Seen and Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist

by Jasun Horsley

Popular culture mirrors the human soul and it can't lie about the state it is in—which is what makes it an essential guide on the quest for self-knowledge. Seen and Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist is a series of autobiographical explorations which slowly uncover the author's secret life to himself. Revisiting his former writings on film and deconstructing old texts, he engages in a literary dialogue with his past as he struggles to bust open his fantasy life and reach the truth behind it. Moving into and through the cultural, social and political dimensions of movies, the book maps previously undiscovered psychological and spiritual realms of the movie-going experience to create an engaging, thought-provoking, utterly original narrative about the essential acts of movie-watching, writing, and self-examination.

Genres: Nonfiction, Film, Art, Autobiography

317 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 30, 2015

About the author

Jasun Horsley is an author of several books on popular culture, psychology, and high strangeness. He is a transmedia storyteller, independent scholar, and existential detective. He lives and farms in Spain.

Artist’s Statement:

Books and things (the good ones) are like half-drawn maps of independent explorations into undiscovered lands. But to map the unknown means that first you have to get lost.

I seem to have been born that way: lost, with a question mark over my head. Creativity has been a way to fathom my own place in existence—the idea of writing for an audience is one I have always had difficulty with. Yet creative expression is like a two-way bridge between the inside and the outside, and between the one and the many.

Writing (fiction or nonfiction, there’s no difference) is an experiment in identity construction and deconstruction. It’s a way to take myself apart and see what I am made of, to have a meaningful dialogue with my unconscious, and, over time, to isolate and magnify the voice of my essential Self, to give it body—a body of evidence that is also (almost incidentally) a body of work.

The dialogue so far has been characterized by my fascination for mainstream “pop” culture (especially movies), on the one hand, and for high strangeness (political conspiracies, paranormal phenomena, Ufos, autism, and the like), on the other.

The map I am ending up with is of this no man’s land, this mysterious area of overlap between the mainstream and the margins, the inside and the outside, the seen and the unseen.

Reviews

[Ann Diamond · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a review. It's just some reactions from the rollercoaster. One reason this book is so inspiring is that it would never get past the Canadian censors -- it's too honest, too quirky, often brilliant, and just too much of everything.

I've finished reading it for now. It was a bit like outdoor camping in gale-force winds. Even now, my ears are ringing and I'm searching for ways to explain what it's really "about."

I took a break after the chapter which is really a brilliant review of The Counsellor, another film I haven't seen (directed by Ridley Scott) that did badly at the box office. Now I want to see it, if only to find out if I can sit through it. Evidently it ends horrifically with the suggested torture-murder of Penelope Cruz, just another victim of Mexican drug wars and the cross-border snuff film trade. I stopped reading because all the violence was beginning to seem too 'personal' -- it seems Jasun Horsley has no other subject or obsession, and I'm grateful in way, that he has made it his mission to view and write about films which depict extreme violence, often sexualized and directed against women. I thank him for that because it means I can go on skipping those films, or just read about them through Horsley's eyes.

I took a breather from SEEN & NOT SEEN to read The Story of O. over Valentine's Day -- the timing was unintentional. The Story of O. also shocked me, in a different way (I wrote a brief review of it at Goodreads but I've since had afterthoughts that I'd like to explore some other time). Usually I don't like to be shocked, but I'm deciding i could get used to it. I thought Story of O. would allow me to consider the subject of sexualized violence against women from a female perspective, and it did but I wasn't prepared for Pauline Reage's detached, poetic style -- so much the opposite of Horsley's. I've nearly concluded Story of O. is a feminist novel -- at least, in a backhanded way it is, as it depicts men as monsters and women as utter dupes and victims, and cold-bloodedly moves toward some inevitable climax that never really arrives. Same subject, but a totally opposite approach since Reage leaves herself out of the narrative whereas Horsley inserts himself everywhere.

For example in SEEN & NOT SEEN we learn that while watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre he sustained an erection throughout. That's amazing -- I mean, it's a detail but it tends to stick in your mind. You wonder why, and you read on to find out. That little detail comes up again in the penultimate chapters about Jasun's brother, the famous English suicide-artist Sebastian Horsley who died of an overdose in 2010. I had never heard of Sebastian although he was famous enough to be interviewed on Q by Jian Gomeshi. I watched five minutes of that interview before I had to shut it down -- it reminded me of things I can't quite name or put my finger on, and five minutes was all I could take of that video.

The same is not true of Jasun's writing which is fluid, self-aware, and revealing of nuances that usually get left out of film criticism. I don't know why, but I keep thinking of Pico Iyer -- whom I can't seem to bring myself to read -- as the possible antithesis of Jasun Horsley -- I'll have to get back to you on that.

Horsley is smooth, but he's not slick. He's cool, but not cold. His prose is weirdly naked, and that could be why it's hard to put down. You think "this boy really needs an editor" but you don't have time to care, since he keeps dragging you down a path that always circles back to some personal trauma. I think that's the hook. You want to know what happened to him, back in childhood, that made him like this. And also, what was it that destroyed his whole family, the nuclear one, the father-mother-brother trio with Jasun the survivor who ran away and lived to tell the tale. That's the crazy subtext to all this, I think, but I'm having trouble being objective because for the last six months I've got immersed in Jasun's online world.

Come to think of it, it's unlike any other world I've ever been immersed in. I don't often get immersed in anything because deep down I don't like getting lost -- but in this case, it's like reading Alice in Wonderland at age 8 all over again. It's so farflung. Obviously, Jasun Horsley has had nothing better to do for most of his life than explore. Near as I can figure, he grew up rich and neglected. First he explored comic books and movies, the more violent the better. Then he ran away and explored America through the lens of Clint Eastwood, Pauline Kael and spaghetti westerns. Then he nearly died of love and ran to Morocco where he met Paul Bowles. After that, he tried to reconnect with his famous-notorious brother, friend of criminals, darling of the London degenerate art scene,, before leaving for Guatemala to become a shaman. I'm sure I'm leaving out a lot -- at some point he even tries to make in Hollywood as he's writing scripts along with film criticism. He goes into all this in SEEN & NOT SEEN -- obviously he can't get away from it -- it's his life story and it's fascinating -- not in the way that old Hollywood movies are, with a causal structure that unfolds inevitably like an old-fashioned sentence -- but more like a Batman movie with special effects, or like BRAZIL (which I found hard to sit through) --

And yet, you can't help feeling he's searching for an ending, almost in the classical sense of a finale that will tie all this together for better or worse or a bit of both.

[Guy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Horsley starts this book starts off with a clearly stated intention that resonates with me:

… how have I used movies to create a social identity, and how have I become a prisoner to that ‘image-inary’ self? How???
All roads lead to enlightenment, or to the opposite thereof. Movies fulfill more or less the same function attributed to myths. They are blueprints for the soul’s journey, ‘user manuals’ for the world of incarnation. With this in mind I decided to recycle my old writings from The Blood Poets[: A Cinema of Savagery, 1958-1999: Millennial Blues, from "Apocalypse Now" to "The Edge" v. 2 (Filmmakers Series, No. 68, published 1999)] into a new, briefer and punchier format.” I wanted to focus on the ways movies matched and mapped my own psychological patterns. As soon as I began to delve into the material, however, I found more than I’d bargained for” (p6).

And the reader will too. This is an excruciatingly honest self examination. Where he turns his eyes to look at his writing he leaves no stone unturned, his personal shadow left unlit.

The examination begins with his honest look at his adoration of Clint Eastwood, including dressing up and roleplaying. It has a great innocence, this remembrance, even while deeply examining the mores of idol worship and its purposeful promulgation and its effect on people like himself. The movie that changed his life forever was ‘Where Eagles Dare’. I was actually drawn to his writing about this very strongly, so strongly that I find myself wanting to watch that movie again, despite ‘Dare’ having been a great teenage disappointment and a movie I was quite content to die before having watched again. And his praise and fascinating critical analysis of ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ and the society around it has sparked a curiosity in me to see that and the sequels, something I have somehow managed to not do so far in my life.

It is when he looks at another important movie, ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacres’ that we begin to see that Horsely’s self-examination is to be unflinching. His look at his past reaction to ‘Chainsaw’ begins his quest’s expansion into some of the dark experiences of his childhood. “I found the film horrifying and deeply disturbing when I first saw it. Later, on at least one occasion, I found the brutality arousing — which in a way was even more disturbing” (p187). The question he examines is why was this a successful movie? Why is it that “... sometimes audiences cheered the action”? Ahh, that is the question. What in us turned perhaps the most brutal film ever created into a massive hit?

This question and his unflagging attention to find the truth in himself and us brings him to examine with mature eyes childhood experiences that informed his original writing of the The Blood Poets and his insatiable(?) appetite for video nasties, violent pornography, movies in general and Pauline Kael’s movie criticism. As he continues to explore the forgotten hallways of his childhood home and upbringing, he discovers the degree to which the social mores around his childhood condoned and perpetuated pedophila at a shockingly open level.

Horsley boldly steps into the tabu of organized child abuse and how that touched his and his brother’s lives when they were children. And what he leaves open is to what extent is that true today? His answer: “Why are we sitting here watching a simulation of reality on [a] movie screen? Because reality is what we want to escape from, and to do that, the simulation needs to be convincing enough for us to mistake it for real” (p96). The suggestion is that the level of sexual movie violence, then, is required to help us escape the violence we deny is our reality.

But that’s jumping to the end, and in that ending there are some very graphic images.

In between he talks about the role of the movie critic, especially as it pertains to his favourite critic, Pauline Kael. He openly ached to be the writer she was, and the quality of his writing was enough to begin a correspondence with her shortly before she died. And he looks at his Kael fascination too. And this is fascinating, and made doubly so as he interweaves his own struggles with her, her open hostility towards his idol Eastwood as stand-in for her absent father, movies and his ache to be a writer.

I will not be watching a movie in any way like I had done before reading this book. I will be looking at my own reactions and wondering at them, and to what extent is that plain manipulation to keep me distracted from the truth of things, or a myth designed in such a way as to hide the truth in the ‘plain’ site of symbol and myth.

And finally, this is very well written. And the research supporting the darkness he found lurking in the background of his life is meticulous and plentiful. It makes one look at not just movies with a different eye, but all aspects of what we think of as 'normal' and 'healthy' life and the evolution (devolution?) of society.

[Qing Wang · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started this book while in the middle of The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, not surprisingly that they have some shared vocabulary. If I had read any of the occult literature, maybe I would recognize more.

Back to the book. The reason it appealed to me in the first place is the last two words in the title: movie, autist. I have been doing a lot moviegoing in recent years with my teenager son in an attempt to connect with him and find a way for him to connect with the world. The first book I read when I was not sure about my choice was The Hero With a Thousand Faces. It's kind of an affirmation that there are values in the superhero stories and one does need some knowledge to see it.

Seen and Not Seen does not start with a promising prospect. Actually I had the impulse to throw it away at the beginning. Why? It offends when people talk about being autistic without any diagnosis but only as kind of a proof that they are different and feel being excluded from the world. I had the suspect of myself once and even went so far as to take some online test and found out that I'm just more introversive. While here the author is using it in the figurative way, though he does present a few half-hearted evidence why he thinks himself being autistic. But this is bit off the topic even though the word is in the title and conspicuous.

I decided to read it as some contemporary movie magazines to review a past age. When I was in my twenties I also watched Clint Eastwood and knew a little bit about western movies. It's fine when you do not need to commit to it and not taking it too seriously. I though I would rate it 3-star.

Things began to change when it comes to the end, the black magic, the brother who had "killed the inner child". It began to take a shape of warning, with real-life examples so horrifying as to be surreal.

Yet I guess the propaganda of the capitalism is still better than the communism counterpart, if only because the former goes deeper in darkness. Even if A.A.Milne failed to connect with his son in reality, he did succeed in making it true in the dreamland, warming up the lost boys. And one cannot help but imagine that deep in his heart, he wants to do that in reality too, if only he can.

[Oliver Wood · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seen and Not Seen is a personal account of what happens when movies cease to be entertainment and become surrogate caregivers. As we learn, Jasun was 'raised' by parents more narcissistic than nurturing, with little time to fix wheels on bikes or build model yachts, or any other small but significant acts that together form a picture of a caring loving parent. Left mostly to raise himself, Jasun is forced to seek guidance from the next best thing closest to hand; the variously lovable and roguish characters he sees on the TV.

We hence follow the journey of a misguided (unguided?) teen as he substitutes gfs for Betamax, and friendship for a full on autistic obsession with such cult heroes and anti-heroes as Dirty Harry and Travis Bickle. ‘Autistic’ isn’t a slur here, it should be emphasised. It’s a term adopted and frequently applied by the author himself. It is Jasun’s belief that, by shutting himself up in his room with only a TV and a video recorder for company, he was exhibiting an underlying and - as yet - undetected condition. Movie obsession was an early symptom of autism; a condition which lead him to substitute his awkwardness for the cock-sure quick-handed cool of the characters of movie fare.

Although I like the idea of a book on film where the significance of a film is measured purely in terms of its personal impact, cultural impact almost completely ignored, there are a number of problems with placing autism at its centre. First: Jasun has not been formerly diagnosed. His affirmation of his autism is really little more than a suspicion; guided by his wife’s feelings on the matter, as well as a book cited called Autism and Spirituality by Olga Bogdashina. I can’t say much about a wife's intuition, but going by the passages from the text cited, it sounds very much like René Girard's mimetic theory, rehashed and spiritualised with some psychiatric jargon thrown in. Girard, for those who might not know, believed that all social roles were paradigmatic of role playing, further: that copying other people is rampant at all levels of society, with every person imitating someone else, doing so in order to make ourselves understood without becoming the subject of intense study. A genuine individual, so the theory goes, would soon be discarded as inexplicable; hence why even eccentrics tend not to stray too far from accepted norms.

The point is, René Girard didn’t think imitating had anything to do with mental disorders, much less anything as specific as autism. We might say "Who cares?", but if Girard was right - and I personally see it as almost self-evident that he was - we would have to accept along with Jasun’s conclusion that he was autistic because of his imitating of others, that we are all autistic as well - which would clearly be unpalatable.

About these concerns, Jasun has a waiting response. His copying, crucially, was carried out consciously and explicitly, derived almost exclusively from televised (i.e. exaggerated) depictions. This makes his copying different: where other people do it subconsciously and artfully, he did it with the mind in full play; focusing on the wrong sources, looking to imitate individuals who did not, in any real sense, actually exist.

A fair distinction to draw but, on further scrutiny, not one that really stacks up. It's virtually a guarantee that if Girard was right and all humans are in the copying business, that most people would want to imitate those with the greatest social status - which in our culture and time is obviously going to be a celebrity rather than a banker or judge. No coincidence then, that this is almost exactly what we find: neurotypicals and non-neurotypicals alike having gone through at least one phase of copying x popstar's haircut, or doing 'that' walk, 'that' voice of a particular actor. It’s strange that Jasun would fail to see how typical this kind of imitation is given that his brother, Sebastian Horsley, was the epitome of the more general kind of fraud: someone socially able, but ultimately incapable of doing anything without someone else having done it first. We start to wonder what gives.

Sebastian Horsley, for those who don’t know, was a dandy and putative artist. He spent a life trying on other personalities like most of us would try on hats, and his masterwork (Dandy in the Underworld) chronicles his frustrated attempts to find an identity that fits. As Jasun himself says, the personality he came up with was really a “Frankenstein's monster, a collection of old body parts” - taken from renowned personalities including, amongst others: “Oscar Wilde, Francis Bacon and Quentin Crisp”. So, for someone so obviously looking for an identity in the same places as Jasun again, it’s odd that Jasun doesn't think he brother was autistic too. Either Jasun thinks his autism is more than just self-conscious copying, or he thinks his brother is a special case - a socially-adept autistic, if such a thing even exists.

Personally, I don’t think autism is anything more than a social construct. But to explain why would mean derailing this review, and I probably wouldn’t offer anything more interesting that hasn’t already been said by people better qualified. I do, however, accept that Jasun’s extreme copying of celebrities wasn’t normal, and I do believe that, by foisting larger than life characters upon the public, the movie industry was partly to blame. But the crucial thing is, everyone does this growing up. That in itself isn’t abnormal. What is strange in Jasun’s case is that he was able to wave the plastic sword and don the crimplene cape well into adulthood. Why? Not because he was autistic, I believe, but because he was raised in a house where it was allowed. Where most other young adults would have been marched down the job centre, he was bundled off with a handsome inheritance - free to luxuriate in Scorsese World and Kronenburg Land within his all-expenses-paid New York apartment.

Admittedly, there is some indication upbringing might have been a factor. In fact, it is when the book divulges the mad hatter antics of life at High Hall that we get a welcome dose of reality, even if it is a reality unlike anything most of us would recognise. Too often, however, we drift back into DSM territory - where personal experience is dispensed with in favour of personality 'types'. And the more Jasun sees himself as a category rather than a person, the less convincing the writing. If this is a book whose aim is "unravelling the layers of his fake identity, stitched together out of movies", the psychiatric category he labels himself too quickly becomes another fugue identity. “I am this”, says Jasun, and never questions any of the moments where he isn’t. We have simply moved from one kind of caricature to another, with the same pathological need for hard boundaries in spite of the oft-stated desire to self-dissolve. Since this is a book not just about deconstructing the self as contaminated by film. It is just as much about deconstructing the self as shaped by its natural home of the body. The allure of ego death, as defined via numerously cited enlightenment-practitioners, runs heavy through the text.

Of course, this is a book about film too, so there's plenty of film analysis on offer - but not as much as you'd think, and not in the way you'd necessarily assume. With the exception of The Counsellor, the films discussed are the pretty standard fare for an 80s teen - Taxi Driver, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Blue Velvet. As the point of the book is to try to understand the Hollywood machine, his “parenting by pop culture”, it’s as well we get these better known productions as opposed to more outre works. Here the writing is good, though not stellar: the stuff about horror movies bullying us into the Hobson’s choice of either siding with the victim or the killer I found interesting. I also liked what he wrote about The Counsellor, even if I haven’t yet seen it myself.

Yet, as we discover, just as films can be mined for their psychic content, so can film reviews. A good portion of the movie reviews are not so much about film, or about the personal effect films have had, but are really there to demonstrate Jasun’s varying states of mind when he was reviewing them. Er, got that? To use an example: we get two different reviews of Taxi Driver (one written in 1999, the other in 2013, both by Jasun) block quoted side by side. We also get frequent block quotes from one of Jasun’s earlier books on film The Blood Poets, which he either cites to affirm his position or show us how less enlightened he was in the past. Ultimately, he concludes, that book was really not about film, but his father (of course, who else?).

There are also, throughout, citations of another book on film called The Disappointment Artist - a text which follows more or less the same personalised approach as this one. But this work isn’t quoted to support or pad out the main argument. In fact, bizarrely, it’s quoted at length to downplay it. Jasun wants us to know that this was the book which inspired him to write Movie Autist, and that it’s much better than the book you’ve currently got in your hands, a point I was convinced by almost to the point where I put it down and picked up the other one.

Now it’s clear that Jasun’s been through a lot of therapy, and that’s a sensible and admirable thing; particularly when, by his own admission, he tends to slip quite easily into paranoid-delusional thinking - something which actually makes him much more likely to be a Schizoid than an Autist, but that’s by the by. The trouble is, the sincerity which in the context of structured therapy is a necessary and emancipating device, here, in this unstructured maze of partially-connected thoughts, becomes sovereign and despotic. This whole book is effusive with the belief that there is no ill which a morbid condemnable confession cannot cure. We hear about how he masturbated to rape scenes as a teenager, how he wants to be praised and adored for his writing, how he once threw his pet hamster at the wall in a fit of sexual lunacy, how he is still seeking the approval of the Hollywood machine while simultaneously seeking to dismantle it, and it is a mark and of how little substance there is of how frequently an almost-insight is turned on its head and transvalued into a confession. Whatever Jasun can’t afford in substance he pays back in sincerity; and the transaction naturally never goes through, because just being really sincere, like really sincere, once the thrill of testimonial liberation has passed, doesn’t in fact resolve anything. Yet we live in an age of shallow psychology and talk show catharsis, so the assumption that it does overrules the reality by sheer weight of conviction.

If I had to speculate as to why such a well-read and worldly man as Jasun is credulous to this very modern misconception, I'd say it's because he's confused catharsis for understanding, but why exactly he is confused on this point, I couldn't begin to guess. For whatever confounding reason, the text ploughs forth with the self-acquitting conviction that the sincerity necessary to acknowledge the unprocessed material is the same as the processing of the material, and the more he owns up to secret or forbidden desires for worship and adulation, the more he apparently thinks we will forgive him his sloppy insights and fridge magnet prose (“only once you are willing to die can you start to live”, "reality is in the eye of the beholder"). But this isn’t how authorship works. It’s certainly not how fame works. And yet Jasun's lack of having 'made it' like his deceased brother is a burning injustice which seems to haunt him almost as much as his maltreatment at the hands of his parents. Again and again, we are reminded, Sebastian's efforts were rewarded while his were consistently overlooked. But why wouldn't Jasun be overlooked? If his aim is self-annihilation, the desire for ego death, he can't be surprised when people fail to notice him.

But Jasun doesn't see it this way. The final 3 chapters - the film studies pretext abandoned - comprises a long winded attempt to move from dissecting the self to uncover the toxins of film to dissecting his brother to discover the value of fame. Predictably, the conclusion that his conclusion is as intense and reality-lite as it gets. "Reigning in hell is a game that never gets old. [...] the most skilled in the game - the most endowed with Luciferian vision - imagine the Gods for the rest to worship, giving them idols to bow down to and relieving them of the need to imagine their own place in the cosmos while simultaneously making them subject to other imaginings, to the false Gods of magic, religion, science, politics, and art, all provinces of the intelligentsia." But where his brother was a master of "glamour magic", which Jasun sees as an essentially demonic competency, Jasun himself is too wise and pure-in-spirit to have achieved the same renown. "To keep one's soul, the world cannot be gained. It's the world that loses" Jasun concludes, with all the swaggering touchiness of a spurned suitor.

But his belief that he is too pure to success, apart from being transparently conceited, doesn't even come close to revealing the nature of fame. Yes, his brother may have been in league with "lucifrian" forces. He may have thrilled in being bad, being seen to be bad, but fame has just as often been bestowed on those who have been kind. As Sebastian himself once said, it was really Jesus, not Wilde, who was the "ultimate dandy". The dandy is not necessarily a cad, much less evil. He is simply someone who rules in virtue of his force of personality. What Jasun overlooks is that fame is the art of performance, and a performance always strikes out at the audience. The artist looks outward, not inward - not just for a reaction, the shifting ripples of cues, but for the security of his very self: he is nothing without them, nothing when not seen. This is where Jasun, always looking away from the audience, or hiding from them (as on the cover of this book) finds himself at odds with the kind of success he claims to have surmounted by secretly admires: where he feels more himself when alone, the performer finds himself erased. When the lights are off, the audience long departed, the true performer experiences an ego death utterly alien to the kind of cosmic self-inflation Jasun experiences as its equivalent.

This is, I believe, the simplest explanation of why Jasun failed to achieved fame where his brother, partly, succeeded. One attempts to reach the audience, even if it is only to provoke them, whereas the other only wants to utilise them as a pretext; to turn self-therapy into counterfeit connectivity. Put another way, where Jasun's ‘I’ loses its reality the more it is seen, Sebastian's condenses the more it is looked at, even when it is pitied. But this is also, I think, a hidden symmetry in their apparently inexorable opposition: though Jasun rejects his brother's way of life as "hollow", lacking in depth, in truth both brothers offer us a view of reality from the same region: it is the territory of the surface. For as deep as it may seem, an astral plane, we forget, is still a plane; as brittle and depth-impaired as surface level charm, life lived close to the veneer. Likewise, to hit the bedrock of being, and stagnate there, is really as superficial as plastic surgery. It is only possible to say one is 'deep' in the most superficial sense. Nothing of the medium itself, the actual substance of the depth, is glimpsed; it is simply refusing to look faraway from an inverted plane of reference.

Now perhaps Jasun is a genuinely individuated character in his day to day existence. I don't know. But going by what's here, he not only wishes to use writing as a platform for his own self-involvement, he wishes to use it as a platform to diminish and in fact destroy the entire basis of art itself. The final chapter of the text ends in a bewailing anti-art manifesto worthy of a reformation cleric: “Art is ideology because art aspires towards ideal forms (it started with Plato)”, says Jasun. “So what we really need, I think, is for ‘reality’ to get rid of the cultural spell of ‘art’." But I don’t agree with his take that creativity is a cheap bid for power, encouraging us to substitute life for art, ultimately leading us far afield from ultimate truth. It can be that. But, tellingly, when it is, no one calls it 'art'. The purpose of art - when transcribed correctly - is the purpose of man: to transform. And in this process of becoming, which is also an end, something must be fought off or killed off to activate the transition. Faith and logic, society and self, nature and technology, dignity and decay (as in dandyism), these are substances of art, and in their most able handling, they almost make their presence felt when they are opposed in a polarity.

If Jasun truly understood this, he would have placed his struggle to create and his struggle to dissolve at the very centre. As it is, he is not in a struggle - he is merely conflicted, which is the all-claiming extroversion of war reduced to the lowest common denominator of discomfort. But to understand this fully, it is not enough to make the struggle conscious, but to recognise that for it to become art, rather than seat-filling entertainment, the point is not to win, but to achieve an uneasy symbiosis. Art is full of strange marriages, botched reconciliations. We like the romantic poets precisely because their bid to render horrific nature ‘scenic’ did not work. Had it done, the two ideas would have dissolved interactively, and the drama with it. Likewise, we enjoy science fiction which affirms the superiority of man over machine, precisely because we only half-believe it: it is a perennial problem to be resolved in the round. And the dandy, if anyone still cares, is interesting exactly because – despite his heroic efforts - he cannot emancipate himself from life just with nail polish alone.

Of course, Jasun hasn’t even the beginnings of such an idea of art as a struggle that never lets up. So, on the journey to dissembling the Hollywood machine, we arrive at an idea of art (as opposed to entertainment) as reality substitution, and not just art, but creativity itself is vitiated along the way – a conclusion largely born of broken definitions. It's interesting that Jasun should quote Plato as an adversary in the setting out of this program of cultural effacement. What Jasun does not seem to realise, in one of his characteristic misreadings, is that he is reestablishing an ancient tradition of culture-bashing which Plato, like him, saw as the righteous casting out of the weak imitations of ideal forms. In this pygmy war of self, he has not yet even worked out who is on his side.

Form, however, never extends itself here to structure. The abiding truth of bad writing is that bad writing is bad thought. As is often the case in this work, the issue is that he hasn't thought things through enough to see what he is aligned with or against. This is not merely writing-as-therapy, but writing-as-thinking. What comes out at the very end, we suspect, then realise, is not so much a conclusion as a digression. We end up with Plato and a leary stand-off with art. But we might just as well have ended on a blueprint for a new kind of film, or a rehashing of one of his brother's overdoses. It is instructive that the very last few pages are a facsimile of a letter he received from author of The Disappointment Artist, Jonathan Lethem, telling him how wonderful his first draft is and that he should publish. Why else end on a fawning piece of accreditation if not to belatedly shore up a transparently flaky premise? Sometimes a book deserves to be published, other times it's best shared with your therapist.

[Lawrence Akers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seen and Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist (SANS) is a memoir by Jasun Horsley that simultaneously explores the author’s experience as an autistic man and the movies that served as a means of navigating the complexities of his own mind. Not a linear memoir by any means, it meanders and spirals in a true representation of the author's investigation into the forces outside of himself that were controlling him, and a society that feeds off such control, though few are willing to be brave enough to speak out.
In SANS, Horsley’s brutally honest and introspective journey does not shy away from discussing the challenges of being autistic, yet also brings to light the unique insights and ways of thinking that come with it. Horsley's solid narrative as an autistic man, which lies at the core of this multi-faceted memoir, makes connections that may be surprising yet cohesive. You almost do not want Horsley’s positions to be true but cannot avoid looking into the darkness with the author as your guide (certainly a Virgil to the reader’s suffering Dante).
As a very recently diagnosed autistic myself, Seen and Not Seen resonated with me in profound ways that I am only just beginning to understand. Horsley's memoir offers a unique insight into the complicated and sometimes unpredictable intersection between autism and film, and his prose is both intellectually engaging and emotionally poignant. Horsley does not only discuss his difficulties but also shares how he accesses deeper emotions and understanding, all the while using his love for film, all while interweaving a darker sub-narrative of his brother’s destruction at the hands of a public that gnashed him up and then devoured him. SANS has this strange undercurrent of brutal, self-immolating honesty and pain that I found to be both fascinating and utterly relatable. By the end, I felt as if I had been on a journey with Horsley, my fellow broken journeyman, exploring the nuances of autism and cinema in a way that was deeply personal and yet universally relatable.
A brief aside: Horsley uses the term "autist" to describe himself and other autistic individuals, which deeply resonated with me. It challenges preconceptions of autism and reunites its relationship with the creative arts. By taking this term, traditionally used in a derogatory manner, and turning it into something empowering, Horsley creates a sense of unity and strength among those of us who are on the autism spectrum (whether he realizes it or not)
Seen and Not Seen paradoxically left me feeling both seen and understood, and for that, I am profoundly grateful. Horsley's ability to connect with his reader on a deeply personal level is part of what makes this book such a powerful read. His experiences and insights feel so familiar, even though we come from divergent backgrounds. For me, this sense of connection is a testament to the power of self-expression and creative arts, beyond the limits of space and time
In summation, Seen and Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist is an essential read for anyone who is on the autism spectrum, or for those who love and care about someone who is. Horsley's memoir offers a window into the world of autism that is both nuanced and humanizing, challenging preconceptions at every turn. It also provides an unsanitized investigation into the autistic mind, providing a more authentic portrayal of the experience for some of us (instead of the vibrant, quirky characters you see on television and in advertising).
Yet it is far more than a memoir, even in its unique portrayal of an individual's experience with autism and cinema. It is also a deeply insightful and introspective exploration of the complexities and challenges of life. Be warned: Horsley's prose is honest, emotionally engaging, intellectually stimulating, and brutal in its deconstruction of a society that does not understand him and those like him (in fact, it may just be a threat to all).
Suspend your disbelief and prepare yourself, for the journey with Horsley through this strange wood is difficult, and though the winding path of his thoughts and perspectives are indeed treacherous, you may just feel strangely seen and understood by the end. In fact, you may just understand yourself a little better. As someone who has always struggled to do so, SANS burns upon contact, but quickly becomes a soothing balm for those willing to allow it to do its work. Horsely proves a worthy guide into the real places that scare us, beyond the human mind into a darkness that is no conspiracy, but very real.

[Simon Maskell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Again not really a review but my thoughts on a book I thoroughly enjoyed.

Not sure where to start really but I think I just read a Literary Nasty, that is not a criticism but a homage to the work!

The story Jasun tells took me on a journey through a forest on a beautiful autumn day and showed the marvels of nature before settling down to enjoy the sunset. Except the sun sets faster than I thought and the author leaves you alone in the dark with nothing but an ember to guide you through the darkness of the night and to protect you from the creatures that hide in the shadows. Just when you think that the darkness will go on forever and you will become consumed by wraiths the sun rises like Mithrandir bursting over the horizon to the salvation of all. Most notably with the last two sentences a pay off for anyone who grew up within the same cultural reference point as Jasun.

I have read one of Jasuns other books ‘Vice of Kings’ which I found informative and open and personal and had immediately ordered this to delve more into the subject matters that he explores. I thought that I was going to read about the way in which movies create a cultural reference for the author and how they acted as a surrogate parent for his self. Instead Jasun draws you in with sure and well developed reasoning of what subculture (popular culture as a wolf in sheep’s clothing) and the movies do to create a social narrative that has supplanted the camp fire stories of old and our need to be sublimated into fantasy worlds. Then he opens up to show you his wounds and how they got there.

As in the slasher movies of the 80s the story becomes truly gruesome but with a sense of a film that cannot be stopped and no way to hide behind a cushion because the story is real. Jasun frames himself a the last victim of the video nasty and you are left wondering if he will survive.

I know that he did survive and that as he puts it himself “When the movies became my escape from the endless confusion of childhood, they became the ‘reward’ – happiness earned – for the sustained nightmare of living. To this day I still look forward to the weekend where I can veg out with a movie”

This made me laugh and cry as it sums up the trauma and joy of fantasy. Like an eternal dyad befitting us all, that trauma, that joy is degrees of power depending on our experiences. Jasun bravely opens up an gives us his raw experience whilst blowing raspberries to the “high priests of culture who administer to the masses”.

Read this book and tell your friends as Jason deserves the reward for his hard work and dedication.