One of the people who came to all three sessions of Blind Games this weekend sent us this musical number from the 2000 film Dancer in the Dark. The first time I saw that film, I sobbed my brains out and then spent two days in bed recovering. No joke.
As a kid whose parents debated whether or not to have a child for risk of passing an eye disease onto him (me), my reaction was a personal one: Björk plays a woman who's losing her vision and trying to raise funds to save her own son from going blind. She faces oppression at every turn—for being disabled, for being a woman, for being an artist, for being an immigrant, for being a single mom, and she also has these lapses into an illusory world that are on one hand a decay of mental health, and on the other hand a fantastic alternate reality filled with color, music and dancing.
I have rarely felt as mortified as I did at the end of Dancer in the Dark when all of Björk's hardships come to a head. It's one of my favorite films and I've avoided it ever since seeing it. Here's to facing fear:
As a kid whose parents debated whether or not to have a child for risk of passing an eye disease onto him (me), my reaction was a personal one: Björk plays a woman who's losing her vision and trying to raise funds to save her own son from going blind. She faces oppression at every turn—for being disabled, for being a woman, for being an artist, for being an immigrant, for being a single mom, and she also has these lapses into an illusory world that are on one hand a decay of mental health, and on the other hand a fantastic alternate reality filled with color, music and dancing.
I have rarely felt as mortified as I did at the end of Dancer in the Dark when all of Björk's hardships come to a head. It's one of my favorite films and I've avoided it ever since seeing it. Here's to facing fear:
No comments:
Post a Comment