SICK

It’s been irking me for years: this cool-talk habit of contraries, saying that

something one finds amusing is ‘sick’ or ‘depraved’. As someone who has studied

in philosophy, I have been taught to keep language clean; it is, with mathematics, a

tool of reason to access and communicate truth. Well my long tolerance for this

border-line practice has caught up with me. I am faced with something I consider sick,

but ‘sick’ won’t do it.

The film «Hangover 2», summer Hollywood fare purportedly comedic is actually, in

my professional opinion, over the top. Or rather in the category of snuff films. This is

verboten, Hollywood; not allowed. The film is complacent about self-mutilation. A

sixteen-year old cuts off a finger during a coke-fueled evening with older men. 

And smiles about it the next day. 

As a grey-haired person, I am actually quite fond of the Hangover boys who periodically

trip-over into Bacchanal behavior as each faces marriage and seeks to begin with a clear soul.

 H-2 actually contains a brilliant scene, wherein the chubby member remembers the night 

before with himself and his cronies as children. That’s fine film-making. 

But the problem remains that there is no way I can recommend this film to a younger

person - and at this point, they are legion - without caveats, recommendations, interpretations, 

all doomed to be ignored as this kind of elder’s behaviour quite rightly

deserves. «Le texte est orphelin», the film must speak for itself, and sadly it is in this

case a purveyor of a dangerous untruth.

The Magnotta case looms in the horizon, here in Canada. I shudder to think...