The Wire | Nicholas Rombes Gets Weird
Nicholas Rombes, author of The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing, and writer/director of our second feature film, The Removals, was interviewed by David Davis at the Weird Fiction website. Davis asked Rombes whether there is "such a thing as 'too weird'" and whether he would consider someone labeling his work as weird as a compliment.
Rombes' response:
"Absolutely it’s a compliment. Our house—I can safely say—is probably the only “suburban” house in Michigan that sports a gigantic Eraserhead poster that’s the first thing you see when you come in! I subscribe to the theory that the so-called “weird” is what reality actually is, and that we’ve slowly constructed elaborate narratives (political, social, scientific, etc.) to create a vital illusion of order and rationality. The Enlightenment was a hoax. Weird fiction and media are appealing because they remind us of what we’ve been conditioned to suppress or forget: the rules and niceties of civilization are important bulwarks against the chaos, but that does not make the chaos any less real. In “real life” we desperately need and want these bulwarks: they save us from our darker angels. So we turn to art—weird fiction, for instance—to satisfy our deep, primordial knowledge that, my friend, the universe itself is one very weird, improbable concoction."
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