As a New Year dawns it’s natural to look back and take stock. We’ll be doing that here at the Solute no doubt, in the comments and in a forthcoming Moments of the Year article. It’s a time to celebrate the best of the past and commit to doing better moving forward.
But of course not everything is remembered fondly. Some things, in fact, ‘twould be best not remembered at all. During a recent Happy Hour, beloved Soluter pico bemoaned some pop culture that he wished could be “flushed from his mind.” Not just things unliked, not just things hated, things that you would sign up for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind procedure to eliminate from your consciousness. An undo button for your cultural life.
There’s a lot to be learned even from bad media (and, let’s face it, some pleasure in reveling in its badness), so this is a very narrow category in my mind. But I think I would be a healthier person mentally – or at least no worse off – if I could drag and drop the 2017 documentary Caniba into my brain’s recycle bin. It comes from two filmmakers, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel whose work with the Sensory Ethnography Lab I’ve admired before and since, including the immersive deepsea fishing film Leviathan and the challenging look at the human body being opened up in labs in De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Caniba, however, links their ability to create sensual audience experiences with the most off-putting of subjects, cannibal and murderer Issei Sagawa. His horrifying crimes are detailed in a graphic novel held up for the viewer to peruse, giving enough context to recoil at spending a feature film in close quarters with the man, with an uneasy balance between attempts to understand and attempts to identify with its opaque, grotesque subject. Making it worse, the film spends time on tangents like Sagawa’s participation in hardcore pornography and his brother’s self-harm rituals that create un-scrubbable graffiti in the brain caves without adding anything worthwhile to contemplate. Better off had I left this particular branch of their filmography unexplored.
Your turn, Soluters! As we look forward to the coming of 2024, what would you like scrubbed from your personal mental record? A song that won’t leave your brain? A film that loads into your memory unbidden at inopportune times?
