[NYer]

Helsinki Syndrome

Yes! I knew you would come up with a rational explanation.

I just loved the concept of a kitchen shower. Once again, this priest is "preying" on his (now former) parishioners. Why is he dawdling at this parish, instead of moving on with his life. Seems he desperately seeks their sympathy when he should be giving them his repentance.

[Desdemona]

Why is he being allowed to choose? This is bizarre. All the ones here were sent to a monastary or something becase no one's seen them since.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

There's a film which depicts this somewhat well. The Desperate Hours. The 1990 remake of the famous Bogart film has Mickey Rourke as the deranged psycho criminal whose psychiatrist has fallen for him. http://www.blockbuster.com/bb/movie/details/0,7286,VID-V++++13406,00.html? .

Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins is held hostage in his home by this "misunderstood" misfit. ( I won't spoil the fitting ending, if anyone surfing hasn't seen this yarn). There is a whole gnostic undercurrent in modern culture to romanticize villains bizarrely as "heroes" (beyond good and evil in the puerile Nietzschean sense) who seemingly rise "above" bourgeois conformity and staid conventions. The whole counter-cultural avant-garde nihilist "anti-hero" mythos is part of this. A variation of "Sympathy for the Devil." Highly weird.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

Actually, "Exposed" (1983) with Nastassja Kinski, Rudolf Nureyev, Harvey Keitel (as the left-wing, anti-bourgeois anarchist terrorist maniac) is probably a better example. The whole thing is haunted by this chic noir atmosphere of punky, psycho-neurotic Euro-nihilism which almost overtook Western civ. in the '80s. Along with the Helsinki-ization.