If you want the text TLDR (seeing a TLDR this long is uh, yeah, there's a lot of stuff), you can check my notepad here x.com/bukibread/status/20663…

So an explanation for this quote, here is the full part (word soup incoming): "But we intellectuals, and I say we because I consider you such, must remain lucid to the bitter end. This life is so full of confusion already, that there's no need to add chaos to chaos. Losing money is part of a producer's job. I congratulate you. You had no choice. And he got what he deserved for having joined such a frivolous venture so lightheartedly. Believe me, no need for remorse. Destroying is better than creating when we're not creating those few, truly necessary things. But then is there anything so clear and right that it deserves to live in this world? For him the wrong movie is only a financial matter. But for you, at this point, it could have been the end. Better to quit and strew the ground with salt, as the ancients did, to purify the battlefields. In the end what we need is some hygiene, some cleanliness, disinfection. We're smothered by images, words and sounds that have no right to exist, coming from, and bound for, nothingness. Of any artist truly worth the name we should ask nothing except this act of faith: to learn silence. Do you remember Mallarme's homage to the white page? And Rimbaud... a poet, my friend, not a movie director. What was his finest poetry? His refusal to continue writing and his departure for Africa. If we can't have everything, true perfection is nothingness. Forgive men for quoting all the time. But we critics... do what we can. Our true mission is... sweeping away the thousands of miscarriages that everyday... obscenely... try to come to the light." The critic is talking about the main character Guido, who has creative block and is stuck in life. He wants to publish a film without actually knowing what to do with it, and the speaker here is scolding him for it, saying, "...you would actually dare leave behind you a whole film, like a cripple who leaves behind his crooked footprint. Such a monstrous presumption to think that others could benefit from the squalid catalogue of your mistakes!" Instead, the speaker says that the thing with artists is that process of creation is equally tinged by filtering and destroying ideas that will never see the light of day: "Our true mission is... sweeping away the thousands of miscarriages that everyday... obscenely... try to come to the light." Sometimes, the best approach is to go with nothing, to start fresh entirely. That's why he gives a lot of examples- strewing battlefields with salt to kill the plants and purify the dead, or Rimbauld, a French poet who stopped writing at 20 years old to move to Africa to become an arms dealer instead. "If we can't have everything, true perfection is nothingness." I suspect since the movie touches a lot on rebuilding your life in the middle of a slump, the art of filmmaking itself and accepting yourself for who you are (without spoiling it too much), it'll link to Lucilla quite a bit. She as a memory-type resonator we know has to constantly delete memories and doesn't even remember herself as a child. There'll probably be more stuff in her story soon that reveals things :)

There's even a small Truth Enforcer ref at the end im crine 😭😭😭