I honestly never thought I’d watch BEGOTTEN again.
And sure, we all probably have films we say this about. Your GUMMOs. Your W.R.’s. Your FAT GIRLs. Your IRRÉVERSIBLEs. Those upsettingly visceral works that send us staggering out of the theatre vomiting up “never agains” like we’ve just taken a punch to the solar plexus. The kinds of films that hurt us, but also, even if we denounce them in the moment, the kind we ultimately – inevitably – wind up going back to (well, at least I did) not in spite of how much they hurt us, but because of it. Because of the marks they left. Because of that certain grim, true something that they made us feel.
But BEGOTTEN was different. Not because it was soooo scary, or soooo disturbing, or anything like that. More just because it felt like the quintessential “once is enough” film experience (experience being the operative word here). It’s not the kind of work that naturally invites parsing, much less communion. With its arcane narrative structure and total absence of dialogue; its garishly grainy serial-killer-art-therapy aesthetic, and its punishingly grisly imagery, BEGOTTEN can feel much more like a closed Pandora’s Box than an open one. You watch it. And then you’ve watched it. And when it’s over, you either take something away from it, or you don’t. As such, it has, over the years, developed a kind of hushed, word-of-mouth reputation amongst horror aficionados to which few other films – even ones far more gruesome and overtly terrifying – can hold a flickering, skull-shaped candle. If you’re the kind of person who seeks out “Top 10 Most Disturbing” lists, then you’ve almost certainly already read about and/or seen it yourself. People talk about it like it’s sentient. Occasionally even like it’s evil.
So, when I first heard about mad media theorist Gary J. Shipley’s book YOU WITH YOUR MEMORY ARE DEAD – the direct result of his spending two weeks alone in a room with BEGOTTEN playing on loop – essentially locking himself inside Pandora’s Box – breaking only for what I have to assume was very unrestful sleep – I immediately had two thoughts. 1.) That sounds like some shit they’d do to you at Abu Ghraib; this guy is fucking crazy, and 2.) I have to read this book (and thus, somewhat reluctantly, watch BEGOTTEN again). Once a hard-to-find cult object (to this day I’ve never seen an official physical copy), the film is now readily available, free and sans commercial interruption, via our mass collective mnemonic graveyard (AKA YouTube). So I turned off all the lights, steeled myself accordingly, and submitted my better judgment to the task.
But much to my surprise – and this is, perhaps, part of Shipley’s point – BEGOTTEN was not really at all what its reputation has come to signify, nor was it, in all honesty, even quite what I remembered. I kid you not, there were clear images in my head from my previous viewing of the film – images I felt quite certain of – that turned out to be complete fabrications – false memories implanted by the film’s considerable, initial shock factor (and, if I’m being honest, possibly by the altered state in which I first consumed it), and subsequently reinforced by its enduringly outré legend. And while I’m willing to concede that my personal scale is different from most – that maybe I’ve just seen too many fucked up movies in the interim – I have to say, compared to the celluloid boogeyman I’d built BEGOTTEN up to be in my head, it was really just… not that bad. Not for the faint of heart (or stomach), by any means, but also not likely to leave you double-checking your deadbolts later that night either. It’s not that kind of scary. If anything, what’s scary about it is that what it is isn’t even entirely clear. It feels more like a relic out of time – a mystic idol or eldritch artifact – than it does a traditional film; both sacredly parabolic, and viscerally documentary; ancient, and prophetic. The kind of thing that has the power to, you know, implant your brain with horrific false memories.
With this second viewing, however, having fully prepared myself for the uncompromising sensory onslaught I remembered, I found myself struck instead much more by the film’s caustic beauty than its obscene ugliness. For one, I’d forgotten just how quiet it is. Though my mind recollected a soundtrack of banshee black metal cacophony (and the film has surely inspired many an album cover across that particular, macabre subgenre), that too turned out to be a mental misattribution. And the longer I watched, the more it became clear that I’d somehow allowed the film’s notoriety to overshadow its artistry in my mind, consecrating it with a degree of gut-level trauma that grossly undersells its true merit. Again, none of this is to say that it’s an easy watch – and the first time you see anything of this nature is undoubtedly always more impactful than the second – but the film is not some meaningless torture porn endurance trial; its sundry abominations are not without a point. The conversation around BEGOTTEN (and perhaps its shoehorning into the horror genre, period) has inarguably broadened its reach, but has also done it a kind of dilutive disservice.
The aforementioned, misremembered soundtrack turned out to be mostly ambient drones and nature sounds – crickets, birds, wind, rain – and while the many (many) harrowing sequences of rapacious violence, torture, and death – none moreso than the opening scene of “God disemboweling himself” – have become iconic for those in the know, what gets lost in this body-drag through the napalmed desert waste is its dire warning of ecological ruin, its fabulist depiction of humanity as an invasive, predatory species to Mother Earth, and its latent optimism at a cyclical, potentially human-free renewal. All of which is to say, BEGOTTEN is so much more than its queasy, double-dog-dare-you reputation. It is mostly darkness, to be sure, but its ending firmly suggests hope for a postlapsarian dawn. (Of course, whether or not you find hope in the idea of a restored Earth emptied of its human infestation is a personal matter. YMMV. But anyone who’s read Shipley’s brilliant novel Terminal Park will likely see some connections, and understand even better his devotion to this particular film).
So, having completed the film a second time and found it (somewhat) more palatable than I’d remembered, I turned to YOU WITH YOUR MEMORY ARE DEAD with fresh eyes, and a host of prefabricated questions. Regardless of whether or not BEGOTTEN weighs in at a 9.5 or a 10 on the scales of visual upset, I think we can all agree that watching any movie alone in the dark for two straight weeks could be enough to leave a person permanently scarred. Like the kid caught smoking and forced to finish the pack, even your favorite movie might easily mutate into your least favorite when subjected to that level of concentrated neurochemical interaction.
I mean, just think about the numbers for a second. BEGOTTEN is a modest (if brutal) hour and twelve minutes long. So if we estimate seven to eight hours of sleep a night (I have no idea how much Shipley slept, or if the film was left running while he did so, its white noise sound palette and desaturated screenglow allowed to insidiously inform his dreams), (these definitely number among my aforementioned host of questions), then that works out to thirteen-to-fourteen screenings per day (minimum), times fourteen days. Which equals anywhere between 182 and 196 total viewings of BEGOTTEN, (let’s call it an even 200), in two weeks. Which means Shipley has now comfortably seen BEGOTTEN more times than I have ever seen, or ever will see, any movie ever made (and if the same doesn’t hold true for you, I’d very much like to hear about it). With these figures in mind it becomes obvious that, just as BEGOTTEN isn’t a traditional film, Shipley’s experiment was never about traditional viewing. Though you might read about this kind of undertaking and think he was simply trying to better grasp a notoriously impenetrable work, it feels to me much more like a willful jousting at his own limits; a bid for transgressive transcendence.
As such, the book itself is not easy to describe. Just as we can read about the Shulgins’ journeys into psychoactive oblivion, or Julia Butterfly Hill’s living in a tree for two years, true comprehension of such audacious acts remains the actor’s alone. But as this is a book review, I will say that YOU WITH YOUR MEMORY ARE DEAD reads something like a waking nightmare journal of nihilistic enlightenment (I don’t know if Shipley took notes throughout, or only wrote in the aftermath – another question) – a 253-page, stream-of-disintegrating-consciousness antipoem ruminating on BEGOTTEN, the sensation of being symbiotically engaged with BEGOTTEN, and the profoundly harrowing ideations that arise after so much time spent in self-imposed solitary confinement with BEGOTTEN. I think it’s reasonable to assume a certain psychographically linear structure – that the sentences are arranged in the order by which they came to him (though once again, I don’t know for sure), and there are movie stills littered throughout (though they don’t exactly track his progress so much as elucidate the ever-increasing impossibility of doing so) but otherwise, much like the film, Shipley has little use for the comforts of specificity. As much as is possible, the book’s design puts you there in the room with him. A litany of unsettling things pass through his (and thus your) head. A vague, but finite amount of time elapses. And then the book is over. For some of my questions, his writing furnishes at least partial answers:
DG: What was it like, being cooped up in what I’m imagining was a pretty basic cell with
SHIPLEY: BEGOTTEN for so long? “I build a composition of this room. It sits inside this one. And there’s not a place to hide and it hides there. Where the walls in the film are the walls. Where everything is screen. Where there’s a want not to become comfortable with this.”
DG: What was the food situation like?
SHIPLEY: “The need for food and water is the one genuine reprieve from acting.”
DG: How did all this affect him physically?
SHIPLEY: “My days are one long extended fidget.” […] “To get back into the body I must shut my eyes. And it doesn’t work.” […] “My arms have the added weight of the effort it might take to move them.”
DG: How did it affect him mentally?
SHIPLEY: “They told me the universe was just a feeling I had.” […] “Because I used to be a picture in my head. Because there’s no picture there now.” […] “And this is my idea for a life. That that sky is my sky now. And away from the screen there are stage sets of rooms, kept inside other rooms, and eyes painted over the top of eyes.”
DG: Did BEGOTTEN ever start to make more sense to him? Did he ever become desensitized to the film’s violence? Did it ever become boring?
SHIPLEY: “I’ve tried to nurture tedium, have it grow old in the mirror of itself.” […] “Seeing only thinks itself – over and over. Consistency: its rhetoric. Truth: its activity. That cul-de-sac promising a way out.” […] “For the world to remain tangible, we need to ignore it.” [,…] “Belief is an afterthought”
DG: How might he carry on after this? How might he follow a book like this up?
SHIPLEY: “If I’m the point toward which my future and my past are converging, then I can feel them drifting apart.” […] “When horror becomes its own nostalgia, and there’s this death called irony to take its place.” […] “The vanity of returning to anything”
This is the stuff of the abyss; perhaps even of touching its bottom. Indeed, I may write a big game when it comes to societal disaffection and existential dread, but Shipley dives into benthos from which I doubt I’d resurface (when trying to put myself in his shoes here, I feel positive I would have spent at least the first couple days keeping my own spirits up with thoughts like “those nomad robes look super scratchy. I hope they used some decent fabric softener beforehand,” and “I wonder what the guy playing ‘God Killing Himself’ does for a day job. Like, is he off managing a Dairy Queen when he’s not doing this?”). That’s just my nature. I would have to make it a joke, for the sake of my sanity, and needless to say, Shipley is clearly not joking here – certainly no moreso than the uber-dedicated players of director E. Elias Merhige’s Theatreofmaterial were when they got on board with this unparalleled vision of desecration and ruin. I would even go so far as to argue that, just by selecting BEGOTTEN from amongst all other possible films for this mind-meld meditation (and Shipley has said in interviews that he’s made a habit of watching two films a day for years, so he clearly had a wealth of options to choose from), he has anointed it with a reverence that allows his readers no quarter save the claustrophobic quarters he chose for them. If BEGOTTEN implanted my brain with traumatic false memories, Shipley has sought the deeper truth of those memories out. To approach his endeavor on terms other than his own now seems unthinkable. To seek humor in it would be to insult its very purpose.
And even if I did allow myself that early defense mechanism, by day three I’m sure I’d be out of jokes and starting to break a little bit – maybe taking solace in the brief moments where no one is being violated or dismembered – re-girding my senses through the closing nature scenes and the opening title cards before the whole hideous business starts over again. But soon even these small respites would come to represent their own kind of horror – tiny gasps of air to be filled with silent screams of “why did I do this?” and “someone, please stop me!” as I began to identify all-too-closely with the desolate God figure hacking his own guts out, or the spasmodic Son of Earth being burned alive, every hour on the hour onscreen. After that I’d probably spend a day or two crying and rocking, knees to my chest, before eventually slipping down between the psychic bedcovers of OCD and catatonia and making a game out of it somehow – retreating to the panic room of inner childhood – counting bird sounds one time through, bug sounds the next – (intestinal razor slashes one time through, genital hammer blows the next) – seeing which sights and sounds were better represented – pitting stimuli against one another as a way of deflecting them away from myself – seeking distraction in the name of survival. By the second week, it likely wouldn’t even be about BEGOTTEN anymore. It would just be about me, desperately alone with my thoughts; about the choices I’d made, and the things to which I’d dedicated my time and energy. Hell. Even under the gentlest imaginable circumstances – say, looping TGE BIG LEBOWSKI with cheesesteaks and rootbeer on tap – I don’t know if I’d make it. Two weeks is a longass time.
Thank suicidal God then for ferocious, iron-forge minds like Gary J. Shipley, as daring and original a writer as there is working in any genre today. As Merhige, puts it in his preface to YOU WITH YOUR MEMORY ARE DEAD, “I always secretly hoped BEGOTTEN to be more than a movie, to be in fact an initiation for those willing to go that far.” And as my good friend who initiated me into the cult of BEGOTTEN some ten years ago put it when I told her of my plans to revisit the film for this review, “that movie… it tests you.” But where so many horror acolytes (up til now, myself humbly included) have treated the film as a test only – another would-be “film I’ll never watch again” – a notch in the belt amid the endless saga of competitive one-upmanship into which horror fandom all too often devolves – Shipley’s ekphrastic transmutation into text of both BEGOTTEN, and his own sublimated selfhood, marks a singular achievement that defies genre, medium, place, and time – a worthy (and for true BEGOTTEN disciples, indispensable) companion piece to the film itself. As a fellow writer and nascent superfan, before I even picked up Shipley’s book I was already trying to think up some comparable, repeatable experiment of my own – locking myself up for a fortnight with Metal Machine Music say. Or Phantasmagoria. (Or both!) – but as I’ve already established, I don’t have the stones, and even if I did, virtually anything I could come up with would smack of both pale imitation, and callous ripoff artistry. In truth, the only answer that felt like it could possible mean anything was to spend two weeks doing nothing but reading YOU WITH YOUR MEMORY ARE DEAD – the relic that the relic begot – over and over again. From thence, who knows what might next be BEGOTTEN?
-Dave Fitzgerald
For anyone interested in Shipley’s books, please check out some of the fantastic small presses that have published his work. Links below:
YOU WITH YOUR MEMORY ARE DEAD © Inside the Castle – http://www.insidethecastle.org/
Terminal Park © Apocalypse Party – https://www.apocalypse-party.com/
Many others available at Shipley’s own SCHISM Press – https://schismpress.tumblr.com
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