Miniature Malekpour, Author at Diabolique Magazine

The morbid metaphysics of the mind occasionally decide to take a little detour. This weird brain wiring, buried somewhere between the conscious and the unconscious, can be triggered by watching a dog chasing its own tail. It could be an image you come across online on Tumblr of Audrey Hepburn’s birdcage costume for the Rothschilds’ Surrealist Masquerade party or even an accidental spilling of ketchup on the kitchen floor. Thus, it enters the metaphysics of the mind. When you absorb these events as they're unfolding, your aural senses collaborate with your subconscious and recall or relate them to something that you have heard before. This is usually caused by a previous musical injection. Our senses are accustomed to triggering memories, and in this particular case, music can remind the horror fanatic (or even the casual admirer) of the “lashings of the old ultraviolence.” Films, and particularly certain sequences or scenes, can be identified based on particular injections, the temporal structure of a certain tempo and rhythm that adds hot sauce to the pastiche of mockery, which makes the mise-en-scene so fucking good. The aural anti-realism of the violent, graphic, blood-splattering phenomena is more than just another form or structure of a horror film. This is a form of cultural expression. How? It combines the visual and the aural and plays a role in the cognitive psychology of the collective breed. Humanity was founded on violence. When was the last time one or another country was not at war? Audrey Hepburn’s ‘Surrealist’ Costume- Rothschild’s Surrealist Ball 1972 The morphological preconditions it summons, a group of dysfunctional disgruntled elements, leads the audience to a detailed exploration of music and violence in its own dance of death. In the space belonging to the psyche of a lunatic or the traits and tropes of abject vileness, where there is no place for language, music adds to the aesthetic and stylistic concept concealed in the belly of the lens, leaving the viewers cringing, terrified, disgusted, and shocked. However, for some strange reason, its mannerist representation and theatrics take the instability of the viewers’ racing heart and nausea and purify the scene with the holy water of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. To mirror the audience’s emotions to what is on the screen is supposed to be positive, but some disrespect is, in fact, respected in this case. Sometimes the disgruntled elements of a particular tune might even distort the mise-en-scene’s act of violence and add a little aural trompe l’oeil (trick of the eye). Maybe what we are seeing is as brutal as we are imagining. “The totality of a culture produces an individual unconscious, a collective unconscious, and [...] ‘an unconscious of the work.’”—Calabrese Rob Zombie’s 2005 film The Devil’s Rejects showcases Zombie’s auteurship of both horror and music. He chose the elements of this movie’s chilling soundtrack (and to those of all his other movies). The film follows a psychopathic family on the run from the law, who kill people (or let them live) at a whim. In a sequence that starts off with the family taking a band of musicians hostage in a motel room, we witness the resulting ruptures of Zombie’s clever music selection. This sequence, which combines rape, death, and pure repulsive mockery, cross-cuts between blues music and the theme of the entire film—the family’s relationship with the devil. Otis (played by Bill Moseley) takes two of the hostages with him to find the family’s buried weapons. The hostages fight back, but to no avail; one has his face cut off, and the other is bludgeoned to death. While this is happening, one of the hostages recites Bible verses, to which Otis replies, “I am the devil, and I am here to do the devil’s work.” The track playing throughout this scene is Otis Rush’s 1969 blues number “I Can’t Quit You, Baby.” The film then cuts back to the motel where the TV was playing the song. It’s a perfect transition, highlighting that blues music was once referred to as the “devil’s music.” Blues were often connected to sexual innuendo, heavy drinking, and violence in lyricism, and the falsehood of religion and Christian values, Blues have long highlighted the clash between sinners and saints. Hell, even the glass harmonica was supposedly a sort of trance-like instrument that hypnotized men and drove them to insanity, while turning women on to the point of overstimulated lust. “I am the devil, and I am here to do the devil’s work.” Although the movie itself has its absurd moments, one can certainly agree that the family was a product of the devil. How the hell did they survive that shootout at the end of the movie if they did not sell their souls to the devil? But Zombie did give the audience a ‘go-out-with-a-bang ending, especially by throwing in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s brilliant 1973 tune “Free Bird.” The Pixies’ 1987 track “Where Is My Mind?” plays during the last scene of the 1999 film Fight Club (dir. David Fincher), a perfect example of the aural trompe l’oeil technique. The use of the song fits perfectly with what is unfolding in the final scene—out-and-out utter destruction—with the song becoming the main objective of the “aural” optical illusion of depth. With the buildings around them being destroyed, The Narrator (played by Edward Norton) and Marla (played by the magnificent Helena Bonham Carter) stand there holding hands, watching everything around them unravel (I don’t really want to spoil this one). The last line of the film, in which The Narrator turns to Marla and says that “You’ve met me at a very strange time in my life” fits in perfectly with Tyler’s own state-of-mind, schizophrenia, see-you-later Tyler (sorry guys, again, the first rule about Fight Club is that we do not talk about Fight Club) apogee. The track selected for these two films might even exist in their own mental and perceptual insecurity when they are produced. Before we discuss the main films, we should briefly look at what the meaning behind “Where Is My Mind?” was about? It was actually inspired by a snorkeling trip, when the lead singer, Frank Black, was chased by a small fish. That is where the fashioned abstract comes in, or to put it in Black’s own words, “manic thinking,” which is the leitmotif of the following films. A Clockwork Orange (1971), dir. Stanley Kubrick Another example, from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), involves the song “Singing in the Rain” in a combination of aural and visual cinematic vividness that is nauseating. If you have not seen the movie, I suggest you stop reading and go watch it. A Clockwork Orange was adapted from Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel of the same name. Like James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta (2005), it is set in the future, in a dystopian England. But the similarities end there, for this world is all about hooligans, rape, and rebellion. After Alex (played by Malcolm McDowell) and his gang of “Droogs” get their junkie’s fix down at the Korova Milkbar, the film takes us on a baroque tour of dancing, fighting, fucking, and music. Alex and his Droogs run around town engaging in what Alex calls “a bit of ultra-violence” in the diegetic space of typical Kubrick scenery and décor. Kubrick’s most important achievement is making a film that balances its grotesqueness with the most important cinematic element of the entire film, classical music. Alex’s personality and madness are found in the musical notes of Beethoven, a.k.a. “Ludwig van.” After committing murder, rape, and other violence, Alex returns to his bedroom to enjoy an aural encore of the night’s Ultraviolence by listening to Beethoven’s symphonies, even while engaging in a threesome. The trajectory of Alex’s love for “Ludwig van” eventually collapses after Alex and his Droogs pay a late-night visit to a random house for a bit of fun. This leads to one of the most disturbing scenes of the entire film, as well as one of the most twisted juxtapositions in cinema between a song and a film scene. The happiest songs are usually played in the background of the most horrific, violent, brutal scenes in order to add to the audience’s discomfort and shock. Alex and his Droogs break into a random house, where they brutally beat up a wheelchair-bound author and rape his wife. If this is not unsettling enough, Alex does this while singing and dancing to the tune of “Singing in the Rain.” However, it must be noted that “Singing in the Rain” was not planned to be in the scene. Kubrick told McDowell to sing a song, and the first one that came to McDowell’s mind (and the only song he knew all the lyrics to) was Gene Kelly’s happy-sappy tune (Gene was not very pleased about it). The context of the importance of Beethoven’s musical relevance in this film is evidently attached to the “ultraviolent” fantasies that Alex experiences, whether consciously or unconsciously. Kubrick’s conditioning allows fantasies to transpire within Alex’s psyche that contains seeds of theoretical notions suggesting that these illusions and desires may belong to someone else. During treatment, Alex’s consciousness goes through a journey. His brain absorbs externalized “media” taming, an assortment of ideas based on oneiric (dream state) visuals he must watch over and over again, as his eyes are clamped open and he is pumped full of a variety of experimental drugs. This ultraviolenza waltz playing in Alex’s head has no core model. In this case, his fantasies might not even be real; for it to be real, Alex must exist, to begin with. Hence, when being “classically conditioned” under treatment, Alex’s instinctive retreat to hearing Beethoven’s music induces agonizing nausea in him. Beethoven, then, becomes the ultraviolenza waltz that has been damaging his thoughts this entire time. Hearing just one symphony becomes so unbearable to him that the line between fantasy and reality ceases to exist. However, Ludwig’s symphonies continue to play. American Psycho (2000)...