalism, journalists and Sri Lanka

Journalism today is under attack everywhere, both in physical and ethical senses. Newspapers are dying in the developed countries. The internet model is still being figured out. Journalists are being fired as newspapers fold up city after city. From the readers' perspective, corporate-controlled media carries less and less credibility.

In the developing countries, the situation is different. The media is struggling between censorship and greed. In India, where the media sprawl is stupendous, there are reports of unethical practices (News for sale: How media is squandering its credibility). In Sri Lanka, both the profession and the professionals are feeling the squeeze.

Veteran Singapore journalist and editor P N Balji shares his views on journalism in the context of the situation in Sri Lanka in this interview with a Sri Lankan paper. His remarks on journalism and his advice to journalists are pure wisdom--something all journalists and editors anywhere in the world should read and keep in mind:

I recommend objective activism. By that I mean present as many sides as possible. And let the readers decide. Media can never give the truth. It can only give some truths. Make sure you give every shade of opinion on a subject. Don’t rush into print with unconfirmed stories. Check and double check. Make corrections the next day if there are inaccuracies.

If you don’t have the passion for the profession, please don’t get into it. With the world becoming more complex and major shifts taking place, we need journalists who can slice and dice the issues and say with confidence and some certainty what it all means to your reader.

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‘I would rather settle for a mediocre novel…’: Voices from chaos

The Singapore Writers Festival 2009 came to a close on Sunday (1 Nov). Between the opening (23 Oct) and closing of the festival, scores of writers from across the world held forth on literature and writing. The star of the festival was clearly the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman who attracted long queues for autographs. His session was held exclusively in Victoria Theatre and all the tickets were pre-booked. I don’t read fantasy fiction so this did not mean a thing to me. But Singapore’s young readers found an idol in him, this cannot be denied.

Honestly, I did not get to meet all the writers—it was not possible for me. Therefore, I focused on only those writers who interested me. In this post, I am not going to talk about individual sessions. I will freely refer to writers or themes that seem most relevant to my interests or sensibilities.

The theme of this year’s festival was ‘Undercover’. Of course, this theme lends itself to myriad semantic possibilities. But personally speaking, ‘Chaos’ would have been a better choice. Indeed ‘Chaos’ was one of the themes of a discussion that included writers from the sub-continent, namely, novelists Mohammad Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes), Elmo Jayawardena (Sam’s Story), Shashi Warrier (Hangman’s Journal) and Ahmede Hussain (Editor, The New Anthem). The discussion was moderated by the Hong Kong-based Manreet Sodhi Someshwar, the articulate and charismatic author of The Long Walk Home.

Except for Captain Elmo, all these writers were new to me. I had exchanged emails with Hussain before but that was like two years ago. I had met Hanif several years ago when he was with the BBC’s London office. I tried to remind him of our meeting that he vaguely seemed to remember. Or was he being polite? I don’t know. Anyway, I did not want to press on it as it was a brief professional encounter. I was glad I could meet him again, that too in a new avatar, I told him.

Throughout the festival, I was looking for one word or one term that could summarize the essence, the zeitgeist of our times. I looked at the books that were there on display in the Arts House bookstore. I tried to listen to the questions that people posed to their favourite writers. What was the gist, what was the spirit, I tried to figure out.

Looking at the titles on display, one of the themes that strongly emerges is that of political power, violence and tyranny. While Elmo’s Sam’s Story (republished in India by Penguin) deals with the futility of ethnic conflict and war, Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes deals with the life of a dictator and state repression. Manreet focuses on the violence in Punjab in The Long Walk Home and Warrier’s recent books study the human condition in the Indo-Pak conflict zone, Kashmir. Hussain, in his first anthology of short stories from many new and well-known sub-continental writers, collects voices that again raise issues of conflicts and fundamentalism of all stripes, among other themes.

Writers are not supposed to offer solutions. They are supposed to ask questions, pose moral dilemmas. This is what these writers have done with their novels—I have not read all of them but that is the sense I get (I have read Elmo’s great novel and have reviewed it here; I have also read Hanif’s novel and it is marvelously funny and biting). Still, emerging from the sub-continental chaos and America’s war on terror, there isn’t a single theory or philosophy or vision that can inspire us to a new future. From these books, from the discussions that these books spawned, the absurdity of violence is evident. But where is the hero or the protagonist that can show ‘us’ in our complete nakedness? We can laugh at General Zia’s antics but what about our passive collusion in this chaos? Where is the rebellion? Where is the man or woman who refuses to go along with the side of cruelty?

The most dangerous place on earth

During Hanif’s session, most people were curious about the daily life in Pakistan. How quotidian was it? Hanif satisfied people’s queries with his quintessential humor. People in Karachi still went out for dinner with family and friends, he said. Their discussion would range from fashion shows to the next possible bomb blast. He said that the 24 hour news cycle had made the things worse. Journalists are excited when there are terrible stories to tell but they feel crestfallen when it is quiet for a few days. Hanif, who lived in London for about a decade, now permanently lives in Karachi. I wish for more peace, more normality, he said.

Hanif said that he was suspicious of lists such as the top 10 most dangerous places in the world and the top 10 most beautiful people in the world. These lists keep changing, he said.

Should writers become activists, I asked the ‘Chaos’ panel. I had Arundhati Roy in mind when I asked this question. I don’t feel any moral responsibility, said Hussain. ‘I see, I don’t touch,’ is his motto. Hanif said that writers are generally self-centered people who care more about a turn of phrase than an actual cause. But I do what I can, he said. Warrier was also of the same opinion. It was only Captain Elmo who said that he was actively engaged in charity work in Sri Lanka.

Someone from the audience asked if chaos was necessary for creativity. This question came in various forms in different fora: Singapore, despite being an advanced country with all kinds of material comforts, does not produce much literature, whereas the sub-continent, despite the chaos and fracas, creates world-class literature. Why is that so? According to Warrier, the problem is essentially arithmetical. India alone has more than a billion people while Singapore has about 5 million people. So, a billion people naturally produce more writers. Also, there are many regional languages in India which support the culture of reading and writing. Print runs of vernacular titles go in the range of 20,000 to 200,000 whereas novels in English become best-sellers when they sell more than 5,000 copies.

According to Hanif, chaos does not necessarily help create great literature. The Swedes still manage to get out some decent novels, he said. Prosperity is good for writers, Hanif said. I would rather settle for a mediocre novel in a less chaotic situation than a great novel in a chaotic and violent set up, he said. One could understand where Hanif was coming from. Father of an 11-year old son, the safety and security of his family must be most prominent for him. I found both Hanif and Hussain ruthlessly honest—only Hanif is more humorous and Hussain a bit more philosophical.

On and off stage, Elmo voiced his concern about the difficulties that first time writers face in finding publishers. A first time writer’s failure (in getting published) discourages many other would-be writers, he argued. He also lamented about the greed of publishers who sold books with marked up prices, taking them farther from the reach of ordinary readers. He wants the gram sellers in Sri Lanka to become book-sellers!

I also had an opportunity to listen to Qiu Xiaolong (Death of a Red Heroine) and Naldo Rei, East Timorese resistance fighter. Both talked about political repression and violence. Xiaolong’s father suffered during the Chinese cultural revolution and his brother never recovered from it. What if I was in his place, wondered Xialong. He also mentioned the censorship in China that he faced while getting his books translated for the mainland.

Naldo is a different case. He was a freedom fighter and a torture victim during the occupation of East Timor. He was imprisoned when he was 9. Later he became a student leader and learnt English in Australia. His poetry now inspires thousands of his countrymen.

Though my interactions with the writers were personally enlightening, I came home depressed because I have a feeling that the chaos would not end anytime soon. Did people between the two Great Wars feel the same? Only, we don’t have the Camus and Sartres of our age to explain the chaos to us. The world is becoming more violent and life more absurd by the day and there are no heroes to look up to in the post-modern anarchy. It is a difficult challenge for any writer to make sense of the world that we live in. I only wish more power to the pen of writers like Hanif, Manreet, Elmo and Warrier and Ahmede!

Book Review: The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English

It can be argued that Southeast Asian Writing in English has not achieved as much attention as African Writing in English or Indian Writing in English, even though English as a language reached most parts of the world wave after wave as a result of colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Manila have been major outposts under British and American colonialism, but the output in English from these big Asian cities has not made much impact on the global literary landscape, the same way that writings from India or Africa have. Where is Southeast Asia’s answer to Midnight Children or a House for Mr. Biswas or Things Fall Apart?

Moreover, many colonial era writers made this region their hunting ground for exotic tales –Anthony Burgess in Malaysia, Orwell's work on Burma (Burmese Days), Graham Greene's on Vietnam (The Quiet American) and the stories by Somerset Maugham (The Casuarina Tree), to name a few expat writers. Did they leave any impact on the local writers? What kind of writing emerged in Southeast Asian countries (mainly, The Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong) in the latter half of the 20th century when colonial powers receded from the region? What kind of themes and issues are being investigated into by contemporary writers and poets in Southeast Asia?

In the book under review, the authors, associate professors in the Department of English and Literature at the National University of Singapore, try to answer these and many more questions. The volume traces the development of literature (focusing on fiction, poetry and drama) in the region with its historical and cultural contexts.

To attempt a volume like this is clearly a challenging endeavour as the authors themselves admit that this kind of literary historiography works within two limiting factors—linguistic and regional. The authors, in their introduction, submit that their aim in writing this book is not for the chimera of ‘objectivity’ but for persuasion and critical awareness.

Post introduction, the first two chapters in the book provide historical and literary contexts of writing in English in the region. The fourth chapter surveys Malaysian and Singaporean writing up to 1965, followed by a chapter on Filipino writing to 1965. Then there are three chapters, each providing a regional overview of narrative fiction, poetry and drama between 1965-1990 in Southeast Asia. After this, there is an independent chapter exploring the expatriate, diasporic and minoritarian writing—this is where you can read about the writings of Burgess or Maugham. The last four chapters look at contemporary fiction, poetry and drama. It also explores the prospects of Southeast Asian writing in English (where does it go from here) in indulges in future gazing. This last chapter also includes some details on publishing in the digital medium—the medium of the future—and how it is not just replacing text but has also led to increased generic experimentation and creation of a larger audience. It is a good sign as it indicates that the authors understand the increasing importance of digital media’s role in the dissemination and consumption of literature.

Overall, The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English is a very useful companion for those who seek a handy understanding of Southeast Asian writing in English. The astute authors of this volume have enriched it with maps, box items, a glossary of terms, and references. There is also a guide to further reading that can help quench the thirst of those who want a deeper understanding of the Southeast Asian literatures and cultures.

http://writersconnect.org/index.php/archives/989

Review: Inglourious Basterds

Before we get to talk about Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), let’s have a quick quiz. Who, among the three infamous dictators—Hitler, Stalin and Mao—caused the maximum number of civilian deaths in his country (“democide”)?

If your answer is Hitler, then you are wrong. According to historical estimates, the Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung’s policies and actions led to the deaths of nearly 77 million of his countrymen, surpassing those killed by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (20 million) and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin (61 million).

And yet how many Hollywood films are made with Mao as the arch villain? Or even Stalin?

It’s not that Hitler becomes less evil because he killed less number of people than Stalin or Mao did. The German dictator’s genocidal atrocities or policies of eugenics were despicable. Still, the constant projection of Hitler as the only evil doer in the western man’s consciousness baffles me. Excepting Idi Amin, I haven’t seen Hollywood going after other dictators as vigorously as they go after the fuehrer.

Clearly, Hollywood is fascinated by Hitler: Almost every year, Hollywood studios plan a slate of anti-Nazi movies. Last year, the offerings peaked (with "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," "Adam Resurrected," "The Reader," "Valkyrie") as The New York Times film critic A. O. Scott noted: “A minor incursion of this sort is an annual Oscar season tradition, but 2008 offers an abundance…” (Why so many Holocaust films now, and for whose benefit?)

Scott goes on to ask: “The number of Holocaust-related memoirs, novels, documentaries and feature films in the past decade or so seems to defy quantification, and their proliferation raises some uncomfortable questions. Why are there so many? Why now? And more queasily, could there be too many?”

Perhaps Scott wrote the piece too late in the day. Or maybe the failure of Death Proof hastened it. Apparently Tarantino had been working on the script of Inglourious Basterds for ten years, even before he did Kill Bill. He is said to have delayed the project because he was not finding the right ending. I can understand his dilemma but he never resolved it. In a relatively well-made Holocaust revenge film, it is the ending that rankles, that seems a bit forced and contrived. A brilliant opening sequence should have been offset with a masterful last scene but it doesn’t. It is a narrow miss that prevents a good Inglourious Basterds from leapfrogging to being great.

I was curious about the film’s title from the beginning (and thought Vishal Bhardwaj stole it for his Kaminay) but like most other motifs in Tarantino’s films, this too turned out to be derivative (or homage, whatever you may choose to call): It comes from a European film Quel maledetto treno blindato (1978) which was released in the USA by the title The Inglorious Bastards. Maybe that’s the reason why Tarantino film’s title is slightly misspelled. Major change that one, huh?

Set in the second world war, Tarantino’s fairy tale Inglourious Basterds(it was earlier meant to be titled as "Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France") has a four track narrative underpinned by a main villain—Christoph Waltz as the Nazi Col. Hans Landa, a polyglot evil genius and a Jew-sniffer par excellence. There is the perpetrator (the Nazi occupiers of France, represented by Col. Hans), the victim (Mélanie Laurent as Shosanna Dreyfus), the spy (Diane Kruger as double agent Bridget von Hammersmark) and the avenger (Brad Pitt and his team of Inglorious Bastards).

As I have mentioned earlier, the opening scene of the film is excellent, classy as a masterpiece, more visceral and evil than scenes of scalping mined throughout the film. Christoph Waltz establishes himself in this very first scene and you look forward to seeing him time and again on the screen. After Waltz’s introduction, when Pitt and his mates make their onscreen appearance, they don’t make that much of an impact—even though Pitt’s voice and body language are well-directed. Eli Roth (as Sgt. Donny Donowitz), with his deadly clubbing scene, is chilling—more chilling than the scalping scenes that looked a bit fake to me.

When it comes to violence and bloodshed, Tarantino seems to take unpretentious pleasure in making people suffer and bleed. He did it with some sophistication in Jackie Brown (Samuel Jackson’s killing of Chris Tucker and Robert De Niro) but it has all been gruesome and in-your-face in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2. His films, one can argue, document the ways in which violence can be inflicted upon people, good or bad. Inglourious Bastards abounds in some new (different from his past oeuvre) methods of sending folks to the next world: scalping, clubbing and even the good old technique of strangulation.

What redeems Tarantino’s nearly B-grade penchant for portrayals of violence is his great ear for dialogues. And there are plenty of clever lines in this film. I loved the line by Goebbels in the film when he says, ‘America’s gold medals can be weighed in negro sweat’. But my favourite still remains the Harvey Keitel line from Reservoir Dogs: “If you shoot me in your dream, you better wake up and apologize to me.”

Despite the unusual screen time (nearly three hours), the revenge drama flows smoothly. As the scenes roll out, you recognize the typical Tarantino stamp on them: the book-like chapterisation, the set-piece of the theatre’s burning down (the revenge), the shootout scene in the restaurant (reminiscent of the garage scene in Reservoir Dogs but amazingly executed), and the imagined sex scene between Goebbels and his assistant (reminiscent of the sex scene between Robert De Niro and Bridget Fonda in Jackie Brown). Tarantino’s favourites Samuel L. Jackon and Harvey Keitel are also present in this film through their voices.

Even though cinema is all make-believe and cinematic reality is different from historical reality, it is the film’s ending that is dissatisfying—or more than dissatisfying, irrational (yes, even fiction, to succeed, must make us suspend our disbelief!). Why would a hardcore Nazi officer change side? If he did not believe in Hitler’s philosophy, why did he comply with his orders for so long? Oh, yeah, he was just doing his job and somebody tipped him offscreen that the Hitler was anyway going to lose the war!

If you don’t have a higher threshold for suspension of disbelief, you may as well forgive the film’s somewhat irrational ending (or not even notice it) and come home thoroughly entertained. As for me, I would like to ask Tarantino what was the alternative ending that he had in mind.

War, love & sex

The Deer Hunter, a 1978 war drama co-written and directed by Michael Cimino, is not your typical Vietnam war film. It's not your Apocalypse Now or Platoon. Perhaps its appeal lies in its small town characters, primarily factory workers, played by Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage and some other actors. Meryl Streep plays the love interest of Christopher Walken. Robert De Niro is also interested in her. The innocence and playfulness of their lives suddenly vanishes when they are thrust into the Vietnam War. The war upturns their lives and they are never the same again. The scenes in Vietnam, especially the underwater prison scenes and the Russian roulette scenes, are unforgettable.

More than the performances (though Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage and streep have given fine performances in this film), it's the film's structure and its editing that struck me as unique. The film starts with scenes of happiness, a bunch of wild, playful factory workers, wedding and frolicking scenes in the small town and ends with a death and a funereal atmosphere engulfing the townsfolk. But life goes on. The editing is without frills. Notice it especially when the story goes back and forth between America and Vietnam.

It is difficult to imagine soldiers like Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage and many others coming to Singapore for R&R during the Vietnam war. But this is largely what happens in Saint Jack, a 1979 film based on 1973 novel by Paul Theroux.

The movie, which was banned in Singapore until a few years ago (2006), is about Jack Flowers, an Italian American pimp in Singapore, who tries to make money by setting up his own bordello. His plans go awry when he is beaten up by the Chinese mafia and his brothel is destroyed. He goes a little more deeper into more humiliating circumstances before he finally wakes up to his own dehumanization and finds his moral compass.

Ben Gazzara plays the main character in the film, and I loved his performance. He is totally into the role. The film's director, Peter Bogdanovich, has done a great work--at least it shows us the Singapore of 1970s. This was the first Hollywood film to be shot on location in Singapore.

According to the director, the film was suggested by Orson Welles to Peter's Guru, Roger Corman. Corman bankrolled the project and Peter came over to Singapore to shoot the film. The Singapore government was opposed to the film's shooting. Peter had to create a fake synopsis (more than 35 pages long!) for a film called "Jack Of Hearts". The film was shot and made purported to be "Jack Of Hearts" and not Saint Jack. Peter counts it as one of his two best films (his most famous and acclaimed film being The Last Picture Show, 1971). It won him the best director award at Venice.

The film is part of, as it were, Singapore's history now. Though there is some nudity in it, there is an uncanny charm in Ben Gazzara and his friend's character, who dies in the film. Even Peter Bogdanovich plays a part as Eddie Schuman.

There is something in the picture--maybe it is Ben's moodiness, his interpretation of the Jack character, his walk and talk, his gait, his soulful gaze, his philosophical smile--that makes you aware that you are watching a classic. I was moved (and disturbed) by the scene where Jack sends his dead friend's ashes to Hong Kong via post and the post office girl flicks the pack (Jack says the packet contains personal effects) into a pile of postal stuff. Life, gone--just like that! What if it were me in that box? Is life so meaningless that it could be flicked off and forgotten like that? It is elements like these that ennobles the film, despite its seedy setting, and in turn, the viewers.