From the Obliteration Frontier forums . . . posted under user name LostBronSon . . .
Against my better judgment,
I decided to marathon all of the Charles Bronson Death Wish movies,
all five of 'em,
over the course of one day.
I felt so filthy and corrupted by this experience
that I had to do it again,
day after day,
week after week,
for a year,
and,
of course,
I lost everything.
Job.
Friends . . . I only had three.
But they were cool dudes.
Not as cool as Charles Bronson.
But they were a'ight.
Girlfriend . . . which hurt a bit. But I would argue that ours was a mostly notional relationship anyways. Iris and I mostly connected through the realms of a MMORPG called Obliteration Frontier,
and to look at us in real life,
out-of-shape, bad haircuts, conversations which mostly focus on the minutiae of Obliteration Frontier lore,-
-Hey.
I get it.
The jokes write themselves.
But you must consider: some of us in this world don't feel wholly comfortable in our own bodies.
Yes, we should exercise daily.
Yes, we should eat better.
No, we do neither of those things, nor do we care to, nor are we over concerned about our own early mortality.
I could tell you in great detail about how there's no free will, and we are all in thrall to hardwired "central tendencies" and "forces of history,"
but you would find me tedious. And unconvincing.
Just as I find myself
tedious
and unconvincing.
Yet,
that magical Free Will
never manifests.
And I am locked into a spiral of increasing habit, self-loathing, and cosmically recursive guilt that drives me faster and harder in a circle 'round the drain.
I could go on and on.
But I have concluded I am just a survival meat-bot, executing program over and over,
ingesting food,
ingesting liquids,
showing up to job to earn money
to purchase food, liquids, escapism, clothes.
Until I began asking myself, "What if I just unplugged?"
But this was too scary.
I fantasized escape every day, night, in dreams, awake,
but I'm no survivalist.
I could never go off the grid.
I am the Grid . . . but that's a tale for another time.
Occasionally,
I'll watch a movie. Usually something weird and violent.
Iris hates movies,
she sees them as an outmoded medium,
and I largely agree.
But movies from long ago,
with physical special effects,
and actual stunt performers
give me a charge that high-end CG animated avatars cannot contain.
Wuxia. HK heroic bloodshed. Arnold. John Carpenter's The Thing. That grisly 1980's remake of The Blob.
Bronson.
I'd always meant to watch the Charles Bronson movies.
Especially the legendarily trashy and exploitative Death Wish franchise.
And so I set aside a single day to do it.
That was my habit.
Take a day out of the week to watch a bunch of old, sleazy movies.
Iris leaves me alone to do this. I just let her know a couple days ahead of time,
"Think I'm going to take a movie day."
I already had a hard drive full of Charles Bronson movies I'd been collecting through file sharing and torrents over the years.
Just had to go in, cue up the five Death Wish flicks,
ready to rock-and-sit.
Have you seen the Bronson vigilante movies?
I'm tempted to say if you've seen one you've seen them all . . . but this isn't strictly true.
But they are similar enough, that if you watched one you sort of get the gist.
You'll know if you want to watch more once you've seen one.
Many watch one
and feel totally repulsed by the copious amounts of sexual violence, rape, shootings, stabbings, and not so subtle overtones of racism and misogyny,
and if you are repulsed,
then good: you are free to turn away, and embrace life.
But if you are drawn to it,
as I am,
then you realize you are in search of something in the vortex of madness.
I found that something.
I should tell you at this point,
that I have innovated a superior method of watching movies and television and other passive forms of media (music videos, online video essays, etc.).
I see no point in consuming media according to official dictates.
I'll download, re-edit, re-score, re-arrange, and even re-voice the scenes as I see fit.
Sometimes my tinkering comes about as a result of dissatisfaction:
a movie is too long; actors' performances are poor; a film needs new scenes to be properly finished, and so I'll insert appropriate scenes from other media, or I'll compose crude animatics to fill the lack.
This is an engaged, serious-minded approach to media consumption.
Not riffs. Not parodies. Not swilling beers, and cracking jokes with the gang.
These are modifications made to satisfy certain, serious aesthetic desires,
and these recut versions do not circulate outside of my own secure, offline system.
My own private cinema.
But I do watch the movies in their original forms at least once, the first time through.
But even during the first watch,
I'm looking for that new vision, that new cut,
but it doesn't just come from my own imagination
or caprice;
rather,
the feeling is that there are other possible films lurking within a given film,
or series of films,
or maybe it's more like each shot
is a unit of communication within the totality of global cinema.
Each film is an imperfect,
often times confused
expression of this global cinema emanating from individual, seemingly isolated production,
and it is this global cinema
that I'm seeking to articulate.
But even I am an imperfect vehicle for this expression.
I tend towards my own tastes, fantasies, preferences.
I scorn CG animated movies, even if I largely relate to Iris and others through an online video game,
I strictly prefer my cinema to be as physical and celluloid as possible.
So,
I do not hold out hope of becoming the perfect vehicle, a kind of prophet.
Maybe I'll transcend my own limitations if I keep at it diligently.
From my first marathon watch of the Death Wish franchise,
I saw the untapped potentialities.
But they were all strictly in the realm of satire, making jokes, swilling beer with the gang.
No, on a private level, I'm not above such foolishness.
But I refuse to allow my public persona to be that of the comedian.
And so, the following weekend,
I took another movie day to watch the five Death Wish movies again.
I noticed the use of squibs-small triggered explosions of fake blood to simulate bullet hits-in the first movie and compared them to how they were used in the subsequent four movies.
The squib work is low key, and somewhat grisly at times,
yet I sensed that there could've been a higher outrageousness to the bloodshed,
particularly in the third installment which lapses into meta-cinematic self-parody
as an enraged citizenry follow the example of their vigilante Christ
and take to the streets to gleefully fire off their guns and kill, kill, kill.
I began to see this mode of madness
as the secret heart of the Bronson Death Wish cycle.
In Death Wish 3, the filmmakers decided to flaunt the fascist power fantasy of vigilantism, and confront the audience with its own twisted desires to see an emotionless, near-silent Charles Bronson kill scores of people in the name of law and order no matter the ethics, the collateral damage, or even logic of such actions. "Here it is, gorehounds, eat your fucking fill!"
And so I set to work pulling apart the scenes,
re-suturing them in a highly disjunctive style,
mixing and matching past/present/future,
having middle-aged Bronson/old Bronson/elderly Bronson shoot at himself,
I even manipulated the audio to make it seem like the squibs were the firing guns,
and the discharging guns the wounds.
I looked deep into Bronson's sad, wrinkle entombed eyes,
and I knew I had to free him,
and all the other actors,
from the fascist idiocy,
from my own idiocy,
and so I created . . . a kind of sixth Death Wish film . . . in which the actors do not fire off their guns . . . they wander a vast empty city . . . a cheap backlot set . . . and when they encounter one another . . . they do not draw their pistols . . . their bodies writhe and burst and spray each other with bright red, viscous syrups and chunks of raw hamburger meat . . . and they do a little dance like they're playing a typically exaggerated shooting death scene in a violent action flick . . . everybody's just squibbing all over each other . . . this was the secret film I unlocked within the official franchise . . . the Lost Bronson Classic . . . this new movie accesses random selections of scenes based on complex algorithms within the code . . . yes, I had to draw new scenes completely from scratch . . . most of it, as of this post, has yet to be properly finished . . . it's all in my all-too-sad head . . . because this movie doesn't need to exist outside of my mind . . . it's too good for this world. People would see it, and would have no choice but to start squibbing all over themselves and each other uncontrollably, until the world drowned in fake blood and chunks of raw hamburger meat.
The secret of the Lost Bronson Classic will die with the final deactivation of my idiotic brain functions.
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
But I got weak.
I just had to share the secret of the Lost Bronson Classic.
I'm living with my cousin, Mike, typing these words over WiFi I cannot afford. I sacrificed my old life to realize this vision. I'm not sure it was worth it. I'm not sure I can forgive myself for ditching Iris like I did . . . but that is a story for another time-one that will never come around, a story I'll never be able to tell . . . or, you know, I want it to be like that. I want the dramatic end of self-destruction.
But I lack the free will to execute such drama.
I'm a survival meat-bot, faithfully operating according to program,
day-in, day-out.
Neither wholly convincing nor wholly fanciful,
not quite a full-on filmmaker, not quite a sarcastic piss-taker,
I work in retail,
and am grateful that my cousin Mike took me in despite my madness, my malfunction,
my momentary eruption of free will.
-December 2018
Copyright 2018 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved.
