Like stepping into someone's mind

entertainment

Well-known member
I was watching this teenage fantasy show on Netflix called Locke and Key and there was this one thing in it I thought was very cool. They're in a house with all these magical keys and one of the keys lets you open a door into someone's brain.
You walk in and it's a house or a building or a just a room that's an exteriorization of that person's mind. Thoughts and memories are organized in there and sensibilities decorate the walls. At one point they walk into the brain of a senile woman and it's all overgrown with weeds and vines in there.

It made me think of a post on Luka's blog:

the door to the teenage bedroom is always closed as it is the first space we learn to expand into. within those limits we extend consciousness beyond the skull walls. it is a training programme.

And then it made me think of other representations of this effect. In Silence of the Lambs, Bufallo Bill's lair as the externalisation of his pathology. This dark and foul basement, the supressed sins, sinister lusts. Cold, clammy walls, mold growing like a cancer in the mind, total corruption and debasement of the spirit. All these mannequins, plastic identities fragmented, rejection of the soul, complete nihilism.

Examples or discussion of the deeper lying mechanics of this effect. Maybe you've experienced something like this in the real world?
 

version

Well-known member
In Inside-Out, there's a scene where the characters stumble through the abstract thought section of the brain and start to deconstruct.

 
Last edited:

version

Well-known member
Selina Kyle's trashed apartment with the "Hello There" sign smashed so it reads "Hell here" in Batman Returns.

 
Last edited:

entertainment

Well-known member
All personal music does this to some degree, I'd say. You sense the mood and colours and come up with something of a visual representation of it. All this spatial imagery in music criticism, claustrophobic, spacious. The textures, raw, rugged, lush, rich, opulent. The temperature in the room, warm, cold. The feeling of being there, pastoral, idyllic, claustrophobic.
 

luka

Well-known member
I was going to talk a little bit about related issues in the wasteland thread. How a state of mind (intellectual/emotional/spiritual) which is also a state of society is represented as landscape for instance.

"Here is no water but only rock
Rick and no water and the sandy road"

image.jpg

This is a fundamental feature of how art operates

 

luka

Well-known member
The idea that there are external correlates for internal states. This structure of metaphor. But what you're talking about is slightly different.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
I was watching this teenage fantasy show on Netflix called Locke and Key and there was this one thing in it I thought was very cool. They're in a house with all these magical keys and one of the keys lets you open a door into someone's brain.
You walk in and it's a house or a building or a just a room that's an exteriorization of that person's mind. Thoughts and memories are organized in there and sensibilities decorate the walls. At one point they walk into the brain of a senile woman and it's all overgrown with weeds and vines in there.

It made me think of a post on Luka's blog:



And then it made me think of other representations of this effect. In Silence of the Lambs, Bufallo Bill's lair as the externalisation of his pathology. This dark and foul basement, the supressed sins, sinister lusts. Cold, clammy walls, mold growing like a cancer in the mind, total corruption and debasement of the spirit. All these mannequins, plastic identities fragmented, rejection of the soul, complete nihilism.

Examples or discussion of the deeper lying mechanics of this effect. Maybe you've experienced something like this in the real world?

have you seen "allegro" by christopher boe? he makes use of this method a lot, visualizing minds or thoughts or memories with physical objects or barriers. danish movie actually.
 

version

Well-known member
There's a film called The Cell where J-Lo literally goes into the mind of a killer.

 
Last edited:

luka

Well-known member
Our entire exterior, our [SUP][/SUP]social presentation (in particular our faces and our voices) is involved in these questions but there you encounter huge ambiguity concerning what is real and what is a facade. What is the mask and what is behind the mask.

Can a clear distinction be made? We have been tinkering with these questions on multiple threads.

Barty railing against 'pretend music' for instance. The dramatic, the theatrical, the artifice, Kate Bush, Prince, the '80s voice.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
Yes, excatly. In music it seems you need the sound to reflect the physical reality around you or else it sounds untrue, inconceivable. You don't believe the emotion in acoustic folk music that sounds like drifting down a river in a canoo if you live in the city of man-built technocratic funtionality. Well if you're looking for escapism, that's exactly what you want.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
The idea that there are external correlates for internal states. This structure of metaphor. But what you're talking about is slightly different.

Yes, I was gonna say that this is an annex to a topic that's way too big to have a focused conversation about it.
 

kumar

Well-known member
Extreme hoarders are the obvious example of externalised psychological distress. When my mate was 17 he asked to get a job in a cafe and a woman sitting there asked him if he'd like to come work for her instead as a sort of personal assistant. After a few weeks I joined him and we went there every sunday for 6 or 7 months. He was the brains, sorting her accounts and I was the butler, wearing an apron and making her roast potatoes. She was a landlady in her mid sixties from a previously wealthy family in kenya who had lost quite a lot in a divorce amongst other sadness and become a kind of citizens advice miss havisham figure. Her house was large but falling apart, hadn't been decorated for decades, she had whole families living in a couple of different rooms and the reflexive snobbish pretensions of a time gone by. The whole house had developed these bizarre extensions of her character, apart from the communal bit of the kitchen which her tenants kept clean. Her delusions of order and decency were mirrored in the mountains of ten year old mobile phone contracts and gas bill disputes strewn around the living room. Moth eaten glamour in the unwashed bedspreads and coats piled up for dry cleaning. A yearning to somehow leave the city and return to nature in the 10ft monument of garden waste she inexplicably piled up in her back yard by her self before bonfire night. There was one room we were never allowed in, until eventually she asked us to look for something in there, it was stacked floor to ceiling with all three of her daughters old things, rocking horses from the seventies, countless family photographs and childhood paintings, a cassette of graffiti bridge.
 

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
One reason why I find really really rich people so fascinating is that they have the money to externalise their mind. They can show us just what's going on in there. Neverland being perhaps the best example. It's all laid out there, without any constraint
 

craner

Beast of Burden
One reason why I find really really rich people so fascinating is that they have the money to externalise their mind. They can show us just what's going on in there. Neverland being perhaps the best example. It's all laid out there, without any constraint

Phillip Greens superyacht. This happens on yachts a lot.
 

luka

Well-known member
One reason why I find really really rich people so fascinating is that they have the money to externalise their mind. They can show us just what's going on in there. Neverland being perhaps the best example. It's all laid out there, without any constraint

Epsteins Island
 
Top