Jaws
Alien
The Ghost and the
Darkness
Life of Pi
They all have one thing in common: a fierce creature that is
too powerful to fight and wants to kill you rather nastily. Life of Pi, however, has something else:
a shipwreck.
All my life I’ve had a horror of shipwrecks. It’s the sight
of the ship going down that does it, and I tried to work out why that image
should stand supreme among horrific images.
I suppose it’s all to do with what I said in an earlier post
about the life force leaving the body at the point of death. There’s something
of the ultimate in dark, mysterious magic about it. Now you see it, now you don’t.
Here it was, now it’s gone. Seeing a ship go down has the same effect, and so it’s
a physical and visual manifestation of death itself. That’s about the best I
can manage by way of an explanation for why I find the sight so rivetingly unbearable.
2 comments:
Someone who understands.
When I was a little kid my Daddy used to work on the weekends, at night, to make extra bread.
It seems like All Creatures Great and Small was on PBS and my mother would just leave it on the channel...where inevitably a documentary about ship wrecks would come on. Ships going down in the Great Lakes...the Titanic...just one story after another...of people scrambling over one anther to avoid the icy abyss.
It's the inevitability of the sinking once it starts. It's irreversible...but often slow.
Arrghhghghh
Yes, the idea of slow inevitability occured to me, too.
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