Hysterical Shrines

Salient Feature #5: Shrine accumulations. There is a scene in Silence of the Lambs where, after Hannibal Lecter escapes from the cage in which he was painting Florentine landscapes and listening to Glenn Gould, we see his handiwork: a Statehouse guard flayed and crucified, suspended beatifically, expertly lit. To me, it seems a moment not only in character with Hannibal's "classiness," but also an instance of directorial hysteria (who did the lighting, anyway?), where Jonathan Demme is arguing with all his resources that, even though he is playing with the tropes of a B-genre, that this is an A-film.
To what end do I proffer this example?
The Primitive is at times caught up in the same brand of hysteria. Not content on forging a barely visible bind between his/her hand and the environment, the shrine alerts viewers that, indeed, this is art. These shrines originally alerted me to the piece's more subtle interventions and gave me a sense of the overall grammar of the Primitive.
Why the butterflies? My own hysterical Web 2.0 moment, perhaps.

>>>