DOUBLETHINK: CONTRADICTORY IN TERMS
One of Kaidie’s guidebooks in Life 3.0 is George Orwell’s 1984, for several reasons. Like Life 3.0, the city of London is the novel’s mise-en-scene. In Orwell’s universe, reality is seen through an inverted lens, where the Ministry of Defence fights permanent wars, and the Ministry of Love (I love this- ‘miniluv’) operates through the mechanism of fear. That deep parallels can be drawn with our reality today can not be emphasised enough. And, like the notion of doublethink, Life 3.0 embodies contradictions without contradiction, with no apology. Like Smith, Kaidie is an experiment; while Smith’s choices may seem limited compared to Kaidie’s in Life 3.0, like Kaidie, Smith contrives to seek spaces within which he could exist/live/be. Orwell’s depiction of Smith’s process of torture through to reeducation and final love of Big Brother, is so slowburning that the final inevitable explosion – or, more accurately, implosion – resembles fingernails scratching a chalkboard, largo, breaking in the process and the small sharp bits scratching and incising the pink raw skin where the nail once was itself, a procedure so calculated and clinical as to be chilling, heartbreaking, repulsive and devastating as it is sublimely beautiful, a la Pasolini’s 120 Days of Sodom, Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange or a Gould’s rendition of the slow movement of the Emperor concerto. Yet another reason why 1984 resonates with Kaidie is of course, how it has been said that the circumstances of one of her previous lives was ‘Orwellian’.
IF YOU COULD LIVE YOUR LIFE ALL OVER AGAIN, HOW WOULD YOU CHANGE IT?
Original composition by Philip Tan 2009
* ERICH FROMM: Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
* MONTY PYTHON, THE MEANING OF LIFE: Lady Presenter: Well, that’s the end of the film. Now, here’s the meaning of life. …Well, it’s nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.
* QUEEN, BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY: Is this the real life? /Is this just fantasy/Caught in a landslide/ No escape from reality
*ANDRE BRETON: It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
*KUNDERA, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING: How can one perform life when the dress rehearsal for life is life?”
*PESSOA: THE BOOK OF DISQUIET: To create I have destroyed myself … I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays. I am a secret orchestra whose instruments strum and bang inside me. I only know myself as the symphony.
*PESSOA: Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, does not exist.
*DARWIN: It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
*WERNER HERZOG: I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.
*CHRIS MARKER, SANS SOLEIL: The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.
