This week I am the master of Erratic Thoughts, and get to decree our chaotic topic of the week. I declare that each contributor to ToM must answer the following question:
Allow me to begin.
The worst thing I ever saw was also one of the best pieces of art I've ever experienced. It was so good that it changed my life. But not without first scarring me horribly with images of how everything we love is violently stolen from us, and returned only at the expense of human life. I refer to the Peter Greenaway film *The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), *which I saw the year I turned 20.
It's a simple tale, really. Helen Mirren is the wife of a gangster (the thief) who eats every night in the city's best restaurant. The cook is an artist whose talents are lost on the loutish gangster, who cares only for the gilded surroundings -- but not on Mirren, for whom the cook makes special treats when he discovers the gangster is beating her. At the restaurant, Mirren also meets a bookworm who comes every evening and reads while appreciating the cook's gifts as much as Mirren does. Eventually the bookworm and Mirren become lovers, meeting surreptitiously between courses in the bathroom, where the cooking staff protects them.
At last, the gangster discovers the lovers and takes revenge. He sends some thugs over to the bookworm's quiet garret, full of lovely old volumes. And they destroy not just Mirren's lover, but also the objects he loves: they rip his books up and jam them down his throat with a stick until he dies. The scene manages to be both deeply sad and utterly disgusting. It's also the impetus Mirren needs to join the cook and take poetic revenge on the gangster. First the cook turns the bookworm into the most artful, lovely roast meat dish he's ever created. (You can see what it looks like in the picture above the fold.) Then Mirren holds the gangster at gunpoint and orders him to "eat the cock." Draw curtain.
Greenaway is what's called a painterly filmmaker, and all his movies are full of bizarre, anachronistic sets drenched with gorgeous color. This story, which sounds hideously ugly on its surface, is shot in such lovely surroundings, under such glowing light, that Greenaway forces you to see how easily beauty merges with ugliness. Then he forces you to look violence in the face and see what's seductive about it -- as well as how it can destroy human connection forever. The visual juxtoposition of art and mauling in The Cook, the Thief will simply shred you.
I couldn't deal with it. All the way home from the movie theater I freaked out. That night I was so fucked up by the weird feelings the flick caused that I couldn't sleep. I got into a screaming fight with some friends that forever altered the course of our lives. It's been more than a decade, but I still think about that Greenaway-inspired fight sometimes. I had finally, painfully, been made to see the difference between cinematic brutality and its real-life counterpart. The former can mean many things, but the latter means only one.
