“Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so? Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls – which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think?”
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
i just saw the riot club and wow it’s so reminiscent of the secret history
like the aesthetic but also the plotline and the characters and the idea of rich white boys who are so arrogant and entitled because they’ve always been given everything they want - not by their parents necessarily but by society, and it’s heightened in the riot club because they’re straight as well.
~ rich, straight, white, conventionally attractive, english boys ~ like, one could not possibly find beings who are more privileged than this and so they’ve never even had to consider the idea of negative consequences for their actions. they genuinely think they can just do and have anything and everything they want and the very concept of consequences is alien and perplexing to them -
the whole movie just makes me think very much of when francis says “i mean, this man was not voltaire that we killed. but still. it’s a shame.” they acknowledge that killing him was wrong after the fact (even though the boys in the riot club have such a lack of impulse control that it never even crossed their mind during the act itself - similar to the greek class when they have the bacchanal) but like tsh the only thing they are really worried about is how to get away with it. they’re never racked with remorse or guilt as one would expect, and it’s partially because they consider the person they killed to be so much lesser than them so it didn’t really matter.
they don’t really have regrets for their actions because they’ve never had to deal with consequences; everything they do can just be swept away by money and privilege. it’s like the riot club alumnus says at the end; “people like us don’t make mistakes” - they don’t make mistakes because 1. their actions are always very purposeful and 2. anything they do that would be considered a mistake can be smoothed over afterwards with a few quiet words and a well-known surname and a handful of notes passed quietly over behind closed doors.
the secret history variant covers: camilla macaulay.
‘By the time you see this announcement,’ he says, ‘I will be dead.’ He goes on to say that it wasn’t a career in law enforcement that killed him but two packs of cigarettes a day. I saw this at about three o'clock in the morning, alone in my apartment, on a black-and-white set with lots of interference. White noise and snow. He seemed to be speaking directly at me, right out of the television set. For a moment I was disoriented, seized by panic; could a ghost embody itself through wavelengths, electronic dots, a picture tube? What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?’ - The Secret History by Donna Tartt
race imboden » francis abernathy | “Angular and elegant, he was precariously thin, with nervous hands and a shrewd albino face and a short, fiery mop of the reddest hair I had ever seen. I thought (erroneously) that he dressed like Alfred Douglas, or the Comte de Montesquiou: beautiful starchy shirts with French cuffs; magnificent neckties; a black greatcoat that billowed behind him as he walked and made him look like a cross between a student prince and Jack the Ripper.”