The Dead Part of You

So last night was the big movie screening that was part of MIT's List Visual Arts Center. Hell House, again tied in with the Cameron Jamie exhibit. You know, I still feel a little ill.

I spent most of the film with 2 thoughts. First, it was upsetting me much more than Jesus Camp did [my Jesus Camp review was lost in the great web-log crash of April 2007]. Much of what is depicted in Jesus Camp doesn't affect me directly - I'm certainly never going to find myself at one, or find myself sending a child to one to be brainwashed. Hell House was hitting a little closer to home - I even said to Bill at one point, "We simply MUST go to one of these". I'd totally go to one expecting camp, and probably have some kind of nerve attack. Here's your Hell House definition.

Additionally, I found myself actually empathizing with some of the people in the film. One girl talked about the year she played the "suicide girl", and during one performance looked out into the audience and spotted the man who had raped her two years earlier. Her reaction? She was finally able to forgive him and move on with her life. I'm down with that - I mean, how enlightened is that from a teenager being raised in a fundamentalist Christian religion? Especially one who's a part of a yearly performance art [there, I said it] piece where one of the underlying messages is rape is the victim's fault?

My second thought was how I didn't expect the Hell House to be so graphic. The whole film made me feel sick to my stomach, from the subject matter to the unfortunate camera work - too many quick pans and sudden re-focusing.

What made it tolerable and not just shock and awe was that there was some humor in the film [unlike Jesus Camp, which just gave me nightmares]. All aspects of the "rave scene" were white hot gold. The whole movie was chock full of sound bites worth ripping for ring tones.

Room number 9 is a funeral scene of a teenage homosexual boy who has died of AIDS he caught from the ink on the book report graded by his pedophile homosexual Secular-History teacher.

God Bless Landover Baptist.

Anyway, that was one of the last public events over at the LVAC until next fall. Would I go to some of them after the summer break? THE ANSWER IS DEFINITELY.