A mixed bag

Last night S and I went to see El Orfanato. My sister warned me about it, but my ticket was already paid by then. It's quite easy to find an excuse to enjoy bad horror movies, but this one was beyond redemption. Not only were the effects really bad and of the kind that are included in any poorly developed horror movie (jarring swings, slamming door, re-awakening corpses) but the worst thing about this movie was its indulgence in "motherly love". A mother's love; irrational, indefeatable, sentimental. Well, come on. In horror movies, women are usually portrayed as equipped with some form of magical empathy that enables them to make contact with the dead (etc.). This latches on to the picture of women as beings who have a strange ability to put themselves in the shoes of others. ZZZZZZZZ. The point is that it is really hard to imagine that the emphasis on motherly love in El Orfanato would instead be placed on fatherly love. By all means, don't watch this movie. It's a waste of time and I really regret having sat through it.

The rest of the night was spent in bars. Which was good. We went to El Gringo as usual and now I've really begun to take a liking to this joint. Cheap beer. Friendly people, mostly. Variety. I'm not a hip hop connoisseur, but at El Gringo the playlist is very limited, so I've got used to the songs and by now I actually like most of them.

I am reading The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. So far, I've found Lessing's take on freedom in relation to gender quite interesting. The battle for freedom is fought on many different levels and they are not without complications. Conversations are described with a sensitivity to detail, as she brings out how we react to what somebody says in light of the way we understand our relation to other people. She illuminates the way we are concerned about how we are understood by others, how we choose our words so as to be understood in a particular way. She gives many examples of the challenges of having an open conversation. She says, for example, that some people are unable to accept an idea if it is not expressed in a language that s/he would use himself. (The situation is that of a communist group, and the clash between the self-assured, male demagogues of the group and the female activists which are not taken seriously because they do not talk right, their language is lacking in ideological correctness.) Good point. I recognize this tendency in myself, to dismiss something a person has said when being uncomfortable with the way it is said. In philosophy, these types of misunderstandings are common. And sometimes there are both misunderstandings and the type of resentment that Lessing refers to.