Quo Vadis, Rope, Dangerous Liasons, Gattaca & aestheticized death (spoilers)

Today I watched parts of Quo Vadis, a film I'd never seen before. I was mesmerized by all the Nero scenes; Peter Ustinov was born to play debauched Roman leaders. I was struck by how they portrayed Nero as an aesthete—jaded, childish, egotistical, and constantly in search of new experiences. In this version of the story, Nero burns Rome not only to clear the way for the creation of "Neropolis," but to aesthetically experience the tragedy itself. One bit of business that I loved was when Nero shed tears for a lost friend—carefully, one from each eye, into a special crystal vial.

While watching the film I realized how much I am attracted to this particular theme—aestheticized death and violence. Some of you know I love the movie Rope, which I've seen dozens of times. In the film, two friends commit murder to prove their intellectual and artistic superiority as Nietschean supermen (based on the famous Loeb-Leopold case). The theme also occurs in Dangerous Liasons in which John Malkovich and Glenn Close's characters play a decadent game that results in the physical death of one character and the social demise of another. This kind of aestheticized violence is what I was hoping for in Gattaca. For some reason I was expecting a dinner scene in which Ethan Hawke's biologically inferior character tried to keep up with the biologically superior dinner guests, bluffing his way through potentially career killing verbal interchanges.

The theme is the foundation of one of my story ideas in which exotic decadence is played out in a fake Asian setting. I found that in my mind I had mixed this up with my other pseudo Asian setting idea. In this short film, women fight each other in single-blow matches, an idea which probably comes from both Hero and the end of Sanjuro (or was it Yojimbo?). Here, the fight lies not in the fight itself, but in the preparation for the fight. So the women spend the beginning of each match sitting before their opponents, scrutinizing each other's dress and posture for tactical strengths and weaknesses. Then, in a single blow, it is over. One is dead and the other survives. The victor is the one who makes the best decision in sizing up her opponent. In the end, our heroine loses her first and only battle; in this game, one can never lose more than once. As we pull our from her bloodied face Psycho style, we hear her voice over: "I always thought that if I lost, it would be because I failed to see something important. I never thought it would be because I didn't see anything at all."

I think the whole thing works well as a short film. It has to look beautiful, sumptuous. I always think of it as looking like the fantasy sequence from Rampo Noir--



There wouldn't be a lot of dialogue. Just set up the macro anticipation of what will happen in the final death match. Then just put in a lot of micro anticipations: the training, the setting, the loving, tears shed into crystal, all painfully beautiful. It also works as a second short film because it expands on noise film, but not by too much. Only voice over, no sync sound. A few actors, but no acting with a capital "A." Real sets with green screen backgrounds.