On watching Hammer's Curse of the Werewolf (and initial thoughts on mereological nihilism, following a question):
When causality breaks down, when there's no determinate linkage between instances of suffering, between the beggar made to dance and the mute servant's non-scream, when blaming the decaying remnants of the old feudal order cannot give account, in the moments before the ascendant middle-class voice makes of this drift an enclosure and narrative of temperance and wholeness to be managed, what intercedes is just ornament, joyous and fraught elaborations of distraction that promise neither new directions of form nor content that is supposed to matter: wall sconces as murder weapons, insistent Russ Meyer cleavage shoved center-screen, senseless monologues of hairy palmed bowlcut young boys, meerschaum pipes with carved intricacies we can neither ignore nor discern...
The story of the film, if any, is not that of order lost and restored, but of an invitation to look in the absence of such an order, an invitation that falls on steadily deaf ears, as the world it comes to describe is grayer, more managed, not bursting out at us, giving the illusion that it had some coherence all along, that there is reason behind the rage. The werewolf, as such, isn't the buried animalistic rage, but the elaborated gap itself - ornament's revenge at the instrumental - between the explanations given and the incoherence uncaptured.
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