Advertisement
Advertisement
John Darnielle: They asked about presenting a movie. My taste in movies is generally not what other people expect of me. I love horror movies. I like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre—that's my favorite movie. They told me, "If you want to do Texas Chainsaw Massacre you can, but we did that last year." And I'm not current on movies—I mainly watch horror movies, the kind of stuff that I'm super into I don't think is what they're trying to screen at a film program. I don't fancy myself to be the guy going, "Oh, yes! I made them screen Silent Night, Deadly Night"—that's not my style. I thought about what I've enjoyed that they might be groovin' on screening, and I thought, I haven't watched Pasolini movies in years, but I used to really like him—especially when I was into Greek tragedy really heavily. Because he did two: He did Oedipus, and he did Medea. His Oedipus is fucking incredible—the murder scene, right, where he kills his father? In tragedy, there's this elevated tone that Pasolini rightly thinks brings none of the brutality to the stuff. And so when Oedipus kills his father, it's like something out of The Warriors. One guy meets another guy in the road and says, "You're in my goddamn way!" and kills him. It's really great.
Advertisement
But there's this opening sequence that's kind of insufferable, right? It's very art house. The centaur is sitting there explaining everything in political terms to this child. They sort of immerse you in theory and thought, and bludgeon you with it so you're like, "OK, let me think about some of these things he's talking about a little bit." And then the next thing you see is this visceral scene, there's no dialogue at all, just blood and community and sacrifice. It's so great that people of Pasolini's generation took their theory so seriously. They're like, "No, no, no. The theory is talking about this."
Advertisement
Pasolini really makes you feel it. He makes you smell it.I've been having a lot of anxiety about how to present Pasolini because I'm a straight dude, I'm just a married guy, right? And Pasolini's sexuality is a huge part of who he is as a filmmaker. Nobody's out in Italy at this time, and Pasolini is very loudly out. But he's living and working in Italy, and he's celebrated. I sort of don't feel like I'm the guy qualified to be talking on that: How do you present something where you go, "Well, go read these guys, but it's really not my position to talk about it"—I'm having some anxiety about that.Well, it's such a rich film, it seems like you could attack it from any number of angles.
But at the same time, you've got the ghost of Pasolini in the background going, "If you don't say this about me, you're not telling the truth about me."
Do you remember the first time you saw a Pasolini movie?On Noisey: The Mountain Goats Get in the Ring in Their New Video for 'The Legend of Chavo Guerrero'
So I was super lucky when I was a kid. At Pitzer, there was a Sunday night film series at Avery Auditorium where they would show—I think it was usually a double-feature, but I can't remember. There was at least one movie a week on Sunday nights, and for most of the time when I was 12, 13, 14—super formative years—they were going on. They were showing Fassbinder, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok. They were showing Andy Warhol's Trash, which I saw when I was 14. And I'm sitting there looking at Jackie Curtis, right, who I know from Lou Reed songs. "Oh my god, there she is," and freaking the fuck out, it's like 1982, right? If you lived on the West Coast, you had no prayer of seeing these people unless you had somebody local who was determined to screen them, which in this case of Pitzer was some college students who were showing these movies.
Advertisement
My stepfather is this figure who—one of my biggest regrets is, it's hard to present a person with whom you've experienced an abusive relationship, to give a 360-degree view—but he was a smart guy. He was making sure that I got exposed to culture. So when I was 12, I knew what I wanted to see. I was branching out, I tended to gravitate to the queer stuff that he was not into. Pasolini, that was my stuff. He liked Pasolini because Pasolini was a Marxist. I liked Pasolini because Pasolini likes blood.
That's the mystery of life—all the things you might've been. All the yous that you have been over the course of your life resolve into the one you are now. –John Darnielle
So this is what it does for me: When you write a song, because songs for me are a very propulsive process, they have a number of possibilities at first, right? And then you find the one, put it in the rhythm you like, not just musically, but there's a narrative, image-matic rhythm that you like, and you follow that. For me, it tends to happen very quickly—it just plays itself out and, boom, I'm done. I tend to finish songs in a day. Sometimes the beginning of it will sit around and gestate, but it's not something I'm sitting around for months doing and going, "Oh, well, do I want the guy to wear a mask or not wear a mask?" These are songs I deal with in a very performative way.
Advertisement
You know that Sarah Dougher song, "40 Hours"? It's about her leaving her marriage to discover a new identity for herself, and she drives 40 hours from I think San Antonio, Texas, to the West Coast, and she said, "Inside every house along the way, possibilities." You get that oceanic feeling, like, "In every house, more stories than I can possibly imagine."And I think Pasolini is doing that with Medea. I think he's also exploring. He's telling us something about Greek tragedy because most of these stories—when the tragedians write their version, they're only writing their version, which sometimes is a local version, and sometimes can be a version where it's like, "Well, I have something of my own to bring to this."But many of them write the same tragedies with different plot points. This is my favorite thing. Because it is your life. We sort of think of stories as so rigid, but you go, "Well, you know, in some versions of John Darnielle's story, he doesn't come out of his heroin overdoes in 1986, he never wakes up, nobody ever hears of him, and he dies." But in other versions, he recovers and is injured, and never really walks right, but he otherwise is the same John you know. And in the third version, right, and so forth—and these are all true, these are all possibilities. And I think Pasolini is talking about how the Greeks knew this, because I think Pasolini—like a lot of artists who engage with tragedy—comes to this realization, or maybe already had it going into it, that those guys were really ahead of the game. They really understood that when you tell a story, you are in the space of infinite possibility, and every one of them opens onto different implications, and they're all interesting.Mark Doten is the author of The Infernal (Graywolf Press) and co-host of humorous literary podcast The Consolation Prize. Follow him on Twitter.John Darnielle is in New York City for two events. He will introduce Pasolini's Medea at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on Monday, August 31, and on Tuesday, September 1, he will read at the Strand bookstore for the launch of the paperback of Wolf in White Van (Picador).