Memory Creates Life: Part II

While Ram V and Anand RK’s Blue in Green, as I discussed in my previous post, examines the ways that we use memories to create life, it also looks at the ways that pain and suffering impact creativity and the ways that the pain that the artist uses to produce a work of art remains, long after the artist’s passing. This is a theme I’ve been struggling to wrap my head around, specifically since a lot of what we consider “great art” stems from pain. However, the pain that the artist endured gets subsumed and consumed once the art enters into the public realm. Following the artist’s passing, it serves as a medium for the audience to seek catharsis in their own lives, but is also serves as a way for the audience to seek absolution for our roles in seeing their demise yet still constantly consuming their works of art. I still haven’t fully wrapped my head around this yet, but today I want to look at how Ram V and Anand RK present it at the end of Blue in Green.

At the end of Blue in Green, Erik Dieter sets his mother’s home on fire, seeking to purge the memory of the house and to kill himself. He does this because of the being that torments him, the same one that tormented his grandfather Dalton Blakely and partly led him to burn himself alive as well years earlier. Inside the burning house, Erik confronts the being, and they ruminate on pain and artistic creativity. The being tells Erik that Dalton…