and thinking about Beckett's work and that of the contemporaneous existentialist-playwrights that I realized they were essentially in the same business as George Romero and John Waters, giving brainless thrills to the decadent wreckage that intellectualism came to when it jettisoned meaning, moral purpose and any claim of intellectual content.
And I still find I really love Kenneth Gaburo's work, believe it or not I have a deep sense of nostalgic affection when I listen to it. But even that isn't going to get me to lie about the brain-dead aspects of much of Beckett's work and all of Sartre's plays. Their audiences are essentially a softer and somewhat more squeamish version of decadent Romans watching people being killed in their "games," the kind of people who used to pay to tour 18th and 19th century mad houses and to watch dissections and operations, of degenerates who liked to go watch the slaughter of animals at a slaughterhouse - the kind of thing that Leopold and Loeb's lawyer, Clarence Darrow ironically compared their proposed execution to be in his epic closing statement, the kind of thing that fueled their imaginations until they acted on their fantasies.
The existentialist playwrights are really just jumped up geek show entrepreneurs who worked mostly out of centers of such decadent intellectual scenes, telling scary stories to decadent intellectuals who find them exciting and thrilling and daring when they're just pretentious versions of the worst in cheap entertainment.
No comments:
Post a Comment