This week I’ll start with a disturbing story.
There’s a work by Marcel Duchamp that I’ve always found discomforting and frightening. I’m fascinated by it, but it also gives me the creeps. It’s an art installation that you see through a door. This photo that I made some years ago shows only a part of what you see. I’m sure that many of you know the piece, but I’ll start from the beginning and return later to this…
In August, I had to spend around 8 hours on a train, so some days before I asked on Twitter if anyone could recommend me an entertaining podcast. One of the suggestions was Root of Evil: The True Story of the Hodel Family and the Black Dahlia.
The Black Dahlia—Elizabeth Short—story is quite well-known, you’ve probably heard about it or even seen some of the films or TV series based on it. If you haven’t, it was an unsolved murder—1947, Los Angeles. I won't explain the details because this is not a true crime newsletter. I’m only writing about this because the podcast explains some details related to art that I didn’t know.
Everyone suspected that the killer was a man named George Hodel, a rich doctor, who in the 1940s was living in Los Angeles. He was a good friend of Man Ray and he had contact with many other artists, such as Duchamp and John Huston. Hodel wanted to be an artist like them, but he didn’t have the talent. Some people think that murdering Short was a macabre attempt to imitate the surrealists.
This theory comes from one of Hodel’s sons, Steve, who was a policeman. When he found out that his father was a suspect in the murder, years after the crime, at first he was shocked, but then he became a bit suspicious because when he was a kid he used to see some strange behaviours at home. He asked for the crime scene photos and started investigating. He thought that the corpse was in a strange pose. It wasn’t casual, it was staged by the killer.
Some time later, Steve was flicking through a Man Ray’s book and one specific image caught his attention: Minotaur, 1933.
The arms were exactly in the same pose that the arms of Short's corpse, which was also cut in two in the navel area. Another photo in the book showed Man Ray’s wife sleeping on a sofa in the same pose that the corpse. There were many other details that appeared in several of Man Ray’s photos and drawings. There were too many similarities to think it was all just a coincidence, especially because Steve knew that Man Ray was really close to his father.
That's when Steve became seriously suspicious of his father. He thought that the crime was, at least in part, a tribute to surrealism. He doesn’t think that Man Ray was involved, but that George Hodel was trying to create sadistic surrealism, a sort of horror exquisite corpse, with the only tool he knew how to use, the scalpel.
We’ll never know if this theory is true or if Man Ray suspected Hodel at any time. In any case, there’s another thing in the relationship between Hodel and Man Ray that we know to be true and that leads one to believe that they had a fishy friendship, to say the least. Man Ray made some nude photos of Tamar, one of George Hodel’s daughters, when she was a teenager. The photos were requested by Hodel, who was forcing his daughter to perform fellatios on him from the age of 11. Three years later, he raped her and she became pregnant.
These abusive details don’t surprise me. Hodel was a powerful and predatory womanizer obsessed with decadence, and surrealism was generally male-dominated and deeply misogynistic. But I’m not so interested in Man Ray, who interests me is his friend Duchamp.
So, returning to Duchamp. The work that I mentioned at the beginning of this text is called Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage. I’ve always thought that it was some kind of strange fantasy, but now I think that it was somewhat related to Short’s crime, and that makes it all the more disturbing.
Duchamp made this art installation between 1946 and 1966. Short’s body was found on the morning of January 15, 1947. In the installation, you can only see the woman peeping through two peepholes in a door. You don’t want to see that, or even acknowledge that that kind of thing happens, but you can’t stop watching.
The body lies in tall grass, like Short’s body. Both have their legs open, showing their sex, without pubic hair. There’s no blood, there wasn’t blood at the crime scene either, but the woman is definitely dead, like Short.
Duchamp worked secretly on the piece for 20 years and forbade it to be shown while he was alive. Nobody really knows why Duchamp made this or what inspired him, but he had an enduring friendship with Man Ray, and he also knew Hodel, so now I can't help but shiver at the sight of Étant donnés.
There are millions of works of art in which women are just lifeless objects, but this one has a particularly spooky legend.
Binge-watching
I don’t have anything against watching mainstream films, but the other day I read this statement by Ted Sarandos that I found completely embarrassing:
“Netflix’s CEO Ted Sarandos has argued, that the cinematic qualities of a movie don’t matter. At the heart of a film is a ‘story,’ which can be consumed on any platform and from any location. This is the logic behind Hollywood’s multibillion dollar push into ‘content.’”
Digital Rocks: How Hollywood killed celluloid, Will Tavlin.
I guess that’s the main reason why all Netflix productions look the same (except Mindhunter). They aren’t selling films or TV shows, they’re selling something completely different, I’m not sure what it is. Perhaps just killing time. The whole article is really interesting, but that quote haunts me.
Of course, the problem is not just Netflix, most streaming platforms are similar and right now Hollywood seems only interested in releasing the same old films from the same old franchises again and again. When I watched Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness a few weeks ago, I thought: “This isn't even a film, it's a two-hour commercial to sell other Marvel films.”
If you want to understand how and why the film industry has changed in the last few decades, this podcast about the megaplex is also a good start. They speak about the USA, but some of the issues are common to most countries, even if their industry is smaller. Here—in Spain—, the film industry is quite small, but the megaplex has changed in similar ways.
This doesn’t mean that all is lost and cinema is dead, as some filmmakers say. Cinema is alive and kicking, but in other places. You can find more films than ever, more diverse than ever, but you're going to have to look a little further than Netflix, Amazon, and Marvel. Things have changed and that implies some issues, such as losing certain types of indie films, but please, I don’t want to hear anyone saying that films were better in the 40s. No, they weren’t better, you’re just saying that because most of the bad ones have been erased from history.
And even if you hate mainstream platforms, sometimes miracles happen. Who gave the green light to Too Old to Die Young? A television network would have never given the go-ahead fot that kind of show, and there’s a great story behind it that proves that nothing is black or white.
Amazon had a senior executive a few years ago who was obsessed with Nicolas Winding Refn's films. He liked some of them so much that he would put them on a loop in his house, as if they were paintings. He gave Winding Refn carte blanche to do whatever he wanted, and no one interfered during the entire production of the series.
When Winding Refn finished the series, the executive in question no longer worked at Amazon, and the new team thought it was unsaleable rubbish, but it was already fully finished and paid for, so they released it anyway. They didn't do any kind of promotion, but there it is.
Today's media are stranger than they have ever been, and that's bad in some ways, but sometimes it leads to happy accidents. By the way, now it’s Netflix the one that’s producing a TV show by Winding Refn. What will Ted Sarandos think about that?
Why are so few working-class people employed by the ****** industry?
The video is about the games industry, but I’ve written ****** because all creative industries have the same problem. The film industry, the art industry, etc… If you’re working-class, you’re probably aware of this issue, but the video is quite clear.
As a working-class artist with a day job, someday I would like to talk about another barrier that is even less talked about: character, or personality. Probably the two most important assets in creative industries are family money and connections. If you’re working-class and introverted, like me and so many other people, the uphill climb is going to be much steeper. I’m in my 40s and I still haven't managed to get over the first slope.
It’s September again, my favourite month of the year, but in two weeks I’ll be back to the winter office hours in my day job, until 6.15pm, and that is discouraging. I hope you are masters of your own time, especially now that the world seems to collapse every week. This week we had a couple of storms that almost seemed like a monsoon. I love rain, but this is the Mediterranean, not the tropics.
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Have a nice week. See you soon!