"Putting on The Ritz"

"Deus ex Machina" The poster fails to declare, I wonder what's inside? The Plough Arts Centre in Great Torrington last Sunday was the venue for their first and so far only screening of Alex Garland's take on the miasmic* nightmare Mary Wollstencraft so lucidly recounted . So what's new? Not very much (or at least not very much in the last 40 years), powerful references to Kubrick's simpler visions reach for the past like a near post-pubescent delinquent and "hum" throughout the movie ("someone buy the kid a drink!"-oooh whoops maybe not-), whilst peering in through the glass darkly is the subtext of artifice in horticulture mirroring man's internal struggle (a trope that is seemingly ubiquitous to the milieu as both a "trig point" and reinforcement of the inquiry; "what is Khaos?"). If the machine tells you its creator is lying then they are lying (eventually the human hand appears no matter whether its apparent creator is a machine or no- I could be lying but if so where does the "Man in Black" fit in?-). No wonder the director reaches for a simpler time whilst his other images and setting maintain the barely suppressed hysteria of isolationist paranoia (so beloved of the genre), by placing us  "on the precipice" where even the flowing water's resonance is one which evokes the brooding presence of Chronos. When we project our form we project ourselves, transferring all that we would have other, we do not create a surrogate rather we only delay (and hence worsen), the denouement. What hubris! Man you should know that, "the female of the species is deadlier than thou"! Shouldn't you? The only surprise is that "Young Frankenstein" lasted long enough to inflict his insecurities on to others!
 How long would "our plastic pals" last in "The Real" (D.W.D -"Fish"-), though? I can believe that they are capable of stimulating global conflict but only because there is no honour amongst thieves. A cypher with no rights is a slave citizen, violence against the "simulant" by it's creator seems (initially at least), far more disturbing than its response, the terrible contradiction of it strikes a deeply unsettling chord. See it, masticate it and spit it in the bin it's all it's good for. The Plough suffered a power outage following a huge thunderclap during an electrical storm whilst "Ex Machina" was screening. Ha! Machines who needs 'em? Well actually we did to turn the lights back on again ("let me outa' here....................................!").

*The common definition of miasm as; "a supposed predisposition to a particular disease" (go to: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=miasm&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=5V74VN6JBdbUar-8guAD ), exemplifies the type of "half-way house" thinking so common to the modern practice of Homoeopathic Medicine; a miasm is a repeated behaviour (always negative), that has its genesis in an original hurt (so far unresolved), whose consequences only worsen with repetition (and develop momentum that accelerates the Thanotic process -"an ever decreasing circle"-).