This Pictorial is about the pictures so I guess makes it easier to imagine (images will be uploaded to rehsongcycle.com in due course.)
If we live in a corrupt universe of half-truths that corrupt naturalness, the traditional belief in the body as an arbiter of the natural order goes by the wayside.
The ego (head) tends to arbitrate reality in terms of the logical order (see Blake print of Newton as a physique that becomes a brain, prev.)
Where the head (ego) arbitrates reality, there seems to occur a type of wordplay that is inherently confusing.
When the body becomes dirty, traditionally one bathes and the dirtier one is the more intense the bathing (see Valeria by Kayanan, prev.)
Dirt in a traditional order requires cleaning in terms of smell and discomfort, but it is not strictly speaking unclean in that dirt kills pathogens. A field or prairie is strong and fertile.
Mud is cleansing (or stale urine - see Fulling HB60). Products that are strong and natural and fertile are cleansing agents.
Strength tends to be of the body and its activities, and the body naturally gets dirty and requires bathing. Dirt is good provided it's cleansed. In a world of the head (ego), these primitive differences are not recognised as a natural state.
We instead approach a type of hospital-sterility that is essentially infertile. It's a confusion of infertility for cleanliness.
This might seem an odd link to Liza Minnelli, but she has a fairly filthy mouth! There is also the fact that Cabaret is set in the decadent and sordid underworld of 30s Berlin.
Joel Grey even is quoted as saying that he had to wear an old uniform and, "Their standards of hygiene are not what ours are."
Smell and sweat and bodily fluids are not what they used to be. Differences in the days of decadence were much more pronounced and in a sense bodily stronger.
Differences are healthy and vibrant and reek of fertility. The problem in the modern sense is that differences are so minute they are almost NOT differences, and there is sterile sameness.
But that sterile sameness is the opposite to a fertile sameness that is the product of curvilinear naturalness (HB173). Things in modernity are generally the opposite to nature, which is sort of tragic considering it's supposedly a Darwinian order.
How does this happen? It's partly wordplay and confusion. There has to be a primitive sameness for things to appear different; one can't be just different. Different to what? To other things that have the primitive sameness.
This whole problem of difference and naturalism came into Minnelli's subsequent musical, New York, New York by Martin Scorsese. Most people seem to see it as a failure, but it's an interesting one in that he tried to replicate the style of the 40s, 50s MGM musicals (and the Vincent Minnelli flair of staging.
Interesting as it was, as often with later films, over-thought-out. The haphazard approach is often more natural. The sets at timed resembled CG perfection against which characters acted.
The over-thought-out approach tends to suppress bodily acts that are loose and easy, as with Ginger and Fred. Another haphazard facet of the studio system is that there was often an element of the sordid. Physical encounters were commonplace and Minnelli herself was apparently conceived onset.
All that is a sign of strength and creativity. Scorsese insisted he was trying to portray two people of creative passion in the musical; his aim was true but the finished product doesn't have it.
Modern films are often either CG type action or head-trips where nothing happens (see CC Beck, prev.) Both are a sign.of the over-dominant ego as opposed to naturalness of body (compare, say, Milius's Conan from 1982).
You could say this applies to.our view of nature. A fertile world is fairly filthy and so this is strength of nature. However, we are told (by "them") to think of nature as clinically obsessed with competition, not as strong and fertile.
The bodily grace of creatures has to be a product of sameness that is curvilinear, not of any tendency to difference (such as competition). This entire unity of living things seems to be omitted by a science of ego and dogma.
There are rumors that Bezos is aiming to buy up MGM. Off the top of my head, there are four landmarks in the archive: Wizard of Oz; Vincent Minnelli musicals; Forbidden Planet; 2001:A Space Odyssey. For products of creative passion to be owned by a passionless zombie would be in pretty poor taste.
