And she’s usually the virginal figure, of course. Power is given to people who usually don’t get much in other movies, right?ĭBBut there’s that whole thing that Carol Clover wrote in Men, Women, and Chain Saws about “The Final Girl,” you know, and how she emerges in the 1970s as this archetypal character that then recurs with great frequency.
Sometimes I don’t even know what it is.īut back to horror movies, I think they also appealed to me because, at least in a certain subgenre, the women in the films are more powerful than in other genres, and in general, power functions differently across the narrative arc. There’s a story before and after what you’re seeing, but it’s not given away. Paintings work with time differently from those forms, but I try to explore where they could converge I like the idea of viewing the paintings like they’re in the middle of a movie, almost like a still. LBBecause my first loves were books and movies, I think a lot in terms of those mediums. Which brings up another thing I wanted to ask you: what’s your relationship to narrative? I even went back and read Ovid’s Metamorphosis, to come at it from another angle-these themes of being in the middle of a transformation. And in horror movies there are these transformation scenes, transformations of the body, that are so key, which I see in your work. LBI know what you mean, but because I love horror movies so much, to me it’s kind of a compliment.ĭBIt’s true. I couldn’t believe somebody would call those figures deformed. So to watch this familiar terrain turn into this horror around the mother and the children, where everything goes through a metamorphosis and people are deformed, was really powerful.ĭBIt’s interesting that you use that word “deformed.” When I was reviewing various press coverage of your work, people kept using that word, which I found kind of offensive. All the adults there looked like those people in that movie, I had exactly the snowsuit that the kids wear in it. When I was a kid in Switzerland, we used to go to a town in the mountains that looked a lot like the world in that film-the snow, the buildings, the 1970s fashion. In part because of his engagement with “body horrors,” if we can call it that? You’ve brought up David Cronenberg’s The Brood, and Cronenberg was an incredible influence on me when I was young. Dodie BellamyReading through some of your earlier interviews, I was surprised at the resonance between my experience and your experience.