PERMANENT GREEN LIGHT: THE STARTLING DREAM OF A TEEN’S SECRET SELF-EXPLOSION
By Hyemin Kim
In Dennis Cooper’s world, kids are like the special herds – the group of quiet and strange animals whose gaze and intensity for their undisguised desire and dream captivate us. Perhaps like any other iGen kids, they also would talk through the screen, exchange freaky teenage vernaculars, and shift around fantasies of drug, sex, and every little evil imaginable in the wi-fi world. Cooper doesn’t negate it. Rather, at its heart, he casts the figures of their dreamlike collapse and memory by carefully observing and embodying their singular desire, obsession, and fascination, through his artistic means – recently, cinema crucial to his continuing creativity.