Welcome to KNIVES IN MY EYES
"I got knives in my eyes, I'm going home sick"
This line, from Rian Johnson's debut feature fim Brick, has always stood out to me over the years. It doesn't have much significance within the plot or posess any metaphorical meaning, it's just how Brennan, our scrappy teenage gumshoe ends a phone call. Maybe I just like how it sounds. Johnson's trick of taking the syntax from the classic noir films of the 1930-40s and the hardboiled detective novels that inspired them, stright from the mouth of Phillip Marlowe, and inserting in the vocabulary of contemorary, Southern-California high schoolers lends the unfolding mystery a hightened, melodramatic edge. It's almost lyrical in way, you could imagine hearing some of these sung in a grungy house show, the smell of cheap beer and sweat enveloping the crowd as they rythmicly crash around the dim basement to crashing drums and distorted guitar.
But there's more to the dialogue than just style. In Brick, words are weapons, tools for it's denizens to navigate and survive in this world. Mastery over this pulpy lingo, is the turest sign of intellegance in this story (the best exaple of this, in contrast, is the dumb jock Brad Bramish, who tells the same repetative and reductive story throughout the film and, when confronted by Brennan, his most clever comeback is just saying "Yeah?!" over and over). Characters use this hardboiled word play to in different ways to meet different ends: Brennan uses it to investigate, to poke and prod, Laura uses it the build a facade and mask her true nature, The Pin uses it to manipulate and control others. The archaic jargon forces audiences to focus and pay attention to every line to decipher meaning and intent, thus further drawing them into the mystery and the cinematic world around it.
So that's a brief explanation behind the name of this blog/newsletter/whatever and a little taste of what you can expect from here on out. This is Knives In My Eyes, a place I can share my writing on film, probably my biggest passion. But, I'll be writing about lot of other things too, like television, books, comics, video games, or whatever! It's my website, I make the rules.
Some introductions is probably in order: my name is Harrison Webb, a writer in his mid-twenties from Ohio with an asperation to write for film or television in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, I currently work at a local independent cinema and, naturally, watch a lot of movies. So I figured, between working and writing scripts, I might as well write about the things I watch and much more.
That's the general idea for this site anyways. After that, the goal is to publish two posts week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I have several ideas for the weeks to come, but I want to stress I'm not intersted in writing "reviews". This is a place of analysis and coversation with a work of art, not a place to assign a film a numerical rank or letter grade. I want to write about works that intrest me, and if my writing in turn intrigues you, then I feel that's enough of a recomondation to you. On that note, I intend to keep things mostly positive on here. There's already enough negativity online and I'm not one to seek out bad experiences on purpose. So, if you seek takedowns and scorching hot takes, I sugesst searching elsewhere.
In any case, I want to thank you for joining me on the start of this exciting new adventure. All posts will be free for everyone to read and subscribe to. You can subscribe to our newsletter for free and/or follow out Twitter page here.
