Violence can be very grotesque and also intensely attractive.

Host: The warehouse was a cathedral of silence, its walls cracked and tattooed with forgotten graffiti. In the far corner, the soft hiss of a film projector cut through the stillness, spilling frames of shattered glass and blooming flowers across a white screen. The imagery flickered—beauty, violence, stillness, eruption—an impossible dance between creation and decay.

The air smelled faintly of paint thinner and rain seeping through broken windows. Dust floated like pale embers in the projector’s beam. Jack stood near the screen, his jaw tense, his eyes grey and sharp, reflecting the chaos of images. Jeeny sat on an overturned crate, her hair unbound, her hands resting on her knees, her gaze fixed not on the screen but on him.

Jeeny: “Ori Gersht once said, ‘Violence can be very grotesque and also intensely attractive. What interests me is how the two—beauty and violence—live side by side, and how moments can be created and erased almost simultaneously. Destruction is painful, but at times it can be very cathartic.’”

Host: Her voice trembled slightly, as if she feared that speaking it aloud would give the images more power.

Jack: “Cathartic? That’s one word for it. Some people call it addiction.”

Jeeny: “Addiction to what?”

Jack: “To the spectacle. To the chaos. People say they hate violence, but they watch it every night. Movies, news feeds, video games—blood dressed as beauty.”

Jeeny: “Because we’re trying to understand it. To make sense of it.”

Jack: “No. Because we enjoy it. We crave it. Violence makes us feel alive—precisely because it threatens to take that life away.”

Host: The projector flickered. On the screen, a bouquet of roses exploded in slow motion—petals turned to shards, beauty unraveling in a moment of elegant obliteration.

Jeeny: “You sound disgusted by it, but you can’t look away either.”

Jack: “Because I’m honest about it. Violence is truth without disguise. It strips everything down to instinct—fear, power, survival. No pretense, no morality. Just raw existence.”

Jeeny: “That’s the language of trauma, Jack, not truth. Real truth lives beyond survival.”

Jack: “Tell that to history. Every empire, every religion, every revolution—built on blood, justified by beauty. We romanticize destruction because it’s the only language humanity truly understands.”

Host: His voice echoed against the empty walls, filling the space with a cold conviction. Jeeny rose slowly, her shadow merging with his on the screen.

Jeeny: “And yet, out of that blood, people still paint, still write, still fall in love. You say violence is our truth, but art is our rebellion against it. Gersht wasn’t glorifying destruction—he was revealing how it hides inside beauty, and how beauty still insists on existing through it.”

Jack: “You think beauty redeems violence?”

Jeeny: “No. It resists it. That’s what makes it beautiful.”

Host: The next frame flared bright—an image of a fruit bursting open under the impact of an unseen force. The juice sprayed across the lens like red rain.

Jack: “You know what that reminds me of? Sarajevo, 1993. I was covering a bombing. A fruit market hit by mortars—peaches, apples, bodies—all torn open together. The smell was… unbearable. But when I looked through my camera, it was almost… cinematic. I hated myself for thinking it, but I couldn’t unsee it. The beauty inside the horror.”

Jeeny: “That’s not beauty, Jack. That’s the human mind trying to survive what it can’t bear.”

Jack: “Or maybe it’s honesty. The world is violent, Jeeny. Pretending otherwise is the lie.”

Jeeny: “But seeing beauty in pain isn’t pretending—it’s choosing not to let pain own you. That’s the difference. That’s the catharsis Gersht was talking about.”

Host: The projector light trembled as the reel turned, and for a moment, the room seemed to pulse with memory—like an old wound reopening just to prove it had healed wrong.

Jack: “Catharsis, huh? Sounds too poetic for something so cruel. What’s cathartic about destruction?”

Jeeny: “Ask the forest after the fire. Or the soul after heartbreak. Sometimes things have to break before they can breathe again.”

Jack: “You make it sound sacred.”

Jeeny: “Maybe it is. Destruction isn’t just ending—it’s also clearing space for beginning.”

Host: The rain began to fall harder now, beating against the windows in rhythm with the projector’s hum. The flickering images spilled over their faces—violence and tenderness intertwined, the same light painting them both.

Jack: “So you’re saying we need violence?”

Jeeny: “No. I’m saying it’s part of us, whether we want it or not. But what we do with it—that’s where morality begins. Gersht captures that paradox: how beauty survives even in the act of being destroyed.”

Jack: “That sounds like denial.”

Jeeny: “No, Jack—it’s defiance.”

Host: Her voice rose—soft, but unyielding. There was fire in it, and sorrow too. She stepped closer, the light rippling across her face like a painting being rewritten.

Jeeny: “When I see his films—flowers exploding, glass shattering—it’s not the destruction that moves me. It’s the grace in the moment before and after. That fragile breath between creation and erasure. That’s life, Jack. We live in that breath.”

Jack: “And yet, we still destroy. We always destroy.”

Jeeny: “Because we’re afraid to feel too much. Destruction is easier than intimacy.”

Host: His eyes flickered. For a second, his armor cracked.

Jack: “Maybe you’re right. Maybe violence isn’t the truth. Maybe it’s just a symptom.”

Jeeny: “A symptom of what?”

Jack: “Of our failure to bear beauty without breaking it.”

Host: Silence fell like ash. The projector slowed, the film sputtering at its end. On the final frame, a flower hovered in mid-explosion—caught between being and ending, forever suspended in the poetry of destruction.

Jeeny: “You see it now, don’t you?”

Jack: “Yeah. It’s… beautiful.”

Jeeny: “And grotesque.”

Jack: “Both. Like us.”

Host: She smiled—sadly, gently—as she reached up and switched off the projector. The light died, and the darkness returned, thick but alive, pulsing faintly with the afterglow of the film.

Jeeny: “That’s what Gersht meant. Beauty and violence—they coexist because they’re born of the same need: to feel something real. Creation and destruction are both ways of saying, I exist.”

Jack: “And both ways of asking, Do I still matter?”

Host: Outside, the rain had stopped. The city lights bled faintly through the cracks in the walls. Jack walked toward the door, paused, and looked back at the frozen screen—now blank, but ghosted with color.

Jack: “Funny thing about destruction… when it’s over, what stays isn’t the wreckage—it’s the silence after. That’s where the beauty hides.”

Jeeny: “Yes. In the silence that forgives the noise.”

Host: The camera would linger on the empty room now—the spent light, the torn film, the faint shimmer of dust caught in the air like echoes of a vanished explosion.

In that stillness, the truth of Ori Gersht’s words lived and breathed: that violence and beauty, though born from opposing impulses, are twin reflections of the same fragile human fire—the longing to destroy what we fear, and to love what remains when the flames go out.