Epistemology Noir continued
Come on. Paul is a sensible man. He pours himself a cognac and settles back to enjoy the film. It's a stupid old noir thing with romantic elements. So there can be a sexual undertone, only sentimental, somewhat tragic, as it must be in noir. There's a bullet hole somewhere in her body, staining her dress, finally seeping all the way through to her raincoat. Soon she is being carried away in the man's arms. You see him walking away into the rain, carrying her in his arms. What happened to that kiss, though? Did he miss it while he was thinking about dry humping telephones? Dinosaurs laughing in the dark? Fuck them. Fuck the whole lizard era with its damned monkeys and blonds and biplanes.
Giving it up, Paul shuts down the show. There's the famous Citizen Kane type sound of a, what is it, like a record, well, a recording skidding into a blur, a light going out, then silence. I'll choke her, he's thinking. Put out the light, and then put out the light. But in the movie he just closes down the screening room and wanders around the house, swigging cognac. "Shit-piss-clit-fuck-tits," he says. "Shit-piss-clit-fuck-dick-cock-suckandfuck," he says, with variations, over and over, until his wife wanders in all soft focus and bedroomy, saying, "Philip says to thank you again for letting him borrow your wife."
"Philip is a corpse," he tells her. "All that remains of him are chalk lines in a locked room."
Later that night he composed the following unsent email, which he saved with all the others, also unsent, to a folder marked "Rudra". That word, in Sanskrit, means wrath ... or that is one of its meanings.
Philip:
I want you to know that you are insane. Everything you do comes out of dark streams. You are motivated by conflicts which began long before you were born. Your present life is an act of revenge; you suffer at the hands of strangers; you take what is not yours. Dogs hate you because you are a dog. You fucked my wife because you think she is your mother. You do what you do over and over again. This is why you must be killed.
Best,
Paul