just popped in to share some notes

[andalus]

the more i look into the mythology of it the more it seems that cremaster 2 is the most intriguing of the five. 2 is the one that has a retelling of the story of Gary Gilmore, a murderer sentenced to death who refused to appeal, who fought to be executed. cremaster 1 had set up the idea of the androgyny of pre-birth, with the womb and the mother, 2 starts out with the idea of the Father, Gary Gilmore's father Frank and mother Bessie in a meeting with the grandmother, whose name is given in the movie as Baby Fay la Foe. Gary Gilmore's grandmother was named Fay, she was a medium. There is a story about Gary's mother meeting Fay after a seance and waking up in the middle of the night to see a demon hovering over her, and Fay vame in the room and told her to get out. Bessie said the demon followed her, and she soon saw it hovering over the beds of her children. Now add to this the fact that Gary Gilmore's name at birth was Faye Richard, it was changed afterwards, to Gary. We have androgyny, a man with a girl's name, plus we have an illustration of an almost matriarchal influence. Later Baby Fay la Foe returns as the queen bee, who offers the escape artist houdini (played by norman mailer, the man most responsible for our current understanding of Gilmore through his book The Executioner's Song) a chance at real escape. Early on the hexagram is assosciated with the male destructive drive, the six sided figure is seen everywhere in cremaster 2, beehives, tiles, sherrif's stars, the arrangement of horses. In cremaster 1 the tiles on the floor of the blimp were pentagons, in 2 there are are hexagrams everwhere, in 3 we see a few septagons in the strangest places, such as the light fixture in an elevator. 4 and 5 have an absense of geometry, meaning that 3 is the turning point between the former and the later. 1 is all women, 2 is mixed, 3 is all men but one woman, 4 is all men (though mostly transvestites), and 5 is all women but one man (in 3 guises). The most obvious themes are, 1- ovulation, 2-coition, insemination, birth 3- erection 4- ejaculation? and 5-death, drowning (post-orgasm?) another interesting thing i notived - at the very end of 3 the young fionn MacCool (a hero of the celtic fianna stories) triumphs over the giant fingol and throws a huge stone into the sea, the stone sinks to the bottom and out springs an island. The Same island (visually) which is the setting for cremaster 4. The location given for cremaster 4 is, now isnt this funny, the Isle of Man. Ha! See how he gives new meaning to familiar terms? Good-year, christ-ler, Isle of Man. See how much more interesting research makes things? Also, watching a documentary of whirlpools yesterday i saw a japanese man refer to the myths of underwater persons with fins for hands and strange mouths who would drag you underwater if you fell in, and immediately my face lit up and I went Thats what they were! The pink japanese underwater women in Cremaster 5! In the credits they were given the name of something like "fyudor" with all sorts of umlauts and accent marks but i couldnt remember exactly.