it felt like a kiss – part two

(Part One)

We enter an office, with desks and filing cabinets full of reports of surveillance. By this stage, we’re catching up with the previous batch of audience members, who are examining evidence even more thoroughly than my group, and the groups blur and overlap.

There’s an interrogation room, what might be a torture room, a television studio, make-up room and film set, all eerily empty apart from the occasional mannequin, all with bulging eyes and often in strange poses, sometimes lying collapsed on the floor or waiting expectantly in the corner of a corridor. Many rooms have screens of one kind or another, showing loops of film – a close up of a woman with someone’s hand squeezing her cheeks, scenes from a beauty contest or a napalm victim burning to death.

Finally we enter the cinema, decorated like a cabaret theatre. The film on constant loop tells us of America’s interference in international politics – the various bizarre attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, giving arms to Saddam Hussein to set Iran and Iraq against each other, a coup in Africa, Nixon visiting Moscow, bin Laden’s early days, the forming of Lee Harvey Oswald’s character and the assassination of Kennedy, the jumping of the HIV virus from ape to human in Africa. The editing is fast, sometimes too fast to get more than a vague impression of violent images. I’m automatically suspicious of fast editing, because it relies on generalities rather than coherent argument, so I feel removed.

Interspersed with all of this footage is film of Americans dancing and the explanation of the production’s title, which comes from a song by Carole King, who discovered that her boyfriend had been regularly beating up their babysitter, leading to the lines, “He hit me and it felt like a kiss. He hit me and I knew he loved me”. The babysitter’s name was Eve, and she later released a song of her own, The Locomotion, under the name Little Evie. Hearing it brings a shiver to your skin. Ambivalence abounds.

To be continued

Tags: it felt like a kiss, punchdrunk