It’s as bleak as Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but much more hilarious. It’s the kind of play that lots of places won’t produce because the humor is just coruscating - there are dead babies dropped on the stage, for instance. His play The Marriage of Bette and Boo is one of the great works of American art. The playwright Christopher Durang was a huge influence on me when I was a teenager.
Humor is a part of that, sometimes to relieve despair, sometimes just because I can’t resist a bit of laughter on the gallows (and we’re all on the gallows). I want to feel the pleasure of the text, and for me a lot of that pleasure comes from a confrontation with things that are bleak and horrible. I don’t have an explanation for that, but it probably explains the tone of a lot of the fiction I write, since one of the reasons I write is to try to inhabit aesthetic utopias. I’m a pacifist who gets light-headed at the sight of blood in real life, and yet somehow within the art form of this violent, gory movie - within the patterns of image and sound it creates - I find an aesthetic utopia, a certain bliss. I feel a sense of great joy and release and catharsis - a sense of the sublime - at the end of the film, with Sally escaping and Leatherface doing his chainsaw dance. I laugh during some of the most gruesome scenes. I always feel better about life, the universe, and everything after watching the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
WHAT GENRE IS SUBLIME MOVIE
Matthew Cheney: I recently said somewhere that my idea of a feel-good movie is Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Do you see your fiction the same way I see it? What do you mean to evoke by the interpenetration of wholesale bleakness and wry humor? These are funny stories - sometimes just by virtue of their squirm-inducing extremity. That said, I also felt that the bleakness of these stories was inextricable from their humor and their playfulness as narratives. There’s almost something hopeful in it - like, by utterly not acknowledging the possibility of hope you make room for it in this strange, indirect way.
God help me, I love that about them!įor me, there’s always been a beautiful sublimity about a narrative that channels irretrievably toward hopelessness.įor me, there’s always been a beautiful sublimity about a narrative that channels irretrievably toward hopelessness.
From the title story, to “The Lake,” to “How Far to Englishman’s Bay,” these stories have a very close relationship with doom, annihilation, the unreachable prospect of solace. They ended up covering a wide range of topics including but not limited to: emotional catharsis through sublime terror, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Witch, inhabiting aesthetic utopias, resisting emotion by way of creating it, loudly eating nachos while watching Michael Haneke, the so-called “genre divide,” and who they’ve been reading, among so much more.Īdrian Van Young: One thing I’m struck by and appreciate about your collection Blood is its overall bleakness. Van Young and Cheney, as it would happen, are also admirers of each other’s work and agreed to have a conversation by email in between bouts of winding down their teaching careers for the summer, and reading each other’s most recent books. Matthew Cheney is the author of the collection Blood: Stories (Black Lawrence Press, 2013) and co-editor (with Eric Schaller) of the occasional online magazine The Revelator. Adrian Van Young is the author of the collection The Man Who Noticed Everything (Black Lawrence Press, 2013) and the novel Shadows in Summerland (ChiZine Publications, 2016) as well as The Murder Chronicles: A New Orleans Murder Mystery, an interactive, serialized mystery novella for.
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