#can't parse out the whole host of issues underneath them

[itskaist]

What is Josiah’s relationship towards his regene tattoos?

Thank you once again for asking! <333 Getting any asks about Josiah always makes my day! Took me a moment to reply because uhhh- [wilhelm scream], but I hope it also gave me the time to ponder some more on this topic.

Under cut as always, though not as long as before. Instead, got… weirder? Question mark?

(tw self-harm, and other Sidestep-typical dissociative issues)

Oh God. He hates them. Burns on his skin, bondage, fish suffocated in plastic. Of course, the most basic reason being that they make it hard to hide, the paranoia seeping in any time there was a rupture in his Sidestep suit. Wearing layers in the Los Diablos heat, too, unbearable. But most of all, the personal - the inhumanity marking him, staining him, can't wash it off, can't cut it out, just like he can't excise his own past. His own nature. The tattoos are a symbol of that, the final leash, a reminder that no matter how far he might run, how thouroughly he might try to remake himself, he will always be a sad little tool in the toolbox. Still cowering in the corner of his cell.

He just can't look at himself. Can't. He will brave it when he needs to, when he needs to sew himself up, but otherwise? Showering in the dark, though to him the tattoos might as well be bioluminescent. An anglerfish. Get close, get bit. Mirrors smashed on a bad day, then covered up in curtains or tape. Can't be bothered to replace them. Shaving in fractured reflections, a thousand funhouse faces. Can't look at his own face, no, no. Having a body at all, a body they made, they groomed, being touched, prodded, examined, evaluated, a racing horse. Gets lame, gets shot. …Proud of every single scar, though, marring their prize pet. Self-harm. Them-harm. A disconnect between the body and mind, body was theirs, I am my thought, I think therefore I am, therefore, therefore, by cutting the body, I am harming them, not myself. Blood down the drain.

The tattoos are an easy scapegoat, too. A convenient excuse. Couldn't get closer to Ortega, no, never, because you could never show skin, and this is what he would want, right? What normal people want. What People want. Not-People don't show skin and he'll either get bored with you and drop you, or get suspicious and drop you. Down, down, down the drain. A solid self-hate spiral, if you dare say so yourself.

Hates seeing his own face in the mirror. Wrong. Boney. Bones… wrong. Set and reset. Can't reset a face. Only, hah, you can. A prettier one. More familiar than this. No need to shave, no scratch, no itch, itch right under your skin that you can never reach. No, no burn; soft, pliant, yielding. Clay in your hands. More... malleable. A remaking, a rebirth. A breath. A step. Steadier legs, standing steady on the ground, no bones set and reset, too long, too tall, standing out. Being seen at last and not hating it. What a novelty. Could you ever do it? …No. Of course not. Only way for you to have is to pretend at pretending at pretending.

Replica of a replica of a replica.

You're Hollow Ground's younger sibling, he says.

Why couldn't it have been you? Why never YOU?

Show him. Show him the truth. Make him curl up in disgust the same way you do, every morning, every evening, every forsaken fucking minute of your sorry life. A burden shared is burden lessened, isn't it, Dr. Finch?

. .. …

…Being seen at last and not hating it. What a novelty indeed.

[nautilusopus]

okay FIIIIIINE i'll throw my hat into the Goncharov ring

Been a while i've done a proper movie breakdown, may as well be this one.

Rather surprisingly (but perhaps not too surprisingly given the unexpected renaissance of things like the original Dracula and Breaking Bad on this website out of seemingly nowhere and with very little prompting), I'm seeing a lot of new people suddenly interested in Martin Scorsese's seminal film classic Goncharov, originally released in 1973. Obviously a movie like that doesn't make it coming up on 50 years without generating a lot of discussion about the different ways the movie resonates and why, but coming into it in 2022 there's been so much cultural cruft that's collected around Goncharov that (similar to stories like Fight Club and Scarface) it's a little hard to parse what it's actually about with all the mythologising that's gone on around the characters.

Those movies, in one way or another, are about portraying the downfall of their protagonists -- Fight Club's after ironically creating another system of control and dehumanisation and becoming what he sought to destroy, Scarface's after being consumed by the wealth and power he's amassed. A lot of people assume it's that kind of story, because aren't most well-loved movies? However, I think this is ironically an assumption made because of the genre of film it is. All the people that aren't going, "OMG Goncharov is so cool and badass and fucks bitches," are going, "WOW I can't believe Goncharov is a cautionary tale about power corrupting," and in the process people miss that Goncharov is first and foremost about loss, in all its different forms.

I'm both kind of surprised and frustrated people miss this, given how utterly pervasive the movie is with its clock symbolism -- it's the one thing everyone remembers about it, it was in all the tie-ins. I dunno, maybe that got funneled back into the theory where they're meant to reinforce how Goncharov is just a mortal man at the end of the day, which is fine I guess, but the movie overall becomes a lot clearer when you interpret it through the lens of, "These things are gone and you can never get them back; clocks don't go backwards."

One of the most fascinating things about the movie is how every character embodies a different kind of loss. I'm gonna ease into this and start not with Goncharov but with:

Rybak, who is usually associated with loss as we typically think of it, i.e. the loss of loved ones via death. This comes up all the time, either in his trust issues (why he's being such a prick at the wedding), in the card game (he never bothers to bet much money, knowing he's bad at poker, and still loses all the same). Rybak is terrified of loss, cannot manage it, and ultimately is punished by losing what few people he had left and then being spared by Lorenzo who deems him punished enough, and is forced to survive, to grapple with what his life is now without them.

Goncharov's is actually more subtle, and it's loss of small, insignificant things as a result of the larger losses he believes he's processed. This is something that's frequently contrasted against Rybak. The pawn shop going under is actually a microcosm of this whole thing. Goncharov anticipates that this is obviously going to lead to financial issues for him, plans accordingly to deal with this, and... it works! He's saved! Except that means card games can't be hosted at his place anymore, given it's burned to the ground. Does this matter, in the grand scheme of his life? No, of course not. Poker night still gets had all the same. But it is different now, and always will be. Little things like this continue to add up, until something as insignificant as a towel -- a towel that never should have been in his room, but Sofia is no longer there to drop off his laundry and chat with him -- is ultimately the final nail in a coffin built of insignificant splinters, each one an imperceptible change underneath the much more larger, noticeable story beats of things like grief.

Otto is the big obvious one I'm not gonna linger on: loss of his youth, moments in the past that he wants to redo but can't. Most people at least seem to have gotten this one.

(This is also what the clocks get associated with a lot, which again, doesn't NOT make sense but also if it were just for this one character that, while thematically important, was honestly just a side character with limited screentime and only two scenes, would they really be all over the movie before Otto's name is even mentioned?)

Sofia's a bit abstract, and is the loss of self -- of the familiar anchors we have to who we are, what we think our core principles are, our place in society, who we want to be to our loved ones -- and by the time she dies she is rendered utterly unrecognisable to herself, and is horrified by it. She grieves herself the same way Rybak grieves his wife (even gets a direct visual callback via the way her face is lit when she's burning Lorenzo's check). You see echoes of this in Goncharov as well, but while Sofia is grieving the person she used to be, Goncharov is grieving the world around him (even though really, it's the same world it always was -- time keeps ticking on, one second per second, and neither one of them can ever un-fire that gun).

Lorenzo, tragically, gradually loses his freedom (and maybe in a parallel world would actually be the protagonist of a movie where he chokes on his own hubris like everyone seems to think Goncharov is GRUMBLE GRUMBLE). As he comes into his own more and more by his family's legacy, he is afforded fewer and fewer options about what decisions he can even make. Arguably he was doomed from the start, but the further he clings to power as a means to freedom, the more it drives him to destroying everything he ever (thought he) cared about. The tragedy of his character, and what makes him a good villain, is that he can clearly see what he is doing to himself and he absolutely hates it (his walking out early at the wedding is a tacit admission of this), but his absolute refusal to accept loss, to accept grief and pain and all the awful shit that comes with the human condition, is what causes him to toss aside every out he has because if he has enough CONTROL over his situation, surely he will never have to lose anything ever again. But, really, he already has.

I dunno. Goncharov is one of those movies that is great, and everyone seems to realise it's great, but nobody ever really puts into words why, and that's how you get Fight Club fans lmao. And it sucks because the actual discussion around the movie beyond "it's another hubris story but REALLY GOOD guys" is so much more fascinating and a much more earnest emotional truth that just never gets talked about.