oh my heart...it shines with sorrow!

I was reading Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra today, and I came upon a classic passage addressing what Nietzsche refers to as the "preachers of death"--those people bent on denigrating this world in favor of some "eternal life." I thought the following passage precisely addressed my concerns with Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, wherein Noe seems to focus almost singularly on just how horrible life can be (unredeemably so!):

[The preachers of death] encounter a sick man or an old man or a corpse, and immediately they say, "Life is refuted." But only they themselves are refuted, and their eyes, which see only this one face of existence. Shrouded in thick melancholy and eager for the little accidents that bring death, thus they wait with clenched teeth.

In his profoundly ironic and acerbic style, Nietzsche goes on to say that the doctrine of virtue of these preachers of death could only be, "Thou shalt kill thyself! Thou shalt steal away!"

It is this kind of idealistic nihilism that I could not accept in Irreversible. (Indeed, I would argue that all idealism is a masked form of nihilism, but that's another matter.) At best, Noe's viewpoint is myopic; at worst, it's self-destructive. It's a viewpoint that an alienated teen would hold. I expected more from Noe. (Although I stand by my "B" rating of the movie for its sheer audacity--something unseen in film.)