Gaspar Noe
March 31, 2010Henry Baum No Comments »Gaspar Noe is following me around. Sure, he’s successful and widely known, but his first movie was recommended to me as possibly a new “Taxi Driver” – a movie I’ve been obsessed with and is directly related to my first novel, The Golden Calf. I didn’t like the movie because it makes you desire for the world to come to an end. That it needs to because we’re hopeless. “Taxi Driver” never does that – in fact it does the opposite. “Suddenly there is change.” To be honest, I don’t know how I’d take “Taxi Driver” today. I haven’t seen it in 10 years. At 20, I was watching it again and again.
Noe’s new movie tackles DMT and the Tibetan Book of the Dead – no doubt things that interest me. Haven’t seen it, but I have to imagine the movie is more about disintegration than it is about the elevation of consciousness. Perhaps it does for DMT what “Requiem for a Dream” does for other drugs – a movie I despise for some of the same reasons as “I Stand Alone” – a meditation on how awful people can be, which is dispiriting and not much more. I liken “Requiem for a Dream” to a new “Reefer Madness” – drugs destroy people, but they don’t only destroy people. Will “Enter the Void” do the same thing? Can’t say yet, but people describe the DMT experience as exiting the void, not entering it (which may be the point of the film). Regardless, the movie looks interesting:
The story opens with Oscar, a lanky twenty-something Canadian expat, as he lights up a drug pipe in the shabby Tokyo Shinjuku apartment he shares with his kid sister. As Oscar inhales DMT, a concentrated form of ayahuasca, one of the strongest pyschedelic substances on earth, Noe invites us to slip through the proverbial rabbit hole and trip the lights fantastik with his protagonist as he drifts into a DMT day-glow slumber in a visual sequence mirroring a Buddhist mandala cornucopia that plays out in the real time of the six minutes it takes the drug to intoxicate the system. Oscar receives a call from a friend to join him at a nearby Red Light District bar. Oscar is initially too stoned to make it out of the house, but convinces himself otherwise when his friend Alex shows up and begins ranting to him about drugs and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The two friends trot and stumble to a nearby Kabuki-cho bar called the Void, a sort of post-modern Karova milk bar for acid freaks where images from Kubrick’s 2001 play on TV monitors; no doubt an homage to the maestro whose visual lexicon presides as patron saint to this film.
Read more. Credit sequence:
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