This morning at the stop

Some sort of shells of nuts spread over a large area at the stop. The four darker spots are furthermore spits. Not the first time this happened, by the way.

M&M: The Hour of the Lynx

A young man arrives in a snowy small town and seemingly without reason brutally kills an elderly couple in a house. The man, by the name of Drengen, is caught and brought to the high security area of a prison. There the young psychologist Lisbet does an experiment by giving the inmates pets. Among them Drengen, who gets a red furred cat. Another inmate gets jealous during yard exercise time and throws the cat over the fence. Surprisingly Drengen has bonded a lot with the cat and ends up killing the other inmate in anger. The cat is found again. But Lisbet has to abandon the experiment. Since it's the last time with the pets, Drengen gets the cat back to say good-bye. But he claims that it's not his cat. He's convinced that god is speaking to him through the cat and pushing him to commit suicide. Lisbet doesn't know what else to do but involving the priest Helen.

Drengen is totally withdrawn and there's nothing they can get out of him that makes much sense. Helen persuades a guard to lock her in with Drengen in his cell over night. In the night Drengen starts talking and things start to make sense when he begins to talk about his past. You've got to watch yourself to find out what he's telling. The original title of this Danish-Swedish movie by the way is I lossens time.

As you can see above, Drengen is a young man, who is not afraid to use brutal force. So this movie isn't a totally easy one. Apart from those two murders however, the movie impresses by being markedly calm and makes one wonder, even well after the closing credits are over, about topics like blame, forgiveness and belief.

By the way, the source material for this movie was a theatre play The Hour of the Lynx (original title: Lodjurets Timma) by the Swedish writer Per Olov Enquist and is a play for five people, which premiered in April 1988 in Stockholm. The premiere for the German version was in 1992 in Ingolstadt. In 1991 the Hessische Rundfunk (Hessian Broadcast) and Sachsen Radio (Saxony Radio) together produced a radio play version of the theatre play.

The sad face

Caution: This entry contains Watchmen spoilers!

In January 2018 a long time and good internet friend of mine (you know who you are) and I came to talk about masks in an online game and consequently also masks more generally. I told her that I have a Scream mask that glows in the dark. (I still owe that friend a picture of that glowing mask. Back then I didn't get a good picture of that, because I keep the mask in the wardrobe in the dark.) I showed her also masks, of which I was thinking of maybe getting version 1 oder version 2.They come closest to the moving Rorschach masks given the options available now. The friend wrote to me then that she had just rewatched Rorschach's death. "he looks like one of his masks inkblots on the snow".

I wrote to her under the title "Rorschach mask ink blots" the following text:

Rorschach's mask is not only moving, those blots are linked to his emotions.

This is one of the cards the psychiatrist shows him when he's caught:

This is the vision or memory he gets from seeing it, his mother (a prostitute) kissing the client. The boy sees them, worries about his mother and speaks to her, which makes the client walk away without paying the mother and she slaps her son:

We never see the full body image of them, like we do on the card, but it should be close enough to get the connection.

Rorschach's obviously false answer to what he sees: “Some nice flowers.“

This is the last image that shows on his mask shortly before his death and before he takes it off:

This is what's left of him, after Doctor Manhattan killed him:

If anything, this is his “sad“ face. It just has to be. Of course it's a sad moment in his childhood, but the image it makes on his face makes sense after we see that memory, at least it makes sense to me. He sees them close and kissing and later gets slapped. That is sad for a boy. And later he knows that Doctor Manhattan will kill him. He has to. They both know it. Another sad moment in Rorschach's life. The remains then form the only shape that makes sense.

There are other ink blots both in the book and movie that are related to certain emotions. But the sad face is the most obvious one of them all and gets repeated several times, as you can see. It's fairly obvious once you pay attention. Most people don't notice.

Check ebay for “Rorschach t-shirt” there are some with that very image for sale, too.

At that time I referred to the movie mostly. In the book there are other situations as well, in which more similar shadows are cast from different people and the Knot Tops spray their tag on walls, which is a very similar figure and on watchmen.fandom.com and whitneyblogs.weebly.com is called "The Hiroshima Lovers" following a comment the psychiatrist makes who evaluates Rorschach.

In memory of Walter Joseph Kovacs (March, 21 1940 - November, 2 1985)