I have a recurring nightmare. It comes to me fairly sporadically, but when it does, I’m certain to be torn away from the nurture of deep sleep. From what I understand, I’ve never screamed, been caught hyperventilating or found my body dappled in flop sweat, but it’s one of those rare dreams that I can remember in detail. It involves ascending a diving board at the local swimming baths of my youth, Edmonton Green Leisure Centre in North London, that has long since been bulldozed. Jumping in from the top diving board was always a rush, but after hearing that someone had had an accident there, I became more reluctant to do so.
Soon after, I started having nightmares that would culminate in me jumping off the top diving board at Edmonton Green pool and the water would drain away as I plummeted. The split-second impact that came from colliding with the hard tiled floor was the moment that would always cause me to wake up. I’d never get to see what I looked like with my body crumpled and mangled. Maybe it’s for the best…
I haven’t dreamed of the diving board for a long time, but it returned to me recently on the back of seeing Yorgos Lanthimos’ new film, Kinds of Kindness. I won’t say why, but you take a guess you’ll be right. But while watching the film, I was moved to physically flinch from the screen. The suggestion of what was to come was enough to make me not want to look, and my body seemed to spasm in a way that was entirely involuntary, as if my dormant dreams and the movie on the screen were interacting with one another. In all frankness, I was tickled by the experience, and thought that in my jaded old age, so little art manages to provoke such an extreme physical reaction that isn’t either laughing or crying.
I got to thinking back to other instances where my body instinctively rejected a piece of art, would not allow me to view it. Drawing a blank, I decided to open up this strange quirk to friends and colleagues, and so what follows is a small dossier of the film moments trigger a feeling of intense upset.
1 THE WRECKING CREW
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE — 1946
WORDS BY MIKE MCCAHILL
At this stage, very little unnerves me whenever I set foot in the dark. Once you’ve witnessed Pierce Brosnan murdering ‘S.O.S.’ in and the bulk of the Gaspar Noé filmography, you’ve got coping mechanisms for pretty much everything. That said, there is one kind of scene I’ve always found uniquely hard to watch: those sequences that involve characters caught in the depths of despair physically wrecking either a long-tended personal project –
