Beat Culture - Before You Go.
This is my relaxation song.
Following:
WE ARE ALL PROSTITUTES AND JUNKIESIDOL Whore Starlet harlot.
Who actually doesn’t know this scene from ‘The Mummy’ of 1999? These beautiful beetle-shaped jewels just so happen to be hideous creepy-crawlies which penetrate the skin and scuttle up into scared little faces, causing people to die. Here, our hero cuts the little fucker out before it chews the chance to eat brain. It’s such a great scene; at least, I think so. It’s always stuck in my mind.
It interests me because what I am mostly trying to contemplate is the ugliness of false beauty, and how like these beetles, the whole concept of really vain and over-the-top self improvement tends to penetrate into a person’s inner-self and cause a really beautiful part of them to die. It turns off a light, in a sense - like a dampening of the soul. I think that it’s especially prominent with celebrity and the whole idea of re-invention and self-obsession. It’s unnatural; we’re effectively watching [predominantly] young females slowly die, because they’re trying so hard to be ‘beautiful’. There’s the surgery, the drugs and the starvation; this makes me think of needles. I think of needles being injected into skinny freckly arms like Lindsay Lohan’s and all these pretty, deadly little beetles scourge beneath her skin and nest in her brain, slowly eating away.
And there’s nothing nice about that.
The picture below I love and is related to the beetle notion by the mummification link, as you can see. Yet, look at this lovely lady! She doesn’t care. My English Literature class have been studying ‘Frankenstein’ for our upcoming exam so I’m really obsessed at the moment with the whole idea of nature/nurture: basically, how we reject ugliness and otherness and how this effects the victims of our neglect. And how much of our personal ugliness is actually intrinsic, if any? Are some people simply born to be ugly, either inside, outside, or both?
The parallel between physical beauty and genuine acts of tenderness here is really touching, anyway, and projects a feeling of moral integrity and unconditional love. But- sometimes it is questionable how much love an intense [moral/social/psychological] ugliness deserves, isn’t it?