You will remember the headbutt sequence in Paolo Sorrentino’s film ‘The Great Beauty’. Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) goes to see a ‘performance’ in the Parque de los Acueductos to later interview the artist. The young woman, naked, with her head wrapped in gauze, … is ready for action. Gambardella and the rest of the audience watch her sitting in the meadow. The girl runs at full speed for about twenty meters, crashes her head against one of the pillars of the aqueduct (the thud sounds painful) and falls to the ground. She immediately gets up, shows the blood rose that she wears on the gauze at the level of her forehead and shouts: “I don’t love you!” The audience applauds and cheers her. Servillo’s shocked face is eloquent.
I read that it has become fashionable among kids (also girls; you can see in a video one who is enthusiastically mopping a blind), as a way of mindless fun and above all to post it later on the internet and make more laughs among the sheepish community, banging their heads hard against metal blinds, signs, doors and similar elements harder than their heads. The other day I found myself in the middle of a blind with a half-lowered blind and I’m still laughing at how funny it was, in addition to the ridiculousness, since the ones who were probably really upset by the lowliness were the passers-by: the unmistakable noise of Hitting your head with a blind is an infallible gag.
I imagine that a reference for such a funny expansion of the gang will be in the ‘Jackass’ series and movies, headed by Johnny Knoxville, where the group inflicts physical punishments on each other that, if it were not voluntary masochism, would be considered torture. When you reach the final stretch of the road and look back, you realize that in reality he has been stupid all his life. Even so, the degree of foolishness reached in adolescence is insurmountable.
In a figurative sense, headbutting is used as an expression of regret for something that has not been done or for a mistake made. Today are the European elections, in which the abstention rate is usually high. This low participation seems to indicate that citizens consider the importance of these elections to be less than national elections, and the opposite is true. The elected MEPs approve or disapprove the community regulations of the European Union, which apply above the legislation of each country. So let’s go vote. That vote in no way ensures that we are not going to butt our heads later anyway, but it is better that it counts and adds to a European policy that hopefully will not turn out to be horrible.
#Argentina
