впервые пересматривая в рандомном порядке 3 сезон, пришла к выводу, что

я не могу это отпустить, да. #ШлиГоды

флорентийская арка была дана нам во многом, чтобы показать ганнибала in the wild. зверя вне клетки, как реальной, так и им же самим сконструированной. такого .. прекрасного? что даже чио не решилась запереть его.
возможность вздохнуть спокойно. ганнибал дома - без дурацких костюмов, полуголый, в постоянной физической близости со своим... психологом. человек какой он есть вне своего терапевтического кабинета и фбр.
у уилла тоже было такое время, в чем-то похожее, в чем-то кардинально отличное.
понимали ли они, что это просто передышка...

в этом мире особое деление на живых и мертвых.
ганнибал как-то говорит уиллу, что только они двое по-настоящему живы - в противовес словам аланы, адресованным мэйсону: мы все тут давно уже умерли.

я всё думаю, равноценны ли их жертвы ради друг друга?
в конце второго сезона ганнибал вспорол уиллу живот и отнял у него абигейл за предательство, а также за то, что уилл хотел отнять его свободу.
а потом он сдался просто ради того, чтобы, когда нужно, быть в полном распоряжении уилла.
он хочет дать уиллу внутреннюю свободу любой ценой, даже ценой собственной свободы.

*** *** *** *** *** *** ***

насчет сказочности сериала. много моментов, которые это подтверждают (помимо слов самих создателей), но почему-то для меня ключевым параметром является то, что у них всё время ЗИМА. почти всегда снег, изредка относительно тепло, но всё равно не бывает ни весеннего, ни летнего неба и солнца. зима - нереальное, подвешенное состояние, отдельный мир, который будто бы никогда не кончится, будто солнце никогда не будет греть.
при этом зима и осень - время праздников. в ганнибале же нет ни излюбленного детективными сериалами хэллоуина, ни рождества или нового года.
никаких праздников, дней рождения, знаменательных дат.
является ли холод символом чего-то? застревания в своих и чужих рамках, возможно. гибернация перед твоим Становлением, если ты найдешь выход из этой вечной зимы.

вырвались ли уилл и ганибал?

я как-то снова сторонник мысли, что уилл так и не смирился. позволил себе один раз развлечься, и сразу погибнуть.
его спокойствие и решительность в последней серии могут говорить как о том, что он отправляется на темную сторону со спокойной душой, так и быть свидетельством полной готовности к самоубийству.
уилла сравнивали со светлячками, которые, несмотря на свою красоту, очень недолго живут. лучше прожить короткую, но яркую (в прямом смысле))) жизнь, чем застрять в вечной зиме.

поняла, что этот конец ощущается не как конец сезона или конец сериала.
я его вижу как the end of part one.

@темы: олени

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Shipping on the Clyde by John Atkinson Grimshaw, 1881.

@темы: изобразительное искусство

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dear diary

@arizona_dreams: В ОВД смотрят Приключения Холмса&Ватсона И это после того, как они надо мной смеялись, мол, детективных сериалов насмотрелась.
@lagu: @arizona_dreams это как Хаус смотрел какую-то трэшовую медицинскую комедию, только наоборот

@темы: родину расхищать, twitter

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02.09.2015 в 14:48

Пишет  Jeanne dArc:

Важное про искусство и его задачи. Может, позже, сформирую пост со своими мыслями. Но, в целом, здесь во многом отражено моё отношение.

02.09.2015 в 11:12

Пишет  Ner-Tamin:

Несколько слов про работу художника и искусство
И давайте еще про искусство, раз уж я села за клавиатуру.

1. Чтобы хорошо понимать искусство, нужно образование. Чем ближе произведение искусства к вам во времени, тем более сложное образование нужно (обычно совмещенное с самостоятельным сбором и оценкой материала и исследованием соседних областей знания). Люди говорят, что естественные науки сейчас становятся все менее и менее понятными для неспециалиста, но это свойственно не только естественным наукам.

2. Если вы не понимаете, как что-то работает, это не значит, что оно не будет работать для вас. Справедливо в отношении бытовой техники, справедливо в отношении визуальных коммуникаций. Не понимаете, как и зачем автор вызывает у вас определенные эмоции? Увидели что-то, не переварили, плюнули и забыли? А оно про вас не забыло, просто вылетело в слепое пятно, и оттуда все равно действует.

3. Искусство не равно красоте, красота не равна добру. Художник не обязан делать вам красиво и давать вам светлые чувства, он обязан честно искать наиболее выразительную форму для отображения своих переживаний.

4. При этом зритель имеет полное право на личное мнение, симпатии и антипатии по отношению к разным художникам. Я за то, чтобы имя художника, стоимость работ, или размещение этих работ в каком-то музее не мешали людям оценивать сами работы по принципу "нравится или не нравится". Для этого не обязательно иметь образование в области. Однако отношение такого рода требует признания собственных ограничений. Если вам не нравится - оно не нравится именно вам, именно вы не понимаете, что в этом хорошего.

5. Художник не является принтером, воспроизводящим реальность. Даже если художественное образование иногда заставляет нас думать иначе. Задача художника - поиск выражения комплексной реальности, данной ему в ощущениях и представлениях, в пластической форме. Эта форма может соотноситься с тем, как наше зрение отображает мир, а может и не соотноситься.

6. В каком-то смысле зритель смотрит в работу художника как в зеркало, находя в ней отражение своего состояния, смыслов, целей и задач. Эмоцию зрителя вызывает резонанс, понимание не только на уровне слов, но и на уровне ощущений, эмпатия.

Собственно, это то, что я говорю на лекциях студентам, и своим знакомым, которые спрашивают, нормально ли, что им не нравится Дали или еще кто-нибудь. Нормально, но не потому что он плохой, а потому что он вам сейчас не нужен и не понятен.

***
thIS IS SO IMPORTANT
особенно пункт 3, сколько у меня баттхертов на эту тему, бррр

забавно, что недавно я обсуждала вопрос понимания языка искусства со своей подругой архитектором\художником\иллюстратором, и она говорит что с ее колокольни это всё вообще иначе, что там нет какого-то языка, что когда рисуешь, скорее думаешь о цветах и композиции. меня это весьма удивило. никогда не поймешь, насколько весь этот поиск скрытых смыслов вообще имеет.. смысл. важно ли вообще задумываться над тем, что сказал автор? сейчас очень популярна тема того, что концепция авторской задумки вообще должна отмирать, что она чуть ли не ограничивает кучу всяких свобод.

жаль людей, которые вынуждены спрашивать, нормально ли не любить признанного художника.

@темы: art, искусство

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Закрытая запись, не предназначенная для публичного просмотра

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Я почему-то только сейчас пытаюсь представить себе реакцию Уилла, когда он увидит этот пластиковый комбез для убийств.

@темы: гиф, олени

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@темы: ...haha

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Мы построим город-платц!

Благоустройство на Маяковской - безвкусица и геометрия изменили облик центра Москвы
anna_nik0laeva

Вот так теперь выглядит площадь. Маяковский переворачивается в гробу. Гигантские цепные качели ( деревянные, или мраморные?) почти полностью закрывают вид на памятник. На них бодренько и с удовольствием раскачиваются дворники и строители. Дорогие москвичи! Неужели вам нравятся эти квадратные, помойного вида вазоны в ряд с рулонной травой? Или, может быть архитекторы и художники разучились делать красивые, интересные, изысканные проекты? Если уж взялись преобразить площадь, сделать из нее полезное общественное пространство, почему все так топорно и примитивно? Почему нельзя сделать так, чтобы это было по настоящему художественно и красиво? Взять какие-то образцы, скопировать что-то из конструктивизма, в конце-концов, модерн тоже вполне бы подошел. Но прекратите уже превращать Москву в колумбарий, где из украшений улиц остались сплошь гранитные кадки и мраморные помойки, а вместо деревьев и кустов - однолетние карликовые туи и елки-смертники. В данный момент в этих квадратных клумбах пластиковые таблички с изображением деревьев.
Не можете придумать сами, посмотрите, как сделали, к примеру, в Барселоне. Что это вообще такое вспучилось на площади? Что за виселицы поставили у памятника поэту? Я даже не сразу поверила, что так могут выглядеть КАЧЕЛИ ! Это просто плевок в лицо москвичам! На эти виселицы ведь выделялись бешеные деньги! Мало того, что сам проект полный примитивизм и уродство, так он полностью разрушил ощущение пространства и загородил памятник. Площадь просто исчезла, ее прикончили уродливыми, прямоугольными МАФами.
Господа архитекторы, конструкторы и проектировщики, а также те, кто имел отношение к воплощению этого трэша у метро Маяковская - вы убиваете наш город воплощением своих дурных фантазий. Вы насаждаете свой плохой вкус - лучшему городу мира. Создаете еще один наглядный пример, что в Москве цветет коррупция. Уродуете центральные улицы старинного города, превращая их в скучное подобие европейских задворок за бешеные миллиарды и уничтожаете нормальную городскую среду, прокладывая многополосные автобаны по спальным районам, вырубая десятки тысяч деревьев и кустов, закатывая газоны в асфальт. Застраиваете парки и ООПТ, пытаетесь протащить варварские проекты дорог и начать строить в Мневниковской пойме, в Кусково, в Тушино, отнимая у будущих москвичей зеленые зоны. И при этом заявляете с экранов телевизоров и газет, что посадили "миллион деревьев", создали дестяки "народных парков", а народ на Активном гражданине вас "горячо поддерживает" и "одобряет" массовую стрижку травы и застройку.
Вы распыляете бюджет на роскошества, на праздники варенья и печенья, на замену бордюров и перекладку асфальта в ***дцатыть раз, в период, когда страна и город остро нуждаются в социальных проектах, когда москвичи теряют работу и испытывают нехватку качественных и недорогих продуктов, да и просто, необходимых для жизни вещей по приемлемым ценам. Вводите плату за будущий капремонт через 30-40 лет, и вышвыриваете за год, на стрижку травы, обрезку деревьев, перекладку асфальта и бордюров деньги, за которые можно было бы замостить улицы города золотыми слитками. В Москве, в том числе и среди детей, растет пугающими темпами заболеваемость онкологией и легочными болезнями, увеличилась смертность (не в последнюю очередь потому, что экология в городе ужасная), а вы в десятый раз перекладываете везде плитку. Это ли не надругательство над городом? Цены в магазинах взлетели под потолок, но ни на день не останавливается машина, по переработке каждого сантиметра нашего города в бабло для тех, кто занимается "благоустройством". Хочется верить, что сколько веревочке не виться - а конец этому безумному транжирству скоро придет по объективным причинам.
anna-nik0laeva.livejournal.com/209237.html

@темы: я другой такой страны не знаю, политичное

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больше артов.

@темы: олени

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@темы: quotes

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***

- фуллер сказал, что план на 4й сезон - путешествия по европе и приключения.
- дядька-критик считает, что версия фуллера глубже чем канон. думаю это тот же мужик который написал ревью на vulture, он прямо фанат.
- тетка-критик говорит, что это всё слишком жестко для нее((
- фуллер тролль
- a religious love nest where they can be awesome together
- как сериал совмещает несовмещаемое, проводит казалось бы невозможные параллели, скачет из чьего-то воображения в реальность так, что мы не всегда сразу понимаем, где что; прошлое vs настоящее итд
- when i asked her to show a little leg, that's not what they meant
- сцена с беделией не понравилась фанату, но в общем понятно что ничего не понятно, вообще не ясно что это значит? мне кажется, что это как раз именно расчет на следующий сезон, чтобы мы поняли, что к чему.
- кому-то из дам показалось, что отсутствие поцелуя - это нелогично и плохо)))) все надеятся на blu-ray. "more kissing, less guts!" хахахаха

@темы: олени

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сентяблября (с)

в день знаний надо поздравить нас всех с тем, что мы бОЛЬШЕ НЕ УЧИМСЯ НИ В ШКОЛЕ НИ В УНИВЕРЕ КАКОЕ СЧАСТЬЕ ГОСПОДИ

@темы: music, шоб позырить, that's my jam

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#fRIENDSHIPgOALS

Best Friends Build Own Private Neighborhood to Be Together Forever



For many groups of faithful friends, adulthood means accepting that logistics are often the biggest obstacle to maintaining relationships. As hard as it is to get the gang together for dinner when everyone lives in the same city, it becomes a Herculean (or Sisyphean) task once the winds of change have scattered everyone to lands afar. Rather than succumb to the inevitable growing apart, four close-knit couples in Texas came up with a clever way to live together while maintaining their independence. They've built themselves four tiny houses all in a row, each within a stone’s throw of the next.Because nothing says friends forever like signing a deed together, eight great pals living in the Austin area purchased ten acres of land outside the city limits, near the Llano River, for what they dubbed the “Llano Exit Strategy.” With a plot of earth to collectively call their own, the environmentally minded landowners enlisted the services of architect Matt Garcia to design four identical residential structures, one for each of the families. In keeping with the pragmatic minimalism of the “tiny house” movement, the homes comprise a mere 350 square feet apiece, with one bedroom, one bathroom, and one living room.
Where the friends’ extremely private community breaks from tiny house tradition is the existence of a fifth building: a big 1500-square-foot cabin with a full kitchen and additional social space for the neighbor-friends to come together as they please—think of it as a ground-level tree house, or a college residence hall lounge with nicer furniture. There are two dishwashers, presumably to avoid fighting over anyone leaving their silverware out too long, a porch, picnic tables, and even six bunk beds to accommodate lucky guests.
It’s not hard to see why the couples chose the Llano River as the site of their ideal idyll. They “had been hunting for a quiet escape from the ever-growing buzz of Austin, a place to ride their bikes, reconnect with nature and recharge,” and the riverfront location checks all those boxes. They’ve made sure to respect their natural surroundings by working with the arid local climate, rather than against it: the homes’ sloped butterfly-style roofs catch rainwater for reuse around the compound, while metal siding and good insulation both reduce heat from the glaring summer sun while preserving indoor warmth during cooler months.
The couples haven’t yet moved to their shared property full-time, escaping their busy city lives mostly on holidays and long weekends, but they do plan to retire there. What a way to grow old together.

@темы: in other news

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Пародии на заставку из Друзей мне нравятся очень редко, но

5+

*
Комментарий из Турбика насчет ...этого всего
Что касается поисков, у меня подозрение, что он специально сделал первую половину сезона чистым артхаусом, чтобы сериал прикрыли за невразумительность (чтобы на год сосредоточиться на "Американских богах"), а на второй половине отыгрался, чтобы всем стало снова ясно, что сериал кассовый."
Хотелось бы верить. Но во-первых, боги тоже наверняка на несколько сезонов, и совмещать, я так понимаю, довольно сложно. А во-вторых, он в этом все-таки не один, и сомневаюсь, что актерам\режиссерам\продюсерам etc удобно, когда такие скачки во времени.
Ну, с другой стороны, Фуллер идет своим путём, и я не могу это не похвалить.

@темы: олени, шоб позырить

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ш-шакалы!!

Больше обзоров! Первый - из архихвалебных.

Я очень извиняюсь перед всеми, кто подписался на этот дневник ради .. ну, уж точно не этого))) У меня не самое лучшее время в жизни так что это простительно?

VULTURE
Hannibal Redefined How We Tell Stories on Television

The show is a palace of dreams, and we are strolling through it.

And so, in the end, Hannibal was a love story all along, and a doomed love story at that.

The third season ended like prior seasons, with a wrap-up that could double as a series ender if it came to that; and since, apparently, it has come to that — with NBC deciding not to carry a hypothetical fourth season of this international co-production, and thus effectively ending it — we should marvel at this climax’s majestic, well, finality. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) and Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) join forces to defeat the fearsome disciple/rival serial killer Red Dragon (Richard Armitage) in a super-slow-motion mano a mano: silent, gorgeously protracted, scored to an original Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin song titled “Love Crime” (what else!). As Hannibal’s showrunner Bryan Fuller put it in a Vulture interview — in metaphoric language, which, like so many Fuller observations, renders additional critical commentary superfluous — Will and Hannibal were “like two jackals bringing down a rhinoceros.”

The recent craze for CGI-rendered blood has been a problematic new development for some horror purists, but pixel crimson has never looked as extravagantly sensuous, or felt as aesthetically right, as it has on Hannibal, a series that takes place entirely in dream space. It has a truly painterly texture, a brazen unreality that tickles the senses even as it completes the show’s vision, which is as romantic as it is horrific. Blades enter flesh, skin and tendons are severed, and the blood doesn’t just spill, it jets, sprays, arcs, like acrylic slung at a canvas. The finale’s director, Michael Rymer (director of some of the most aggressively visual episodes of TV drama, especially on Battlestar Galactica), stages it as a death dance, a loving showcase for bodies in motion that never forgets its immediate narrative goal of neutralizing the Red Dragon even as it pushes its true purpose — expressing the twisted, yet perversely pure love between Will and Hannibal — into the foreground. Their bond is brotherly but also romantic and (somehow, powerfully) sexual. This battle is its long-delayed consummation: the sex scene between Will and Hannibal that has been repeatedly imagined in so much fan art, or, to quote Fuller again, a coded “three-way” — one of many imagined by this censorship-flouting network series — wherein “you eliminate the third [participant] and get to business with the two who matter.” Will’s necessary and also eager participation in a killing (he’d only been a passive accessory before) is the sex act Hannibal has been urging him toward, as seen in the dream image (Will’s or Hannibal’s? We don’t know) of the two in a church, Hannibal dressed in a seersucker jacket with a Windsor-knotted tie. “I was rooting for you, Will,” Hannibal says. “It’s a shame: You came all this way and you didn’t get to kill anybody.” He’s not a virgin anymore. He gave it up for Hannibal.

Will and Hannibal’s final moment is a mutual recognition of the loving death-grip they’ve been locked in since season one. It takes place on the edge of a cliff (the right spot for a cliffhanger), backed by a glassed-in home significant to Hannibal’s own history, but also redolent of so many great thriller climaxes, including North by Northwest and, of course, Michael Mann’s Manhunter, a very different take on the same material. They embrace: Will rests his head on Hannibal’s chest, Hannibal puts his chin atop Will’s head, and then they go over the edge. The camera moves in, after a respectful moment, to look down. The final shot (not counting, of course, the post-credits stinger with Gillian Anderson’s Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier serving a Hannibal-styled feast) is a vertigo-inducing overhead shot of the surf crashing into a suggestively V-shaped cove. It is one of the great final shots in TV history. To quote the good doctor himself: “I believe this is what is known as a ‘mic drop.’”

This is as good a place as any to repeat that I’m as surprised as anyone by how much I grew to love this show. I’m on record stating that I never had much interest in serial-killer stories. Except for the occasional outlier (such as Manhunter and parts of The Silence of the Lambs and a few of the images in The Cell) I found most of them either ostentatiously stupid or morally reprehensible: a tactical evasion of real-world evil rather than a useful way of reimagining it in terms of a fable. It wasn’t until Bryan Fuller’s adaptation, which presented itself as a dark fairy tale from minute one, that I willingly immersed myself in Thomas Harris’s fiction. It is about the capacity for evil, and how evil is a stultifying word that closes off understanding, and how empathy really is the flip side of sadism and connected to it, and also about the fragility of order — how it can be tipped very easily into chaos by people like Dolarhyde, or Hannibal, who recognize the fragility, see the thin skeins of twine holding “order” aloft, and play them like guitar strings. They are out there. They may not be as physically imposing as Dolarhyde or as cultivated and smug as Hannibal, but they are out there. As my colleague Greg Cwik points out in his brilliant recap of the finale, via a Herman Melville quote:

“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.”

The sophisticated aesthetic developed by Fuller (and his many collaborators, whose ranks include a number of visually oriented directors and a few veteran cinematographers, such as Guillermo S. Navarro, who shot numerous Guillermo del Toro films and directed the 11th and 12th episodes of season three). The aesthetic is the reason why, despite being the most gruesome drama ever aired on network TV, Hannibal never felt unacceptably brutal to me. It is, no question about it, ultraviolent, but not in the manner of a cheap slasher film. It is ultraviolent in the manner of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and The Fury, and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and A Clockwork Orange (which Hannibal quotes by scoring Jack's beating of the doctor to Gioachino Rossini's "The Thieving Magpie") and touchstones of religious painting, such as Tintoretto’s 1565 painting of Christ’s crucifixion. It is “studied” in the best way, i.e., thoughtful, considered. It is concerned mainly with exploring what violent actions mean (to us, and to the story) rather than simply attempting to replicate the physical experience of suffering (although it does that, too; every wounding and death on the show is viscerally jolting and also often carries an emotional charge).

And it pays equal attention, sometimes greater attention, to emotional violence, showing how characters (usually Hannibal, but not always) coolly scrutinize their targets, then push certain buttons to ensure a particular outcome that’s often destructive for all involved. The physical violence represents a continuation of emotional violence. This is made clear in many subplots throughout the series, but especially in the reimagining of Red Dragon/the Tooth Fairy in the back half of season three, with Hannibal and Will (individually, but also in tacit collaboration) contriving to slag Francis Dolarhyde as a disfigured, sexually inadequate freak in order to draw him into the open, knowing full well that it’s a cruel and inaccurate description, and beneath them as psychologists and human beings. (In Michael Mann’s 1986 version of the story, and in the novel, they insinuated that Francis was homosexual. Fuller realized this was unwelcome and unnecessary as well as ugly-retro, just as they realized that Dolarhyde’s necrophiliac rape of his female victims was no longer necessary to get across the idea behind his murders, violating the image of a “perfect” nuclear family.) You can see the same care exercised in the way that Hannibal manipulates Bedelia (and how she allows herself to be manipulated) in Italy, and in the many ways that Will’s FBI boss, Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), insinuates that Will is himself behind actions that were originally envisioned, or at least suggested, by Lecter. The word psychodrama is thrown around indiscriminately in criticism (I’ve been guilty!), but here, more so than in a lot of dramas, it fits. Hannibal’s understanding of human psychology, while admittedly expressed in a knowingly stylized and grotesque way, is as sound as that of Mad Men’s or In Treatment’s.

If you read this piece with no experience of the series (and really, why would anyone do that?) you might assume that Hannibal is entirely grim, a parade of perversity, suffering, and gore. It is that. But it’s also quite funny, and somehow in a way that never trivializes the momentousness of the psychological and physical violence. No series, Twin Peaks included, has quite managed to be as deadly serious but also as winkingly ludicrous, so that you can’t easily separate one mode of presentation from the other. The show is an outrageous joke that’s not funny at all, and a horror show that’s very funny, at the same time, without contradiction. (Dreams are funny/not funny that way.) As Hannibal, Mads Mikkelsen gives the sort of performance that would be called “delicious” if a 1940s ham character actor gave it, but there are many moments (particularly reaction shots of Hannibal listening to patients, or to Will) when he seems to be truly feeling the pain of others, even as he thinks about how to increase or top it, as well as moments of serene acceptance or sly amusement. The bromance between him and Will is a joke but not a joke; it’s powerful, just as the relationship between Will and Jack, and Hannibal and Bedelia, Mason Verger (Joe Anderson) and Margot Verger (Katharine Isabelle), and Alana (Caroline Dhavernas) and Margot, who leave the story as co-parents of their Verger baby, which Alana carried. In every scene, there is always humor to relieve the excruciating tension. Some of it veers toward outright camp — particularly the season-three scenes involving Verger, who sounds (as Anderson plays him) like Richard Nixon eating peanut butter, refers to the risen Jesus as “the Riz,” and fantasizes his mortal enemy Hannibal laid out on a banquet table, naked and honey-glazed, and crows, “Transubstantiation!”

There is an elated, intoxicated quality to every frame of this amazing show. So much of Hannibal’s look and feel is what critics who prize linear, foursquare iterations of plot and character would term “excessive” or “pretentious” or, God forbid, “arty.” And there are ways in which such complaints are hard to refute. No reputable psychiatrist would hold sessions in an almost-dark room, as Hannibal Lecter and Bedelia Du Maurier tend to do. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a plague of serial killers who all seem to be auditioning for a spot in a hip art gallery, arranging corpses and pieces of corpses into sculptures and murals and mixed-media installations. Nothing on this series is “realistic” in any sense that means anything. In fact, there are moments when it seems to be channeling German expressionist dream films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu and The Hands of Orlac or The Last Laugh, or Surrealist features such as Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus and Luis Bunuel’s L’Age D’Or and The Exterminating Angel, and the dream sequence that Salvador Dalí created for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and the animated psychotic break that Saul Bass cooked up for Hitchcock in Vertigo.

Everything is exaggerated, distorted, reframed so that it feels at once figurative and real. Hannibal’s childhood chateau looms against a purplish sky at night like Dr. Frankenstein’s castle from a 1930s Universal horror film (there are numerous Frankenstein allusions throughout the series equating Hannibal to Frankenstein and the other serial killers under his sway as creatures that he “created” to some degree). When Will is thrown from the back of a moving train by Chiyoh (Tak Okamoto) and the camera dollies back and back, the caboose is clearly a set filmed against a green screen, and the pop-up-book quality accentuates the eerie certitude of her act. The whole Italian arc is production-designed and photographed to emphasize artificiality: Italy and Europe not as the actual places, but as fantasies of Italy and Europe, rather like the Europe presented by Lars von Trier in The Element of Crime and Zentropa, both of which are framed as dreams occurring, respectively, in a drug haze and under hypnosis. The show is a palace of dreams, and we are strolling through it.

This Surrealist-Expressionist film lineage continued on TV, but to a severely limited degree, given the medium’s “don’t scare the advertisers” edicts. You can see it on such series as Miami Vice (the first season of which has a similar feel, especially in its silent-with-music montages; check this out) as well as Twin Peaks and The X-Files and moments from The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men. But Hannibal pushes it further. The whole series occurs in this mode. There are no breaks, no relief. Many TV programs have staged excellent, convincing dream sequences, but they were carefully set apart from the main story by signifiers that told us “this part is broken off from reality, you needn’t take it literally.” Hannibal doesn’t do that. What it does do is closer to this description of Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, by Jonathan Jones: “To tell a story on screen, you create a physical world that serves your purpose. But in ‘Un Chien Andalou,’ the physical world is thicker, more resistant, more alive (and more dead). Instead of smoothly setting off the characters' desires and fears, it becomes an opaque field of desire and terror in itself. The events that can happen in such a world are full of passion, comedy, horror; it's just that they never get resolved and tidied up by narrative explanations. There are people in the film, but it is not 'about' them — it is about us, our reactions, our disgust and perversity.” (Francis’s filmed images of murder have a 1930s experimental-movie quality, which, given the creative team’s cultural literacy, has to be deliberate.)

But while it is accurate to sum up Hannibal as a 39-episode dream, that description doesn’t go far enough. Because it’s not just staging dreamlike or “weird” situations, it’s routinely adopting the points of view of certain characters — not in a particular episode, or in a self-contained sequence, but in a scene, or in part of a scene.

When Francis Dolarhyde imagines himself as the Red Dragon, there are individual shots that show him completely transformed into something like the creature he worships in William Blake’s painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun. Very late in the series, after the incarcerated Hannibal has tried to psychologically manipulate Will into thinking himself a potential serial killer on par with Francis (something Hannibal has been attempting to do, to varying degrees, since season one), an episode starts with similar images that we assume are from Francis’s point of view, but these are ultimately revealed to be Will’s, in a session with Bedelia. The Florence church scenes from the early part of season three recur throughout the final leg of the story. They’re presented as fantasies of Hannibal’s while he’s in lockup, shorn by Alana (Caroline Dhavernas) of signifiers of dignity, including his books and a proper toilet. It is also subtly indicative of Hannibal’s simultaneous wish to mock God and become a god himself by manipulating mere mortals. [Начинаю подозревать, что в этой истории нельзя Ганнибала считать только Дьяволом, а бога искать в Джеке или ком-то еще. Бог есть Дьявол, а Дьявол есть Бог в данном случае. Наверное. Кто-нибудь читает эти посты? Мне лень переводить это всё.] The church scenes also recur as fantasies (shared, perhaps?) by Hannibal and Will, who are far from Florence by that point. There, the church is a place of mental peace and fulfillment. It seems paradisiacal or heavenly or utopian, and there is no hand-holding explanation for the function that it serves: The show just assumes we’ll figure it out and not be confused, and it’s correct in assuming that we can.

Ditto the crime-scene imaginings of Will Graham. In Manhunter, Will (played by future CSI front man William Petersen) stands amid the mayhem after the fact, speaking his speculations into a tape recorder. The dramatization of atrocity occurs mainly in his face and voice, and via the droning synthesized score, and in our imaginations. But on Fuller’s show, Will is an imaginative (visually active) participant, actually performing the deeds he’s attempting to visualize, including pulling a small child out from under a bed and killing him (off-camera) with a pistol shot. We are implicated in a way that other horror films rarely attempt — for good reason, because few horror stories are capable of achieving the precise tone that Hannibal nails in episode after episode, making situations psychological and viscerally real (Will is suffering, visibly suffering, in these sequences) but also stylizing them in order to provide enough distance for the images not to seem trashy and exploitive. They are real and not real: imaginative projections of Will’s empathy for both killer and victims.

Season three could easily have been broken into two mini-seasons or mini-series (Italy and the Red Dragon arc), and there are points where the second feels very much like a follow-up to the first, but Fuller and his collaborators have planted many lines of dialogue and images in the early section that recur in the second, so that on rewatch, they feel like pieces of an intricately conceived whole. The architecture of images is ingenious. Sometimes the Italy arc seems to be foretelling events that happen later. Some of the most dazzling moments in the Red Dragon arc bring back images from an earlier episode in a different context, so that they have different meanings or associations. My favorite example of this is the series of flash cuts that occur after Will and Hannibal kill Francis: We see flashbacks to Francis’s burning scrapbook (the frame itself seeming to burn and curl as the character’s soul is released and his torments ended) and, most strikingly, a shot of Francis, seen from the back, standing before a burning mass of celluloid film strips arrayed in a starburst pattern. This is a visual callback not just to Francis’s film fetishism (which included a moment where he seemed to swallow a projector beam and “become” the record of his atrocities) but also to the sequence of Will visiting the Jacoby home, where FBI forensics officers had mapped the spray of blood jets with suspended strings.

These daring structural flourishes bring Hannibal closer than any commercial series to embodying the phrase “a novel for television.” A novel is not merely a novel because it is long. It is a novel because of the freedom it takes, or can take, in telling its story. It can adopt different points of view and slip back and forth between past and present, not just from chapter to chapter, but within the context of a page, a paragraph, even a sentence. Hannibal makes almost every other TV series seem aesthetically impoverished in comparison because it takes these freedoms and actually plays with them, to make the story and its telling more surprising, confounding, and multilayered. (One of the best examples are the sex scenes, which are shockingly explicit, in that you always know exactly what the characters are doing with each other physically, but also figurative, smearing and doubling body parts into prismatic tangles of limbs and whirling graphic patterns.)

Anyone who makes scripted television should look at this series and think about ways to apply Hannibal’s experiments in tone, point of view, image, and sound to non-horror material, because what it’s doing is not innate to the horror movie, but to the most sophisticated third-person omniscient novels. It is literary and cinematic at the same time, in such a way as to suggest that one mode can be the continuation of the other, without falsifying or oversimplifying the uniqueness of either form. It represents a major step forward in scripted TV’s artistic evolution.

Hannibal is dead. Hannibal is the future.

TVoverMIND
Hannibal Season 3 Episode 13 Review: “The Wrath of the Lamb”

When Season 3 of Hannibal began, the good doctor Lecter invited us to consider his story in a surprising context: “Let it be a fairy tale, then. Once upon a time…” Twelve weeks later, even though we commonly think of the series as a crime procedural (or else some variation on that that centers on killing), the fairy tale structure holds up. “The Wrath of the Lamb,” quite possibly the final episode of Bryan Fuller’s adaptation of Thomas Harris, populates itself with fairy tale allusions: Hannibal telling Alana that he spun her gold being the most obvious line of dialog and the heroes coming together to kill a dragon being the most obvious image. But where I see the fairy tale format work best in “The Wrath of the Lamb,” which has received some wonderfully delicious mixed responses, is in its treatment of the concept of true love. Rather than say true love protects the finale from certain criticisms, I would prefer to do what I’ve always done with these reviews: explore an idea and how it relates to what we’re being presented in a given episode of Hannibal. You can read about whether I liked or disliked it all in the “Bite-Sized Thoughts” section below, but Hannibal is at its best when it is looked at not for its quality as a TV series, but for its ability to help us see things about ourselves.

The discussion hinges on the idea that true love exists in the world of Hannibal, which is easier to accept given the fairy tale idea. In our own separate worlds, we may or may not agree with true love as a concept, but Fuller clearly intended it to be a part of the story of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter. In Hannibal’s version of true love, the lovers are inherently, intrinsically, inexorably, inescapably and inextricably tied to one another. They are, in other words, doomed. Bedelia posits it as a “Can’t live with him, can’t live without him” situation, which is also an accurate way of looking at it, but however you do, it’s important to note that the unfortunate by-product of true love for the lovers is that there is no way to break away from the other person. Hannibal did its best to show that to us. Not only is there a three-year gap between Will breaking up with Hannibal and finally coming back to him, but Will was given the perfect replacement under the circumstances. Molly makes Will laugh and feel as though he no longer has to be the one to pick up strays; someone can care for him in the ways he cares for other people. In the end, though, it isn’t enough. What Will and Molly share is a deep, heartfelt love, but it is not true love, which is exclusive to Will and Hannibal.

Granted, this notion could have possibly been communicated better, whether by having another scene in last week’s episode in which it is clear Molly has been tainted for Will because of Dolarhyde and Hannibal, but seeing her in the position of former Dragon victims works towards that. In any case, Molly’s absence in “The Wrath of the Lamb” is crucial to understanding why the love shared between Will and Molly is less than the love shared between Will and Hannibal, regardless of how much Will tries to deny that to himself. By limiting Molly’s presence in this finale to only a single mention, we see a rare instance of Hannibal going into a character’s perspective, because not having a scene with or even an image of Molly speaks to how Will is actively pushing her out of his mind. In that way, much of “The Wrath of the Lamb,” which technically has Will in the title role if we follow through on the biblical comparison from last week, is seen through Will’s point of view. By sidelining Molly, Will is able to follow through with his decisions without feeling the guilt of abandoning her. I actually don’t think it would have made a difference in the end—that, even if Molly had had a presence in this episode, Will would have done anything differently—but subconsciously or even actively blocking out Molly helps us understand what’s going on inside Will’s head. At the risk of diminishing the initial power of the Will-Molly relationship that I felt at the beginning of the Red Dragon arc, I don’t think there’s much of a difference between Molly and Abigail as far as the philosophical and even emotional nature of Will’s relationships with them. Much of these episodes (and even much of Season 2) has shown a reluctant Will who is pretending to be something that he’s not. Dialog in which he is trying to convince either a character or the audience of something has felt quite unconvincing and, already beginning to look back on this season, what we have is a Will struggling to come to terms with the person he has become. Again, subscribing to this idea means admitting that Molly is essentially a wonderful distraction for Will, but a distraction nonetheless. Yet, given her absence in this episode, that position is probably easier to come to than instincts would suggest.

Regardless, “The Wrath of the Lamb” finally lets Will realize that there’s no denying Hannibal—not permanently, anyway. They are true lovers, and their fates are tied to one another. They go through the motions with each other in the sense of fighting that connection—Will, in another unconvincing line of dialog, tells Hannibal that he (Will) is going to sit back and watch the Dragon change Hannibal, and Hannibal tells Will that his compassion for Will is inconvenient, as if that compassion is the only thing keeping Hannibal from killing Will himself—but it’s all affect. It’s all pretense. It’s all an act, like stage performers. The end we get in “The Wrath of the Lamb” is the ending that was destined from the beginning of Hannibal, and yet it’s one that’s still hard to come to terms with.

I find that absolutely fascinating, because I also experienced immense resistance to a lot of Will’s development over the last two seasons. But the conclusion I’ve eventually come to is that many of the reasons for having that resistance come from a place of expectance. I expect characters to act a certain way. I expect heroes to be heroes at the end of the day and villains to be villains. What I don’t expect is to get to the final episode of Hannibal and see that traditional notions of hero no longer apply to characters like Jack Crawford and Alana. So, all the times when Will is acting differently than how we expect him to act are actually times when Will is acting differently from how we want him to act. And that’s okay. I want Will to be the empathetic, kind-hearted profiler of Season 1, but that’s simply no longer on the cards. Hannibal Lecter, as he has done with so many people, changed Will Graham and took that from the audience in the same way he took Abigail from Will—violently and permanently. He put Will into a situation in which Will’s only happiness was tied to a life with Hannibal. The cruel flipside of Will’s pure empathy is that Will can’t have a truly loving relationship with Molly, because part of him will always be living that life for Molly, not with Molly. Someone with pure empathy has a monumentally difficult time being selfish, and selfishness is a necessary component to any relationship. It’s why people have to make compromises, because relationships can’t be one-sided. Hannibal is the only person in Will’s life with whom he can have a selfish, loving relationship, because the two characters share similar understandings of the world.

This is the realization that both terrifies and comforts Will. After having three years of distance, the notion is terrifying, because people want to believe they have full control over their lives. The notion is comforting, though, because Will is relinquishing control to someone who is doing the same with him. In the end, even though Will would have never been alone with Molly, he would have been lonely. Hannibal appeases the loneliness and allows Will to be himself when he relinquishes that control. It gives the fight with the Dragon so much more poignancy, because Will and Hannibal finally killing together is the most powerful expression of their love imaginable. How appropriate, then, to give what could have just as easily been titled The Tragical History of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter that moment before needing to end how tragedies traditionally end? There is beauty in death, which is something Hannibal has supported several times, most notably in a session with Bella Crawford. The death of Will and Hannibal in the series’ most beautiful triumph in that regard. The ending also mixes the qualities of the fairy tale and the tragedy to show that life isn’t as black-and-white as those frameworks would have us believe. Even if lovers are doomed, it doesn’t make the power of fairy tale true love any less wonderful to think about and feel. And even if it’s easy to try to live in one’s own head, imagining an idyllic life (like how Hannibal uses his memory palace), there are realities that we must all come to terms with.

That, too, is terribly fitting, since it has been hard to come to terms with the reality of Hannibal’s end. Of course, different viewers can, have and will read “The Wrath of the Lamb” in different ways, with various ideas of how the story might continue. But as someone who thought he wanted a different Will Graham than what was being presented, I think I’ve finally acknowledged that this should be it for Hannibal. Going down this true love route makes this the perfect ending for the series that has been able to pull off impossible things within the episodic, broadcast network format. Lovers like Will and Hannibal will always exist, but there will never be another pairing quite like it. Similarly, the networks will continue to produce shows, but we’ll never see another Hannibal ever again. For that, we don’t owe ourselves fear of trying to find its replacement. We ourselves awe for having it as long as we did.

Bite-Sized Thoughts: Buon appetito!

– So, I liked this episode quite a bit. Is it a perfect episode? Nope. But because I think it’s a perfect ending to the series, it’s getting a score of 10. I’ve read and listened to many of thoughts that come from people less enthused with the finale than I am, and they all have really interesting opinions, so definitely seek them out. We talk at length on our podcast, This is Our Design, the final episode of which should be available in the next couple days.

– Before getting into some of the real bite-sized thoughts for the episode, I just wanted to say thank you to TVOvermind and the readers who have shared these reviews online and got in touch with me on Twitter. I’ve absolutely loved going in-depth with some of the ideas in Hannibal, and even though I would write these things with no readers whatsoever, the fact that people are going through them and leaving really sharp feedback of their own makes the whole process infinitely more rewarding. Hannibal is going to leave a huge hole in my life, but I’m grateful to have shared it with all of you.

– Okay. Details. Where to begin? The performances from Armitage and Wesley are excellent in the opening scene. Anyone familiar with the source material knew that Dolarhyde was faking his death, but the style of it works beautifully, from the Debussy to the burning stag head. I also like how Reba turns to sit down by instinct, knowing exactly where the bed is, before Francis says anything about sitting down.

– “When life becomes maddeningly polite, think about me. Think about me, Will. Don’t worry about me.” I actually think Mikkelsen says “maddenly” instead of the correct “maddeningly,” but it’s hard to tell.

– Arnold Lang was also the decoy body in the source material.

– Bedelia’s face is so wonderful when she’s mulling over what Will tells her. It’s the very definition of “NOT IMPRESSED.”

– “You’ve just found religion. Nothing more dangerous than that.” One final instance of Fuller and Lightfoot omitting subjects in their sentences.

– The Alana-Chilton scene is much more affecting than I thought it would be. I was surprised that the show didn’t pull the trigger on killing Alana, but if it meant giving her a scene in which Chilton tells her to her face that she’s basically turned into Hannibal, that’s worth it.

– On that note, Esparza as Chilton wins the series award for Supporting MVP. In a perfect world, he would win all the awards for that category. It simply can’t be overstated how integral he has been to the success of Hannibal, and I hope Esparza knows that the Fannibaldom appreciates everything he’s put into the role.

– Chilton in this episode brought back memories of a recovering Georgia from Season 1.

– Perhaps my favorite line in any episode of the series: “You dropped the mic, Will. But here you are having to come back and pick it up again.” It’s partly because of how ridiculous Hannibal taking about mic-dropping is, but it’s also because it recalls one of my favorite images in the series: the teacup shattering. Bravo.

– If the post-credits scene and fairy tale allusions weren’t enough to recall Abel Gideon, then the car chase/breakout did, since Hannibal was in a similar position to how Gideon was when he was being transported. I appreciate that we got that sense even though Izzard wasn’t in the episode.

– But, hey! Katharine Isabelle was in it! Yeah!

– Speaking of the post-credits scene, first of all: wow. Wow, wow, wow to that outfit Bedelia is wearing. Wow. Also, I read this as Bedelia cut off and cooked her own leg in preparation for a Hannibal who never came. It was her way of getting out ahead of the situation and offering herself up, because there was no escape. Her disappointment is really interesting, since there’s also a tinge of wanting to be eaten by Hannibal in her.

– The eroding bluff is such an obvious-but-awesome entendre.

– And the final fight sequence is among the most gorgeous pieces of filmmaking I’ve seen on TV, accentuated by the perfect use of the Dragon imagery. There have been moments of that imagery this season that haven’t been very good, like the first time we see the tail. But the wings were flawlessly used in this episode.

[Отдельно соглашусь насчет Рауля Эспарзы. Очень непросто сделать любимца публики из того, кто, во-первых, долгое время невероятно бесил, во-вторых, просто из .. мелкого человека. Не Героя и не Злодея или Хитреца или еще кого-то, чей архетип сам по себе ярок и привлекателен, а из бездаря-проныры.]

Read more at www.tvovermind.com/reviews/hannibal-season-3-ep...

@темы: олени

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Больше стёба на уже, видимо, культовый кадр из Гнева Ягненка

@темы: олени

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посмотрела первые записи про Ганнибала, наткнулась там на пост Фалька, который не так давно обсуждали (после Кингсмана). про насилие, привыкание. я была с этим постом тогда согласна!!
what was i thinking???

хотя у меня с тех пор очень сильно изменилось отношение к человеческой природе и к насилию, так что...

@темы: олени, ...haha

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@темы: sf, ca, ю-эс-эй, плерода

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Why you should forget ‘nutraceuticals’ and focus on a healthy diet instead
www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/20...

Probiotic burritos and collagen beers are just two of the more unlikely ‘miracle foods’ to emerge in recent years. The food industry says nutraceuticals are the key to transforming our health – but the truth is far murkier.

There’s no evidence that the father of modern medicine Hippocrates ever said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Some debate whether he’d even have agreed with the sentiment. Nevertheless that Facebook-friendly quote has become the motto for a whole industry of what’s become known as “functional foods” or “nutraceuticals”.

By now most people are aware of the cholesterol-fighting stanols and sterols that are added to margarines and yoghurts, plus the omega-3, the “friendly bacteria” that, according to their manufacturers, can do everything from make us cleverer to boost our immune system. In the last five years, though, two seemingly contradictory movements have swept through the functional food industry. One is that ever more nutraceuticals have emerged. Everything from beer laced with collagen (it’s supposed to be good for your skin) to burritos with added probiotics. Yet, at the same time, European food authorities have restricted the claims that manufacturers are allowed to make. Do any of these so-called miracle foods, then, actually work?

“Nutraceuticals is a marketing term but there are undoubtedly foods with active effects,” says the British Dietetics Association’s Duane Mellor. “You only have to look at coffee, with caffeine, which has a very obvious effect. There’s good evidence that stanols reduce cholesterol and you can get far more of it when it’s added to margarine than you would from food.”

Japan, where the probiotic drink Yakult was invented in 1935, is regarded as the homeland of nutraceuticals. Thanks to a lighter legislative touch than in Europe it’s also relatively easy for food manufacturers to claim special powers for their products. It’s in Japan that you can buy a beer called “Precious”, which is laced with two grammes of collagen and marketed to women as a beauty treatment with the slogan: “Guys can tell if a girl is taking collagen.”

“I don’t think collagen beer would meet the standards required by the FSA (Food Standards Agency)!” says Dr Mellor. “The trouble is it’s a long way from your gut to your skin. Collagen is a protein and the enzymes in your gut are going to break it down.” Nutritional therapist Lucy Patterson is equally dubious about the idea of drinking yourself beautiful. “I use collagen mostly for gut health,” she says, “but you’re better off adding it to smoothies and shakes rather than alcohol. Alcohol is dehydrating and a toxin in other ways so it’s not the best thing for your skin.”

In Japan you can also buy a fizzy drink, Mets Cola, which contains added indigestible dextrin which is supposed to stop you absorbing fat. Mellor argues that many of these products, even if they do what they say, merely have a “health halo”. Selling an unhealthy product such as cola for its supposed health-benefits might do more harm than good.

Patterson, though, thinks there is something to be said for products such as the burrito with probiotics. “Probiotics often have a tangy, pickly flavour,” she says, “which can be strange if you’re not used to it. Anything that encourages people to eat it is a good thing.” But only if probiotics actually work. In 2010 probiotic market leader Danone withdrew its claims that Actimel and Activia boost the immune system and aid digestive health, after EU scientists disputed the claims. The NHS in the UK accepts that probiotics might have benefits for treating diarrhoea and digestive problems but not much more.

Proponents, meanwhile, continue to claim much more impressive effects. Most recently a study suggested that consumption of fermented foods, such as sauerkraut and pickles, can reduce social anxiety in young people. “It is likely that the probiotics in the fermented foods are favourably changing the environment in the gut, and changes in the gut in turn influence social anxiety,” said the author of the study, Professor Matthew Hilimire. The standard of proof required in the EU, however, is higher than that provided by individual research papers. “To be accepted, the product has to contain a molecule that’s been proven to work, proof of cause and effect and success in clinical trials,” says Dr Mellor. But he says that his own research into the alleged mood-boosting effects of chocolate is a good example of why it’s hard to make definitive claims about specific, targeted health-benefits of food. “There is some evidence that polyphenols, which can be found in chocolate, may improve mood,” he says. “but it didn’t work in my study. When I gave people chocolate their anxiety levels went down, but that was because I was giving them bags of chocolate, which is a nice thing to do.”

Clearly “nutraceuticals” can work, in some circumstances, for some people. Explaining why they work, though, is extremely difficult. Even omega-3, although generally accepted to be an important nutrient, has its limitations according to Dr Mellor. The much publicised research into its effects on children’s concentration is still heavily debated.

“There have been some successful trials but is it the omega-3 itself that has the effect?” he says. “There’s evidence that sitting down for a social meal and having a healthy diet works better.”

One reason that food is not really like medicine, then, is because there’s more to eating than just its chemical effects. “We need to go back to a traditional family meal,” says Dr Mellor. “It might not sound very exciting but we’ve lost the social aspect of food. That’s just as important. We’ve pinned too much on functional foods.”

@темы: eat your greens!

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Confessions of a Neurotic Extravert
By Scott Barry Kaufman | August 30, 2015 |
blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/co...

"I've found that neurotic extraverts tend to be more confused about their own personality than anyone else.” — Personality neuroscientist Colin DeYoung

I have a little personality test for you:

Do you often act first and then worry immediately about the consequences of your actions?
Do you get excited by possibilities then immediately cry because you’re overwhelmed?
Do you like to take charge but worry that you stepped on someone’s toes on the way to the top?
Does danger excite you but also terrify you— at the same time?
Do you like to jump into social situations but then worry what people are thinking of you?
Do you say whatever enters your mind but then immediately regret what you’ve just said?
Are you often not quite sure whether you are actually happy or really existentially troubled?
Don't fret: you may just be a neurotic extravert.

My whole life I’ve been very confused about my personality. I’ve felt as though I didn’t quite fit into any of the preconfigured labels that people constantly throw around. When I read Susan Cain's delightful book Quiet, I resonated with so many of her descriptions of introverts (e.g., reflective, cerebral, sensitive, imaginative, solitude-seeking), but not so much with others (e.g., shy, risk-averse, serious, subtle, calm).* On the one hand, I really do love the world of ideas and imagination, and do often need to recharge my batteries because the environment can quickly drain my energy. On the other hand, I really do also have a lot of enthusiasm and zest for life, wide interests, and love being out there in the world. So what am I??!!

After many years of reading scientific papers and conducting my own research on the science of personality, I think I have finally figured it out. I think I'm ready to come out of the closet. I’m a neurotic extravert.

Let’s be clear: this profile is in the minority. Which is why life can be a very confusing place for people like us. Research shows over and over again that in the general population (i.e., for most people), introversion is positively correlated with neuroticism (typically at around the .30 level). This means that there is a tendency among large groups of people for those who are more introverted to also be more neurotic. But science only captures tendencies, trends, patterns. There is lots of wiggle room for all sorts of personalities to exist in this world, including neuerotic extraverts and emotionally stable introverts.

I decided to write this deeply personal post with the hope that I can offer insight and compassion to my fellow neurotic extraverts who fit this profile. While we may be in the minority, I want you to know that there are many of us out there.

***

What does it scientifically mean to be a neurotic extravert? To get to the bottom of this, let’s look at what we know about each of these fundamental dimensions of personality (which we share with other animals), using the latest tools of personality science.

First, let’s consider extraversion. Extraverts are outgoing, sociable, adventurous, excitement-seeking, assertive, enthusiastic, expressive, self-disclosing, joyful, spunky, talkative, energetic, and active. The common theme here is behavioral exploration. Well, a particular type of behavioral exploration. Extraverts have a stronger drive to engage with the external world, engaging more in social interactions and social activities and generally being more physically active (e.g., playing sports, dancing, running around, planning parties, exercising, etc.). Extraversion is fueled by dopamine, particularly through the reward circuits of the brain that cause us to get excited by the possibility of rewards in the environment (but which don't guarantee that we'll actually enjoy what we get).

There are many popular misconceptions about the extraversion-introversion dimension of personality. The opposite of extraversion is not shyness, social inhibition, sensitivity, or even increased imagination. Those are all false dichotomies. The opposite of extraversion is simply reserved/quiet/deliberate. That's it. On average, introverts prefer a quiet environment than being out and about all the time, and prefer a bit more time to respond to external input. These aren't absolutes, of course, but merely tendencies. Every now and then an introvert may enjoy hitting the town and getting wild and crazy, and sometimes an extravert may really enjoy staying in an embracing solitude. Personality variation has more to do with behavioral tendencies and inclinations, not absolute behaviors. It's so important for anyone across this spectrum to get out of their comfort zone every now and then!

Also, contrary to popular myth, both introverts and extraverts can be imaginative, introspective, intellectual, and thoughtful. Just because you have a strong desire to engage with the outer world, or seek out new adventures, doesn't mean that you can't also have a strong desire to engage with your inner world. It's best to think of the drive for cognitive exploration as a separate dimension of personality that can interact with the extraversion-introversion dimension (and perhaps create even further tension in one's personality structure).

There are benefits as well as disadvantages of being an extravert. Extraverts tend to have more mates and social allies, but they are also more prone to physical accidents, traumatic injury, and tend to have lower relationship stability because their high behavioral exploration tends to get them into trouble. Extraverts also score high in sensation seeking, reflecting a “willingness to take risks for the sake of excitement or novel experiences”. Interestingly, while people scoring high in sensation seeking seek out risks for fun (e.g., drinking, roller coasters, gambling), they usually do not regret their decisions afterwards and their behavior rarely leads to serious problems unless they are also high in other forms of impulsivity. So the link between extraversion and sensation seeking is not necessarily a problem for extraverts.

Now, let’s take a look at neuroticism. Neurotic people are anxious, nervous, worrying, ruminative, overthinking, moody, temperamental, self-conscious, and self-critical. The common theme here is sensitivity to threats/danger— not just for threats in their immediate perception, but neurotic people are wired so that their brains are constantly feeding them nagging concerns. These concerns can come from memory of past experiences, but can also come from an overactive neurotic imagination that constantly computes all of the possible ways something could go wrong in the future. It’s as if the neurotic brain was designed by a Jewish Mother.

The opposite of neuroticism is calm/tranquil. Those who score low in neuroticism are emotionally stable and don’t tend to ruminate over every little thing. They don’t sweat the small stuff. Neuroticism is influenced by serotonin, a neurochemical which in low supply causes neurotic people to be much quicker to activate their fight or flight response and hit panic mode.

It's SO important to realize that the biological cause for social withdrawal differs between neurotic people and introverts. The reason why introverts prefer quiet over excitement is simply because they are less energized by environmental stimulation (due to their dopaminergic reward system being less active on average). For neurotic people, however, they frequently need to recharge their batteries because they are quickly frazzled and overwhelmed by their environment. Being so emotionally sensitive and deeply affected by the world can be a very draining experience.

There are benefits as well as disadvantages of being a neurotic person. Some of the greatest thinkers in the history of human intellectual thought were highly neurotic people. Think Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Darwin. Neuroticism can be conducive to deep thinking, thoughtful thinking, and insightful thinking. In fact, recent research suggests that the combination of positive and negative emotions may be most conducive to creativity. Neurotic people are also more vigilant to danger, and are generally more aware of potential threats and dangers.

On the other hand, neuroticism is also associated with the imposter phenomenon, stress, anxiety, depression, and impaired physical health. In terms of impulsivity, neuroticism is associated with a sense of urgency, reflecting “the tendency to experience strong impulses, frequently under conditions of negative affect” that often lead to “impulsive behaviors in order to alleviate negative emotions despite the long-term harmful consequences of these actions.”

Therefore, neuroticism is more strongly linked to impulsivity in the traditional sense than extraversion. Whereas extraverts tend to take exciting risks because they want to, neurotic people tend to do impulsive things to help reduce their anxiety but then soon regret their behavior.

***

While extraversion and neuroticism are two separate dimensions of personality, a minority of people really do score high on both.* So what's its like to be a neurotic extravert? I’m going to be completely honest here (and will most certainly regret it later). It feels like I am constantly being pulled in two directions, as if one part of me is constantly saying GO GO GO and the other part of me is constantly saying BE CAREFUL BE CAREFUL BE CAREFUL. It can be absolutely maddening!

I am enthusiastic and excited by EVERYTHING, I smile at everyone I meet, joke with strangers, jump into any situation that looks interesting and exciting, and say just about anything that’s on my mind. Then I’ll spend the rest of the day obsessing over how I came across, whether I hurt anyone’s feelings, whether that was the best use of my time, whether I came across as stupid, blah, blah blah-- SHUT UP!!!!

While I already regret writing this post (because I'm a neurotic extravert), I hope it offered deeper insight for people who have long felt like a personality anomaly. I want you to know that you’re just as lovable as anyone else. So, to my fellow neurotic extraverts, I leave you with a call to embrace our motto:

Act first and worry immediately!

(C) 2015 Scott Barry Kaufman, All Rights Reserved

* I want to be clear: I absolutely support Susan Cain's mission to increase appreciation of many quiet strengths in society (e.g., solitude, imagination, creativity, sensitivity, humbleness, etc.). In this article I decided to explicitly distinguish between various personality traits (1) to highlight the multidimensionality of personality, (2) for the sake of comparison among characteristics, and (3) for the sake of presenting the latest science. When I hear Susan use the phrase "introversion", I immediately translate it in my head to mean "the constellation of characteristics that are more inward turning than outward turning". In that sense, we could all use to harness more of these quiet strengths.

** For simplicity, I mainly focused on two dimensions of personality (extraversion and neuroticism) in this article. In reality, modern personality psychologists have identified five major dimensions of human personality. We can add these other three dimensions to further broaden our understanding of the multidimensionality of personality:

People who are high in openness to experience are imaginative, curious, intellectual, logical, original, insightful, artistic, clever, and inventive.
People who are high in agreeableness are sympathetic, kind, affectionate, soft-hearted, warm, generous, trusting, helpful, forgiving, good-natured, friendly, cooperative, gentle, unselfish, praising, and sensitive.
People who are high in conscientiousness are organized, thorough, planful, efficient, responsible, dependable, precise, practical, deliberate, and painstaking.
Once we consider these other dimensions of personality, we see that there are actually many nuanced ways people can differ from each other, and even more potential for really distinctive personalities to emerge. In fact, if we assume that you can score high, medium, or low on any single dimension of personality, that leaves 243 (3^5) types of people in this world! And that's only looking at the Big Five personality traits. If we look at Colin DeYoung's 10 aspect model of personality, we get 59,049 (3^10) personality types. Or if we want to get really crazy, we can assess ourselves using the AB5C model of personality, which has 45 total facets of personality. That gives us 2,954,312,706,550,833,698,643 personality types. Kinda puts the MBTI to shame! This is why most modern personality psychologists describe personality using a profile of scores on each dimension, rather than trying to assign people to different types.

Scott Barry Kaufman is scientific director of the Imagination Institute in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He conducts research on the measurement and development of imagination, creativity, and play, and teaches the popular undergraduate course Introduction to Positive Psychology. Kaufman is author of Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined and co-author of the upcoming book Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind (with Carolyn Gregoire). Follow on Twitter @sbkaufman

@темы: социальное, псих