Back in the early daze of bOING bOING’s Web life, I wrote an article about folks who have holes drilled in their skulls as a path to enlightenment, or at least achieve a perpetual buzz. It was called “Head Like A Hole,” and you can still read it on BB here. Several years ago, an indie documentary was released exploring the practice, called trepanation, and profiling its modern day evangelists. Over at h+, RU Sirius reviews the movie, titled A Hole In The Head. From h+:
…A couple of minutes into A Hole in the Head, we are confronted with a clip from a 1970 film – Heartbeat in the Brain – that was made showing Amanda Fielding’s self-trepanation. Fielding – the attractive English doyenne of contemporary trepanning and a leading figure in British ’70s psychedelia – freshly trepanned, stares into a mirror, her face patched and speckled with blood, looking as happy and satisfied as Sooky Stackhouse after a long night with Bill Compton and Eric Northman. As she wipes blood from her teeth, there’s the faint hint of a smile.Fans of grisly medical shows will definitely find satisfaction in this film. The most disturbing scene, which is also toward the beginning of the film and runs for several minutes, shows an African woman’s fully exposed brain matter being drilled by a witch doctor.
But shock is not the point here – or at least it’s not the entire point.
“Fixing A Hole in the Head” (h+)