If I told you once
I told you a thousand times my dear
Never to fall in love with a man
Who drinks from the well of despair
I thought from the very start
I’d made it quite clear I fear
Now you’re righteously f*#ked
As you swing from the rope
At the top of the stairs
trying to kill a trope –
but the cinema clichés
refuse to die.
“It’s curtains for you Mug!!” When someone is threatened with death in the old gangster/hardboiled detective movies & stories, it was always curtains. This term derived from theatre, when the last bit of stage direction was curtain – indicating the end of the show/play, and dropping the curtain.
“It’s curtains for you” is a metaphor. The final ‘Curtain’ is drawn across the stage at the conclusion of the person’s life. The expression ‘it is curtains for you’ simply means you are finished, your escapade is over, the game is up, you have been discovered, you are about to receive your punishment, you have arrived at the conclusion of your wrongdoing, the time is up for you. The hardboiled characters used this as a threat of imminent death. So well-worn was this expression of existential threat that it became a cliché and used in parody. Even Bugs Bunny menaced those gangsters when the jigs was up.
Surreal: having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream; unreal; fantastic, phantasmagorical, uncanny, intense hyper-reality, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur. Characteristics associated with art and literature created by founders and followers of cultural movement known as Surrealism.
( The video came to my attention by way of Mobius Faith’s blog, On Being and Becoming. Make sure to check it out. )
Dark Pines Photo 
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