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i remember in Mike Hodges’ Croupier there were lines like these on the voice over, “gambling is not about money,” the croupier who dyed his hair black for his work coldly, and almost wearily explains, (to his unconvinced fiancée, who was killed later in the film, and to his audience, very probably including he himself) “…it’s about the outright denial of the odds of life…” The croupier in the film, is also a writer striving for his first publication, he contemplates and takes on the tone of the subjects he is writing about, the gamblers themselves, “He wants to fuck over the whole world – to ruin himself and everyone else…” Strictly observing his professionalism throughout the whole film we, of course, never did once see him gamble… with money; instead he, should i say, rather accidentally, puts every thing other than money at stake.
The croupier, played (methodologically) by Clive Owen, is named Jack. At one point he muses, “In life there is a choice: be a gambler or a croupier.” The haunting voice goes on, “…I was hooked on watching punters lose.” Oh Jack, how does it feel when you call “Black Jack,” or a “Zero,” winningly devoid of affection in your voice? But Jack! Whose life? And, which life?
The croupier Jack wrote about in his book, is simply named Jake.
It is not altogether difficult to expect reluctance on the part of Jack’s fiancée, to condone that Jake in the book, she was almost nauseating on the spot, horrified and heatedly she told Jack that she doesn’t like the book. On demand of an explanation, she says, “…there is no hope in it.”
And yes, there should be a young woman like Kate Hardie, who appears as Bela in the film… or a Sonya Marmeladov, or Anna Snitkina; they share that some thing i simply envy, and adore.
–Porcelain. Ed. D Alexandrovna. Exist Random, 1999. p4-6
“…I’ve always been fascinated by the imbalance between the physical author of a book, the individual who puts his name onto the cover, and the authentic author who I am not certain is the same person. Take War and Peace, for example. On the cover it says, ‘Leo Tolstoy.’ You open the book on the first page, and somebody starts speaking to you. Is this Tolstoy real? No, it is the one that can be perceived as the narrative voice of Tolstoy. One that is very different from the man called Tolstoy. The stories, it seems to me, are written by a certain place in our interior which is unknown and inaccessible to us. This is the reason why the biography of the writer and his work are never in accordance. A biographical study will never tell you where exactly the work came from.”
You are a human being. The human part of you is a seeker. Seeking eventually leads to frustration, confusion and failure of finding the truth. We reach a point when seeking just stops. It is at this point that we start discovering BEING! It is through the human seeking that we finally find what doesn’t work. Embrace your humanity. Through this allowing and surrender of humanity we find what we have always been…BEING ITSELF!! It is through separation that we find Oneness!
Emotional feeling is Energy-Motion (emotion) brought about by thought. Any thought believed to be real acts on the body as sensation.
Derrida describes an ‘unnatural’ ghostly haunting whereby the dead are taken into us, but they are not internalized as they would be under more ‘normal’ circumstances (a psychoanalytic view of mourning) – he labels this as ‘terrifying.’
Derrida recounts his 1982 arrest in Czechoslavakia on trumped-up drug charges …
see also this clip in which Derrida plays ‘himself’ in the film and comments upon ghosts as they pertain to cinema and representation itself; the late Pascale Ogier (1958-1984) plays ‘Pascale’ who is questioning Derrida.
