Whether innate or cultivated or both, the picture of David Lynch the straight-arrow square is striking for the obvious contrast with the darkness and extremity of the work, its obsession with grotesquerie and depravity.
James Freyn, the narrator, is 106, a dropped-out philosophiser, reminiscing into Cowley's tape-recorder about a trip he made in his 20s into the interior of a god-forsaken British colony in South America, to collect two horses from a French-Swiss religious nutter worshipped by robotically obedient natives.The echoes of Joseph Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness" are obvious.
The book has attracted voluble criticism for equally obvious reasons: Its army of darkness is a totalitarian institution called "the Church".
There is an obvious homage to Heart of Darkness here, and that book certainly haunts the pages of The Book of Strange New Things, but this novel is very much an original and thought-provoking read in its own right.
The signs are obvious from the streets: constant darkness at dusk and closed blinds at noon are the outward indicators of an empty flat, ownership likely foreign and opaque.
The directness of the image (behold, the bloom) is in contrast to many of the earlier, partially concealed shots, and this progression from the obscure to the obvious literalizes the experience — from darkness to revelation, unknowing to knowing — of watching the film itself.
The authorities acted responsibly on Wednesday, he said, moving during daylight, so that "everything was obvious," rather than under the cover of darkness.
He guided me round as it got dark and it became obvious which buildings were homes with lights on and which were empty investment opportunities, black inside as darkness descended, because there was nobody in.
The latter was obvious enough in his complexion and in the darkness of his eyes and hair, but his contemporaries soon learned to their cost that he was not only a southerner he was also an Oriental.
