![]() ![]() ![]() He homes in on presenting the direct experiential level in every detail. Mitch Jenkins, the film series' director, seems to understand this very well. In fact, the more confounded the intellect, the more visceral our mirror reactions are likely to be. We continue to experience the surreal and painful world of Jimmy's End as if we were there, and be as overwhelmed as James trying to apply the intellect to things that are beyond his intellectual control. I can easily believe this is true when watching installments of The Show so far, when accounting for the extreme reactions Act of Faith produces as we see Faith struggling with her own need for extreme experiences and caught in an unlucky net of her own devices.Īs the world of The Show gets stranger and seemingly inexplicable events occur that defy the laws of physics and real-time, that actually makes no difference at all to our mirror responses. In fact, there is no quantifiable difference between those two brain responses, from the one being tapped to the one watching someone's shoulder being tapped. I recently heard that scientists have identified the "mirroring" processes in the brain and concluded that when we see someone being tapped on the shoulder, our brain lights up in the appropriate areas as if we, too, have been tapped on the shoulder. ![]() Fortunately for us viewers, we can participate in the film-time with James, and he becomes our proxy, suffering all our slings and arrows for us and to some extent, with us. That there are layers of experience and meaning, but it's important not to lose that perspective, that it is a "show", a demonstration of the force of perceived experience and what can be learned by going through the motions, taking part in the rise of the curtain, and realizing that this "entertainment" is just that, something requiring participation, endurance, and a puzzling out of meaning that you simply can't reach without having been there. ![]() This is part of the crux of The Show, as far as I can tell. Though I was surprised, given what D'Silva was talking about in terms of James' recent ordeals, that he could eat lunch at all. Because there was something to be reached, a goal. And, like everyone in the canteen, she was anxious that the clock should start again and James should continue on his journey, no matter how brutal it got. And Hewlett/Faith nodded sagely, and laughed, and commiserated with D'Silva/James. It felt like hearing some outside, omniscient observer commenting on James' afterlife and what he had been up against, with some sympathy. Real-time and film-time caught up over clinking china cups and D'Silva, who had streaks of gore on his face that initially looked like he had spilled his lunch over himself but turned out to be far more sinister in application, cheerily commented on the horrors he and James had been recently facing. Siobhan Hewlett had arrived for a visit, and so across the table from each other sat Faith, but not Faith, and Darrell D'Silva, James but not James, one in costume, one not. The introduction to that world was a strange mixing bowl of elements when we turned up in the canteen and the crew and actors, some in costume, some not, sipped tea and finished sandwiches. Touring through the epochs that make up Northampton's checkered history, Moore acted as my guide until we reached the portal, of sorts, into film-time. On January 14 th, I arrived in Northampton in chilly weather, but with sunlight struggling through to grace the rather historically steeped and fraught landscape and architecture so buried in layers of strange incidents that Alan Moore writing his epic novel Jerusalem (now nearing completion) seems the only appropriate response to its legacy. ![]()
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