The girl chewing gum
Note! Read nothing about this video until you’ve watched at least the first few minutes.
There was a moment in first watching John Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum that I burst out laughing. Maybe you did too?
It’s that moment when you realise the narrator is completely delusional. What at first seems like his confident control of all the action taking place is, some minutes in, exposed as a hopeless fantasy of control.
I was laughing out of recognition.
This is me, in my life, pretending to be in control. I think of myself as directing the action, but in fact I’m simply doing a running commentary on things that are happening of their own accord.
This is one insight of Buddhism. That there isn’t any essential ‘me’ that is running the show. Things happen or don’t happen based on an entire complex of causes and conditions. While we can influence the way life unfolds, any sense of being in control is indeed a joke!
“Like many other film works made by British artists in the 1970s, The Girl Chewing Gum was made in ideological opposition to mainstream cinema. A primary aim of the film was to undermine its inherent illusionism, drawing attention to its own artifice (rather than the conventional practice of attempting to disguise it). The film draws attention to the cinematic apparatus by denying its existence, treating representation as an absolute reality in its own right. It achieves this by using a voice-over to subvert the reading of the image, marking the beginnings of my ongoing love/hate relationship with the power of the word. ”
