Bukowski's books glorify drinking like the movie Leaving Las Vegas glorifies drinking: the trailer may give you the impression they're about getting drunk and having fun, but sit through the whole actual thing, and having a drink is the last thing on your mind.
I saw a documentary of Bukowski (sorry, I don't remember the title) and it was clear that his life was a spectacular train wreck.
But I also think, if we look into our hearts, all of us, every one of us is winging it.
"We're all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should make us love each another, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by life's trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing." - Bukowski
Perhaps it’s like war films, in the sense that it’s very difficult to not glamorize the subject, no matter how gritty the treatment. The worse it gets the better it looks.
This is the process of eroticization, of making distasteful things appealing, seen a lot in film. Schindler's List does this with the Holocaust, Titanic sidesteps it by overlaying a love story, Irreversible confounds it by [spoiler] ending at the beginning of the story, and so on.
Yes, on one hand the filmmaker wants to do art, and naturally searches beauty in composition, story, photography... even with the gruesomest topics.
And on the other hand even if you tell the story of someone/something reprobable, it is their story, and stories are “virus” for our empathic minds - so we end up understanding and siding with the wrong ideas / actions when they are explored (because to explore them by focusing om them turns them into the protagonist of the story).
I think to a large degree eroticization is compensatory. Check out Lodge Kerrigan or Harmony Korine for (English-language) relatively-accessible movies without the kind of clarity of dramatic structure you describe.
In other words, it isn't essential at all. Spielberg could have made a movie that represented only the helplessness, misery, and horror and left it at that.
To be fair, that scene is about a period of time spent in virtually another world. Drinking was what straightened you out when it came to everything they consumed.
HST is a great subject. But really, he was documenting a madman he travelled with more than anything with a few spots of other occurrences in between.
If you haven’t before, I recommend reading the compilations of his letters. He was a much more “normal” person than his literary persona. I distinctly recall letters to his mum about being proud about having paid his credit cards off finally after his... endeavours.
Agreed. He makes it very obvious he is damaged. The quality of the life he has is as obvious as the quality of hitting yourself with a hammer on the head repeatedly.
That does not make him less attractive - but you would have to be already in a very bad shape if you felt any compulsion to emulate him.
Agreed. Even though a lot of what he describes is distasteful and some of the really gruesome stuff would probably be actual felonies in real life, he puts across the point repeatedly of how the world works for the lower classes, and their brief interaction with the upper class. Specifically, the dynamics of sexual attraction, which is a very complex topic in itself.
Its entirely possible that I found it revealing because before that all my reading/viewing had led me to believe a different reality of how Romance and Sexual Attraction work.
Along that same line, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a pretty good movie at warning that playing it fast and loose with recreational drugs beyond alcohol can have you end up with a very bad time
