“From the garden of the nurse’s place in Puteaux you could look down over the whole of Paris. When Papa came to see me, the wind ruffled his moustache. That’s my first memory.”
—Death on Credit
“And as you follow the hearse, everybody lifts his hat to you. It's heart-warming. Then's the time to behave properly, to look dignified, not to laugh out loud, to gloat only on the inside. That's permissible. Everything's permissible on the inside.”
—Journey to the End of the Night

“I'm a sound man. And— the bang was before the blowout.”
“Know any good screamers?”
—Blow Out

I watched Blow Out in a basement theater in Paris a year or two ago. I had read Journey to the End of the Night, and successively Death on Credit, a little less than a year before. I left both of these ‘showings’ stunned. I left Blow Out barely able to walk, hungry and vindictive on the way home through the Paris streets. The theater, as it is with almost all French theaters, scoffed at our request to bring snacks into the showing once we realized they would not be offering any. The room was bright red before the lights turned off, there was only one other person watching the movie in front of us and it was boiling, so hot I almost had to leave the movie only 15 minutes in, especially hot given that the french would have scoffed the same way they scoffed at the snacks if I mentioned the temperature, so hot I jumped up and down and cursed as I put my clothes back on after we got back onto the streets having finishing it: I suffered.

I suffered when I finished these works. I suffered internally, not in turmoil but in a darkness, in a sluice box of head-heavy pain at what the world is. After finishing Celine’s works, similarly to the compressed cinematic reaction I had to Blow Out, I am always in a funk for days, I am on the brink of something strange and I become strange. After the disgust and beauty of these works, I remember myself and what I have become, or rather what I had to come through: the filth that comes after birth, after the age of consciousness. I am less interested in discussing these works than discussing what they left me with. It is worth a short introduction and drawing of parallels between them, but for the most part the focus is the effect— only the enlightented are royal enough to speak of the unfolding of the acts themselves as something important.

Journey to the End of Night deals with a truly fantastical life, but a real one; that is first and foremost its majesty. Even if Celine is a lower-middle class accountants son, there is poetry in his life, it may be in his father, we don’t know, all we know is his mother and grandmother (“work hard my dear little Ferdinand.”) sell antiques and his father works at a firm called “The Ladybug”. His life, even if we forget his misadventures in WWI and Africa and simply focus on his childhood, has some grand horror and misfortune and recountability to it, surely, and surprisingly, it is not just his literary fancy that enlightens it (at some points we may even be convinced it is, but when we look plainly at the events described, they go beyond what would be expected of a life in his position; even then, our expectations are always due for apocalypse).

Anyways, his first two novels, autobiographical in nature, describe his life. He is a boy born to a family always on the brink of mayhem, a family who actively bemoans his existence, he goes to war and goes half mad, he goes to africa, he goes to Detroit, he comes back to Paris, he studies and becomes a doctor. All of these events are vividly described. As a powerful example, about the studies in he finally undertook he says this, which I find revelatory and punishing, given my seeming lack of such:

“Molly had been right, I was beginning to understand her. Study changes a man, puts pride into him. You need it to get to the bottom of life. Without it you just skim the surface. You think you're in the know, but trifles throw you off. You dream too much. You content yourself with words instead of going deeper. That's not what you wanted. Intentions, appearances, no more. A man of character can't content himself with that. Medicine, even if I wasn't very gifted, had brought me a good deal closer to people, to animals, everything. Now all I had to do was plunge straight into the heart of things. Death is chasing you, you've got to hurry, and while you're looking you've got to eat, and keep away from wars. That's a lot of things to do. It's no picnic.”

Journey to the End of the Night is a better book than Death on Credit, given the latter’s tendancy to bleed a bit long in its repeated accounts of his father beating him up on account of “the Freemasons and the Jews” (a funny thing, considering how Celine himself later in life repeated these same wailings), but the first third of Death on Credit equals the first book in power. In this first third of Credit, a young Celine is sent to a boarding school in England to learn english so that he may return better equipped to find a job, this episode is for me a terrible highpoint in all of literature. I hesistate to write too much more about specific episodes in his life, I remember them and the faint words of love a chosen few whispered to him so vividly I am often on the brink of tears.

These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies—captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly."—Ralph Waldo Emerson (Used as the epigraph to the Tropic of Cancer)

The key connective between Celine’s work and Blow Out is that they are ‘autobiographical’. A supplementary connection is the difficulty of the work, difficult not intellectually (God forbid!— excepting Joyce) but spiritually. The exact definition of the autobiographical is not a concern, and John Travolta as De Palma is even less an orthodox autobiography than Celine’s, but that is unimportant, what is important is the pain and the voice; what parts of their soul’s they unabashedly show. In Blow Out we see what at times could almost be called uncouth— we cannot acuse Celine of the same, as with him it is more historical than inventive—, we see a man who’s vocation is sonic involvement in B movie porno-horror films, who is also politically enlightened (in others words conspiritorial), who also happens to be both the victim and exhibitor of the brutal muder of women.

Blow Out is genuinely beautiful and serene for the first half; and the scene with Travolta and his audio-recording equipment on the bridge unforgettable. It is also a wonderful Philadelphia film (“to Philadelphia, add Agape…”, Etc), and a film that ends with the movie-man, Travolta-Palma, using the scream of his innocent lover’s murder as a dubbed over gimmick in his newest slasher-sex film. He is broken at the film’s finale, he is crying and smoking and can hardly talk after experiening the (Chinatown-esque inescability) second audio-voyeuristic death of one he is meant to protect. De Palma likes blood and he must pay in life, he knows the world conspiritorial and knows himself fated to do nothing about it but suffer. As he tells us in the wonderful A24 retrospective about himself, he used to secretly film his father’s illicit trysts. He has watched destruction passively on the sidelines many times before, and this time we must watch it with him as he puts us through seemingly unneccesary but brutal muders on screen. We must watch it and push and hope for all to end heroically, but it ends tragically.

The greatest similarity between these two men is their passivity, their emptiness of anything but perserverance, their darkly-taoist wu-weiism, their all-encompassing receptivity… it is in many ways disturbing. I am reminded of Pope Francis’s frank statement in the Wim Wender’s documentary about him where he says: “One must never take a proselytizing attitude”. This is a shocking thing to hear a pope say but it is true. Passivity has some power even if at first it is only a witness to horror, a horror washed of its horror when one realizes that one has not done anything wrong, maybe that is what Adam’s sin is all about, even before salvation.

I remember when Second City Bureaucrat tweeted that the world must be “Celined” and "Everything that is declared scared must be dragged through the gutter”. I wondered if he and BAP, who I have great respect for and who is a vocal encourager of Celine’s work, really “understood” Celine, or rather, felt him. I have concluded, with much time, that they do in only in part; That yes, certainly, these dark works have much important power, but more importantly, that they also cannot be manufactured. These books are not for everyone and cannot be understood by most, they are different than mosts people lives, and may be innaccessible. So much of what Celine writes about is his childhood, things that are absurd because he is a child, even his descriptions of later life are birthed of this framework. A writer or filmmaker cannot artificially birth such “samizdat” and those who try to do so stick out embarassingly, stick out as false to life. Those who would consciously “Celine” life miss the whole point: they would have had to live first. Let the eugenicists of all people finally realize… An imp is born an imp.

“From the garden of the nurse’s place in Puteaux you could look down over the whole of Paris. When Papa came to see me, the wind ruffled his moustache. That’s my first memory.”
—Death on Credit
“And as you follow the hearse, everybody lifts his hat to you. It's heart-warming. Then's the time to behave properly, to look dignified, not to laugh out loud, to gloat only on the inside. That's permissible. Everything's permissible on the inside.”
—Journey to the End of the Night

“I'm a sound man. And— the bang was before the blowout.”
“Know any good screamers?”
—Blow Out

I watched Blow Out in a basement theater in Paris a year or two ago. I had read Journey to the End of the Night, and successively Death on Credit, a little less than a year before. I left both of these ‘showings’ stunned. I left Blow Out barely able to walk, hungry and vindictive on the way home through the Paris streets. The theater, as it is with almost all French theaters, scoffed at our request to bring snacks into the showing once we realized they would not be offering any. The room was bright red before the lights turned off, there was only one other person watching the movie in front of us and it was boiling, so hot I almost had to leave the movie only 15 minutes in, especially hot given that the french would have scoffed the same way they scoffed at the snacks if I mentioned the temperature, so hot I jumped up and down and cursed as I put my clothes back on after we got back onto the streets having finishing it: I suffered.

I suffered when I finished these works. I suffered internally, not in turmoil but in a darkness, in a sluice box of head-heavy pain at what the world is. After finishing Celine’s works, similarly to the compressed cinematic reaction I had to Blow Out, I am always in a funk for days, I am on the brink of something strange and I become strange. After the disgust and beauty of these works, I remember myself and what I have become, or rather what I had to come through: the filth that comes after birth, after the age of consciousness. I am less interested in discussing these works than discussing what they left me with. It is worth a short introduction and drawing of parallels between them, but for the most part the focus is the effect— only the enlightented are royal enough to speak of the unfolding of the acts themselves as something important.

Journey to the End of Night deals with a truly fantastical life, but a real one; that is first and foremost its majesty. Even if Celine is a lower-middle class accountants son, there is poetry in his life, it may be in his father, we don’t know, all we know is his mother and grandmother (“work hard my dear little Ferdinand.”) sell antiques and his father works at a firm called “The Ladybug”. His life, even if we forget his misadventures in WWI and Africa and simply focus on his childhood, has some grand horror and misfortune and recountability to it, surely, and surprisingly, it is not just his literary fancy that enlightens it (at some points we may even be convinced it is, but when we look plainly at the events described, they go beyond what would be expected of a life in his position; even then, our expectations are always due for apocalypse).

Anyways, his first two novels, autobiographical in nature, describe his life. He is a boy born to a family always on the brink of mayhem, a family who actively bemoans his existence, he goes to war and goes half mad, he goes to africa, he goes to Detroit, he comes back to Paris, he studies and becomes a doctor. All of these events are vividly described. As a powerful example, about the studies in he finally undertook he says this, which I find revelatory and punishing, given my seeming lack of such:

“Molly had been right, I was beginning to understand her. Study changes a man, puts pride into him. You need it to get to the bottom of life. Without it you just skim the surface. You think you're in the know, but trifles throw you off. You dream too much. You content yourself with words instead of going deeper. That's not what you wanted. Intentions, appearances, no more. A man of character can't content himself with that. Medicine, even if I wasn't very gifted, had brought me a good deal closer to people, to animals, everything. Now all I had to do was plunge straight into the heart of things. Death is chasing you, you've got to hurry, and while you're looking you've got to eat, and keep away from wars. That's a lot of things to do. It's no picnic.”

Journey to the End of the Night is a better book than Death on Credit, given the latter’s tendancy to bleed a bit long in its repeated accounts of his father beating him up on account of “the Freemasons and the Jews” (a funny thing, considering how Celine himself later in life repeated these same wailings), but the first third of Death on Credit equals the first book in power. In this first third of Credit, a young Celine is sent to a boarding school in England to learn english so that he may return better equipped to find a job, this episode is for me a terrible highpoint in all of literature. I hesistate to write too much more about specific episodes in his life, I remember them and the faint words of love a chosen few whispered to him so vividly I am often on the brink of tears.

These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies—captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly."—Ralph Waldo Emerson (Used as the epigraph to the Tropic of Cancer)

The key connective between Celine’s work and Blow Out is that they are ‘autobiographical’. A supplementary connection is the difficulty of the work, difficult not intellectually (God forbid!— excepting Joyce) but spiritually. The exact definition of the autobiographical is not a concern, and John Travolta as De Palma is even less an orthodox autobiography than Celine’s, but that is unimportant, what is important is the pain and the voice; what parts of their soul’s they unabashedly show. In Blow Out we see what at times could almost be called uncouth— we cannot acuse Celine of the same, as with him it is more historical than inventive—, we see a man who’s vocation is sonic involvement in B movie porno-horror films, who is also politically enlightened (in others words conspiritorial), who also happens to be both the victim and exhibitor of the brutal muder of women.

Blow Out is genuinely beautiful and serene for the first half; and the scene with Travolta and his audio-recording equipment on the bridge unforgettable. It is also a wonderful Philadelphia film (“to Philadelphia, add Agape…”, Etc), and a film that ends with the movie-man, Travolta-Palma, using the scream of his innocent lover’s murder as a dubbed over gimmick in his newest slasher-sex film. He is broken at the film’s finale, he is crying and smoking and can hardly talk after experiening the (Chinatown-esque inescability) second audio-voyeuristic death of one he is meant to protect. De Palma likes blood and he must pay in life, he knows the world conspiritorial and knows himself fated to do nothing about it but suffer. As he tells us in the wonderful A24 retrospective about himself, he used to secretly film his father’s illicit trysts. He has watched destruction passively on the sidelines many times before, and this time we must watch it with him as he puts us through seemingly unneccesary but brutal muders on screen. We must watch it and push and hope for all to end heroically, but it ends tragically.

The greatest similarity between these two men is their passivity, their emptiness of anything but perserverance, their darkly-taoist wu-weiism, their all-encompassing receptivity… it is in many ways disturbing. I am reminded of Pope Francis’s frank statement in the Wim Wender’s documentary about him where he says: “One must never take a proselytizing attitude”. This is a shocking thing to hear a pope say but it is true. Passivity has some power even if at first it is only a witness to horror, a horror washed of its horror when one realizes that one has not done anything wrong, maybe that is what Adam’s sin is all about, even before salvation.

I remember when Second City Bureaucrat tweeted that the world must be “Celined” and "Everything that is declared scared must be dragged through the gutter”. I wondered if he and BAP, who I have great respect for and who is a vocal encourager of Celine’s work, really “understood” Celine, or rather, felt him. I have concluded, with much time, that they do in only in part; That yes, certainly, these dark works have much important power, but more importantly, that they also cannot be manufactured. These books are not for everyone and cannot be understood by most, they are different than mosts people lives, and may be innaccessible. So much of what Celine writes about is his childhood, things that are absurd because he is a child, even his descriptions of later life are birthed of this framework. A writer or filmmaker cannot artificially birth such “samizdat” and those who try to do so stick out embarassingly, stick out as false to life. Those who would consciously “Celine” life miss the whole point: they would have had to live first. Let the eugenicists of all people finally realize… An imp is born an imp.