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Orf, you've amazed me! Thank you.
I can certainly understand what you've said, and as art, the movie remains "open for viewing". To experience art, one needs to look for it. One needs to be aware. There can be art in anything, but is everything art?
As a work of art, an atonal piece of music can stand in it's own right as a testament to destruction. When viewed in that light, a person can listen to it and attempt to understand it's chaos in that context.
Without that context, is there anything in it that moves the human spirit? It may be created by human thought, but human emotion seems, if not raped, than wholly discarded.
Can any medium that seeks to show us the range of emotions provoked by war, rape, or other tragedy do so in a completely detached and remote manner without addressing the emotions and still be considered valid? When the listener listens to the atonal cacophony of Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima for 52 Strings (never heard it) are they supposed to feel emotions and passions? Or is it entirely theoretical, to be bandied about in words and thoughts only?
A - If it is to be felt, than it is playing on our emotions without normal musical constructs. I can get the feeling of "annoyed" by listening to fingernails on a chalkboard, but is that music? Or does it just need a title for it to become "valid" in some measure?
Regardless of how it is supposed to evoke emotion - it is doing it artificially. We, the listeners, are not being raped, incinerated or otherwise mutilated as we listen. We are being induced to feel emotion despite our surroundings. While a melody would ruin the "theme" of an atonal composition, would it hurt the message the theme is being used to illustrate?
B - If it is entirely theoretical, than why have emotions crept into it at all? If a viewer is annoyed by an atonal barrage, or disgusted at a rape scene, then the pristene theoretical aether in which the message floats is destroyed. When speaking of such theoretical matters, such emotion becomes baggage that must be shed before proper thoughts can be concieved.
After all is said and done, I think it's extremely tough to criticize what "Irreversible" has done. It displays a theme of destruction, and in my views, it does so in a destructive manner. I believe it was intended to do so due to the unfliching nature of the violence and the one-take, one-pass style of filmmaking which draws the viewer in and places them at the scene. I think that the theme of destruction was played out very well because the viewer - me - felt violated. It was intentional and thematic. Hard to complain about - art typically strives for such cohesive wholesomeness.
By failing to see it's emotion, I think you are missing an integral part of the movie Noe sought to create. That's not to say what you are experiencing is inherently wrong, but I don't think it's what Noe intended. Only Noe knows for sure.
It's a shame that such thematic wholesomeness isn't applied to prettier topics. What properties would such a piece have?
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