Analysis: “Earl,” by Earl Sweatshirt. (2010)

My main man Malcolm over at Destructural sent me this video by Earl Sweatshirt from Odd Future and asked what I thought about the bodies in it. Here’s what I came up with:

I would say, if the bodies in the video could be considered revolting, it is because they are in revolt. The bleeding, and especially the vomiting of blood, but also the lost teeth and the fingernail scene at the end, imply, in their abjectness, a rejection of the body by itself. I find it fitting how similar the fingernail scene in Earl’s video is to the fingernail scene in Cronenberg’s The Fly, because Cronenberg’s film is also about abjection, a body in revolt, altered states, and the terror of being trapped in the materiality of one’s body- as that body fails.

In this sense, the video captures one of the more difficult and terrifying aspects of an uncomfortably intense drug experience: because we are our bodies, to feel trapped inside of one’s body as it fails is to experience the immediacy of one’s materialty while at the same time feeling isolated and at a distance from it, as though our bodies are not us but an Other that constrains and in some cases attacks “us” from the outside.

One takes too much speed and it feels as though one’s heart will burst; one trips on Benadryl and experiences the contradictory (extremely unpleasant) feelings of both needing to move, as if electrified, and being unable to do so, as if one’s body had turned to immovable lead;  one ingests too much of a strong marijuana edible, and it feels as if one’s internal temperature is rising too high, while at the same time as if one’s body is being compressed from without; one smokes salvia and experiences the intense “hot pins-and-needles” feeling of the comedown. In each case, the overwhelming desire for the unpleasantness to end, and the feelings of fear and impotence that arise from one’s inability to do anything about it, from the knowledge that one must simply “wait it out” until one’s body returns to “normal,” can only be described as a feeling of trapped-ness.

Which is, of course, psychosis: an ecstatic fragmentation of the body-as-self into the body versus the self, a sense of alienation toward one’s very corporeality: perhaps for its ineffability (this description could never fully convey the experience), what might be describable as the reduction or dissolution of oneself into a kind of pre-symbolic ecstacy. It is the shattering of the mirror, and all of the horror that shattering entails. And it is also a feeling, especially when derived from stronger, more dangerous drugs, of closeness to death, of approaching it. Director A.G. Roja’s video also captures this particularly well.