It's Going To Get Worse And Worse And Worse, My Friend

A speech can be a mighty weapon. Throughout the centuries it has enthused countless masses and galvanized them into action, for better or for worse. It has unleashed revolutions and fuelled wars. Just by the power of words. But a speech does not only enthuse the hearers, often it also transposes the speaker into a state of trance. Then he loses himself in a stream of words, in an obsessive, ecstatic way of speaking. The power of a speech often depends on the trance of the speaker.

In It’s Going to Get Worse and Worse and Worse, My Friend, Lisbeth Gruwez dances the trance of that ecstatic speechifying. In the process, she takes advantage of fragments from a speech by the ultraconservative American televangelist Jimmy Swaggart. Initially the parlance is friendly and pacifying, but from his compulsive desire to persuade transpires growing despair. Eventually it exposes its deepest nature: violence. Rarely have image, movement, light and sound invigorated each other so powerfully. This turns It’s Going to Get Worse and Worse and Worse, My Friend into a subtle masterpiece that has managed to captivate audiences around the world into a nearly magical yet disturbing state.