Errol Morris had an intriguing series of essays published this week at the New York Times. They are entitled “Incommensurability,” and are an exploration into a philosophical idea about the social nature of science and knowledge. It turns out that Morris took a graduate seminar in philosophy from Thomas Kuhn, a writer from whom I’ve stolen some very good ideas. The climax of this relationship, from Morris’ perspective, was when Kuhn threw an ashtray at his head. The reason for this assault was Morris needling Kuhn about a problem regarding incommensurability.
Kuhn was a scientist and a historian of science more than a philosopher, but the ideas he had to formulate to make sense of his interpretations of science’s history were deeply philosophical. Key to Kuhn’s own understanding of the history of science, and the focus of Morris’ essay, was the concept of incommensurability. Science was not a progress toward better and better knowledge of the world, as traditional ways of writing its history would have it. The history of science actually consisted of a variety of models, ways of understanding the world and articulating problems that are largely unrelated to each other.
Revolutionary periods in science were the time when new models were created and become prominent enough to challenge the old models. This usually happened when some problem that the old model couldn’t make sense of become too noticeable to ignore. Those practicing one model understood the world in a totally different way than those practicing another model. The terms of one model only make sense within that model; to translate terms from one model to another would remove all the distinctive characteristics from the translated model. This is what it means to be incommensurable.
Morris explains that he confronted Kuhn with a problem of incommensurability: If two broadly defined ways of seeing the world were truly incommensurable, which Kuhn assured him they were, then a historian of science in the mid 20th century could never truly understand the scientific worldview of the medieval Europeans or ancient Greeks. The history of science itself should be impossible. And the ashtray flew.
Morris goes through several intriguing examples from history and philosophy and the history of philosophy to illustrate his points about the problem of the incommensurability concept. They are quite fascinating, but they all add up to the same point: If different models of understanding the world are genuinely incommensurable, then holders of different models shouldn’t be able to understand each other at all. Yet the conflicts among models of understanding the world seem to be motivated precisely because their opponents understand the new model. Read the articles and think about it.
Are you finished? Good.
I first heard of Errol Morris when I saw his documentary about the career of Robert McNamara, The Fog of War. I thought it was a brilliant exploration of how a sharp, intelligent, and empathetic person found himself becoming the architect of one of the most terrifying mistakes the American government ever made: its invasion of Vietnam. As I started hearing more about Morris’ history, I was less impressed.
When his filmmaking career began, Morris was friends with Werner Herzog, and would always talk to Herzog about this idea he had for a documentary about pet cemetaries and the people who use their services. But he would always come up with excuses as to why the film could never get off the ground. Finally Herzog said that if Morris ever actually got his film made, Herzog would eat the very boots that he was wearing at the time of the challenge. Morris made Gates of Heaven, and at its festival premiere, Herzog ate the boiled shoes from the challenge. The result was another short documentary: the hilarious Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. But it took a shoe eating challenge from Germany’s greatest living director to get it off the ground. I discovered on the commentary for Herzog’s Stroszek that this film was generated when Herzog went to rural Wisconsin to help make a documentary about Morris’ early life. But Morris never showed up, so Herzog wandered around small-town Wisconsin himself, coming up with ideas for the film that eventually became Stroszek. A wonderful result, but borne of Morris’ scatterbrained laziness.
Perhaps despite of these habits of his personality, Morris has written a fine series of articles that work a general audience through complex philosophical problems. The project suffers, I think, from the prominence that having an ashtray whipped at his head plays in his memories of Kuhn. That confrontation colours his entire view of Kuhn: With every interaction they had about what incommensurability meant, Morris thought Kuhn's anger was a sign that Morris was getting to the older man, forcing him to deal with something he didn't want to admit. Having won the staring contest, Morris presumes his suspicions were right, and doesn't think about the miscommunication he and Kuhn could have had from the beginning. I don't blame him for being affected by nearly being knocked out with an ashtray, but there is more nuance to Kuhn's (or at least Kuhn-inspired) thinking than Morris suggests.
It doesn’t require a purely objective perspective, a god’s eye view, or a view from nowhere to understand a way of making sense of the world that is alien to your own. All you need are skills of observation and disciplined, careful imagination. I think Morris makes a mistake in calling incommensurability the absolute separateness of some way of understanding from another, that someone who thinks according to paradigm A couldn't possibly understand anything of paradigm B. If this were true, there was no way for anyone to do any history of science at all: every view that differed from our own would be dismissed as nonsense. But one can think about one's own premises of thinking, and do so for any paradigm of thinking you care to investigate. In understanding how a paradigm of thought arises and evolves, one understands that paradigm.
Incommensurability is a matter of practical work, not pure understanding. A phlogiston chemist can't test for oxygen, because the structure of phlogiston chemistry doesn't include oxygen, or much of the periodic table. That phlogiston chemist could learn the basic concepts of a periodic table chemist, just as the periodic table chemist could learn how phlogiston theories work. But you couldn't do chemistry experiments using both theories at the same time. They can be understood, from a perspective of self-reflexivity, reflexive criticism. But when it comes to the work, you have to choose one or the other.
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Monday, March 21, 2011
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Wake Diary: Poems Made of Tone and Images
The problem with novels is that the vast majority of readers expect them to have plots. That is, they want a clearly identified protagonist or protagonists facing a concretely described problem that they slowly investigate, act to solve, and then manage the aftermath. This is the standard rising-climax-falling structure of a plot that people are taught in high school literature studies. I prefer novels that are more narrative than plot, because plots have clear beginning and endpoints. The characters exist in the service of the plot, rather than serving as points of interest themselves. I read and I write stories that don’t have plots, as much as they have explorations, narratives, collisions of people.
Then I came to face Finnegans Wake, which doesn’t even really have characters. Looking for a narrative in this book is an academic cottage industry, as is looking for a clearly defined cast of characters. But I think there’s another way of reading this book, which actually fits its style better than an attempt to find (or interpret into it) clear characters and narratives. It’s a poem, constructed from emotionally evocative language, its rhythms, allusions, and allegories. There are recurring motifs, some of which receive clear definition in one part of the book so they can be better recognized in the rest of the work. HCE, Anna Livia, and Shem the Penman are some of these motifs. But the writing is meant to affect a reader the way a tone poem, or a piece of music does.
If anything, I suppose the entire thrust of James Joyce’s writing was a series of experiments that slowly jettisoned reliance on plot, then narrative, then even character. The stories of Dubliners were intricately constructed plots, situations whose narrative arcs created detailed situations that climaxed in a character defining epiphany. Portrait of the Artist eschewed the careful construction of plot for a series of five moments that exemplified the transformation of a character as he grew from a dependent child to an independent adult. Ulysses left narrative behind for a series of events contingently connected through the characters that wandered among them. Wake abandons even the constancy of characters. I’m not sure what to call whatever remains.
But I’ve had some profoundly strange ideas about how the Wake’s techniques influenced other artworks.
I found a very intersting interpretation of the Star Wars prequels a couple of months ago that reads them in the same way. It actually fits with some of what I know about their production, and how George Lucas envisioned particular scenes. If you watch Red Letter Media’s detailed reviews of the prequels, one of the critiques of Lucas’ narratives is that he includes specific images that mirror or parallel images from the original trilogy, but that these images lack their emotional impact when they appear without the investment of the individual characters.
When Leia sees Boba Fett’s ship taking off from the dock at Cloud City, she’s emotionally devastated, because the man she loves may have disappeared forever. When Padme watches Count Dooku’s ship take off from the dock of his mountain base, she doesn’t have the same emotional investment in the moment. Lucas created parallel images, but didn’t realize that the emotional connection of audience to story comes from the narrative itself, not the image alone.
That article above suggests that Lucas had always envisioned the story of the prequels told through images alone, not through narrative, and that he had to create his overcomplicated, emotionally cold narrative to get the proper images into the films. In other words, Lucas was stuck, because of the economics of his own film company, making a sci-fi blockbuster, when he really wanted to make a new La Jetée, on an enormous scale.
La Jetée was a silent French film whose narrative would form the skeleton of Twelve Monkeys. But its technique was to tell a story entirely through images that created emotional tones, crafted using motifs that allowed viewers to track the triggers of these emotions, and the relationships between those triggers. It was a film told with the same techniques of Finnegans Wake.
Then I came to face Finnegans Wake, which doesn’t even really have characters. Looking for a narrative in this book is an academic cottage industry, as is looking for a clearly defined cast of characters. But I think there’s another way of reading this book, which actually fits its style better than an attempt to find (or interpret into it) clear characters and narratives. It’s a poem, constructed from emotionally evocative language, its rhythms, allusions, and allegories. There are recurring motifs, some of which receive clear definition in one part of the book so they can be better recognized in the rest of the work. HCE, Anna Livia, and Shem the Penman are some of these motifs. But the writing is meant to affect a reader the way a tone poem, or a piece of music does.If anything, I suppose the entire thrust of James Joyce’s writing was a series of experiments that slowly jettisoned reliance on plot, then narrative, then even character. The stories of Dubliners were intricately constructed plots, situations whose narrative arcs created detailed situations that climaxed in a character defining epiphany. Portrait of the Artist eschewed the careful construction of plot for a series of five moments that exemplified the transformation of a character as he grew from a dependent child to an independent adult. Ulysses left narrative behind for a series of events contingently connected through the characters that wandered among them. Wake abandons even the constancy of characters. I’m not sure what to call whatever remains.
But I’ve had some profoundly strange ideas about how the Wake’s techniques influenced other artworks.
I found a very intersting interpretation of the Star Wars prequels a couple of months ago that reads them in the same way. It actually fits with some of what I know about their production, and how George Lucas envisioned particular scenes. If you watch Red Letter Media’s detailed reviews of the prequels, one of the critiques of Lucas’ narratives is that he includes specific images that mirror or parallel images from the original trilogy, but that these images lack their emotional impact when they appear without the investment of the individual characters.
When Leia sees Boba Fett’s ship taking off from the dock at Cloud City, she’s emotionally devastated, because the man she loves may have disappeared forever. When Padme watches Count Dooku’s ship take off from the dock of his mountain base, she doesn’t have the same emotional investment in the moment. Lucas created parallel images, but didn’t realize that the emotional connection of audience to story comes from the narrative itself, not the image alone.
That article above suggests that Lucas had always envisioned the story of the prequels told through images alone, not through narrative, and that he had to create his overcomplicated, emotionally cold narrative to get the proper images into the films. In other words, Lucas was stuck, because of the economics of his own film company, making a sci-fi blockbuster, when he really wanted to make a new La Jetée, on an enormous scale.
La Jetée was a silent French film whose narrative would form the skeleton of Twelve Monkeys. But its technique was to tell a story entirely through images that created emotional tones, crafted using motifs that allowed viewers to track the triggers of these emotions, and the relationships between those triggers. It was a film told with the same techniques of Finnegans Wake.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Dream of a Music Video Director
I enjoy the music of just about everyone in the New Pornographers collective, Neko Case and Dan Bejar especially. Destroyer’s Rubies was one of my favourite albums of 2006, and I still love listening to it. Now, Bejar’s music and personality was always a little ridiculous. His New Pornographers songs were always the strangest on every album, but they were usually also the most interesting (although “Myriad Harbour” from Challengers is an earworm that lodges itself in you until you want to drill a hole through your head).
However, after hearing some songs from the new Destroyer album, Kaputt, I don’t really know what to think. Pitchfork gave the album an 8.8 and included it on their list of Best New Music. I usually respect Pitchfork praise, which is not exactly given lightly. They described Kaputt as evoking the pop aesthetic of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Describing its sound, they offered analogues in Sade, Steely Dan, Roxy Music, and Chuck Mangione. When I first listened to the lead single, “Chinatown,” I enjoyed it, finding it retro and catchy. But after a few more listens, the kitsch and the cheese is just biting into me and making me bleed in uncomfortable places. Listen to “Chinatown,” below, and see if you can’t get through that saxophone line with a straight face.
This is the kind of music a lounge singer from 1984 would sing at a private gig in the catskills for a bunch of bankers’ wives.
This morning as I was walking to lunch, I imagined a music video for this utterly ridiculous song. The setting is, of course, an expensive restaurant with an expansive dance floor. A beautiful Asian woman in a red dress leaves her companion, an uptight older white man, to get a drink from the bar. As the music begins to play, she sees a handsome brown-skinned man her own age. They lock eyes, a thin silk fabric goes over the camera lens, already coated in more vaseline than a wrestling pig at a Wyoming county fair. They walk past Dan Bejar, singing the song, on their way to the dance floor. A subtly erotic tango begins as the saxophone kicks in.
Her older lover stares at the couple on the dance floor, his face seething with the inward rage of hidden anger. Bejar’s head turns into the frame at suitable moments throughout the song, facilitating breaks in the dance in alteration with the Asian woman’s now-former lover. As the last verse finishes, the woman in red leaves the restaurant with her new lover, walking past the older man, who is still quietly enraged. She ignores his presence completely.
Outside, the young man opens the passenger door of his car (a DeLorean, naturally), offering it to her. But the woman in red looks away and walks down the street, proudly alone and self-reliant. Bejar sings as she strides into the city on her own, repeating, “walk away.” “Walk away.”
Maybe that should be one of my alternate careers in case academics doesn’t work out. Music video director.
However, after hearing some songs from the new Destroyer album, Kaputt, I don’t really know what to think. Pitchfork gave the album an 8.8 and included it on their list of Best New Music. I usually respect Pitchfork praise, which is not exactly given lightly. They described Kaputt as evoking the pop aesthetic of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Describing its sound, they offered analogues in Sade, Steely Dan, Roxy Music, and Chuck Mangione. When I first listened to the lead single, “Chinatown,” I enjoyed it, finding it retro and catchy. But after a few more listens, the kitsch and the cheese is just biting into me and making me bleed in uncomfortable places. Listen to “Chinatown,” below, and see if you can’t get through that saxophone line with a straight face.
This is the kind of music a lounge singer from 1984 would sing at a private gig in the catskills for a bunch of bankers’ wives.
This morning as I was walking to lunch, I imagined a music video for this utterly ridiculous song. The setting is, of course, an expensive restaurant with an expansive dance floor. A beautiful Asian woman in a red dress leaves her companion, an uptight older white man, to get a drink from the bar. As the music begins to play, she sees a handsome brown-skinned man her own age. They lock eyes, a thin silk fabric goes over the camera lens, already coated in more vaseline than a wrestling pig at a Wyoming county fair. They walk past Dan Bejar, singing the song, on their way to the dance floor. A subtly erotic tango begins as the saxophone kicks in.
Her older lover stares at the couple on the dance floor, his face seething with the inward rage of hidden anger. Bejar’s head turns into the frame at suitable moments throughout the song, facilitating breaks in the dance in alteration with the Asian woman’s now-former lover. As the last verse finishes, the woman in red leaves the restaurant with her new lover, walking past the older man, who is still quietly enraged. She ignores his presence completely.
Outside, the young man opens the passenger door of his car (a DeLorean, naturally), offering it to her. But the woman in red looks away and walks down the street, proudly alone and self-reliant. Bejar sings as she strides into the city on her own, repeating, “walk away.” “Walk away.”
Maybe that should be one of my alternate careers in case academics doesn’t work out. Music video director.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Nobility in Barbarous Times
After a slightly circuituous journey, my dvd of Werner Herzog’s Invincible has finally arrived this week. The company delivered the wrong dvd at first, a film of the same name released the same year, starring Billy Zane as an immortal swordsman turning against his people to fight for humanity. The film that I actually wanted to watch was Herzog’s adaptation of the life story of Zische Breitbart, an early twentieth century Jewish strongman into a parable about justice, hope, and kindness in 1932 Berlin starring Jouko Ahola and Tim Roth.
Invincible is the story of a naive Jewish blacksmith in eastern Poland who becomes a famous strongman performer in Berlin, and a lightning rod for tensions between the rising Nazi party and the local Jewish community. The story begins when Breitbart gets into a fight in a restaurant with some local anti-Semites, and competes against a travelling strongman for a prize to pay back the damages. He’s seen by an agent, who books him to perform in a variety/occult club in Berlin, working for Tim Roth, a hypnotist and clairvoyant who is cruel and demeaning to his lover Anna Gourari, and is courting for a position of power in the Nazi party. Ahola is first dressed up as Siegfried in a blonde wig and viking armor, but eventually decides to be true to his own identity and declare himself the new Samson. The real Breitbart died in 1925, but Herzog uses the man as inspiration for this story.
The more of his films I watch, the more satisfied I am at my choice of Herzog to be the centre of this philosophical project. Having familiarized myself with his classic period, 1970-82, I can easily spot the common themes and ideas in his more contemporary work that originated there. The faux-metaphysical proto-new-age nonsense that Roth spouts onstage during his hypnotism act reflects Herzog’s irritation at the attitudes of most professional hypnotists that he developed while working on Heart of Glass. It also brought a smile to my face when I recognized Herzog's son Rudolph, himself a magician, in a cameo as the club's magician, and Herzog's voice denouncing Ahola from off camera. Invincible is the most direct engagement Herzog ever made in his work with what he calls the barbarism of the Nazi period. Even here, he never addresses the war directly: he doesn’t need to, because in 2001, when the movie was made, we all know what will happen.
One thing that struck me when I was researching the film was the criticism of its acting. Among the three leads, only Tim Roth is an actor by trade. Jouko Ahola is a strongman athlete, and Anna Gourari is a classical pianist (her performance of Beethoven’s third sonata is the centrepiece of the film’s story and the fulfillment of the character arcs of herself and Ahola). Roth gives a highly nuanced performance, embodying stealth, viciousness, ambition, while slowly engendering sympathy as his plans are ruined. Ahola, in comparison, is almost naive in the transparency of his performance; Gourari is stilted and uncomfortable at almost all moments when she isn’t playing piano.
But watching the film, particularly the development of its story, the style of performance was itself integral to the narrative. Invincible doesn’t really have a plot, if by plot you understand events that push the characters to a climax. It has a storyline: these three characters are brought together and transform each other’s lives, physically and ethically. Roth’s hypnotist is a con man who has lived his entire life as a series of cruel deceptions, and when he meets Ahola, he presumes that this Jewish performer in Berlin will also embrace a new identity. But Ahola’s strongman is honest about himself, his feelings, and his motivations. He tears away his disguise because the only way for him to live is to be who he is.
Ahola’s strength is obvious, physical, part of his very identity. Roth’s strength comes from his mind, his ability to deceive and manipulate: physically weak, he finds ways to turn the strength of others to his advantage. He succeeds with Ahola at first, but the strongman eventually learns how to direct his strength of body and character in a more noble direction as a symbol for the confidence of his people. The simplicity of his performance fits the simplicity of his character’s spirit, given purpose in collision with a duplicitous man. Herzog created in his Breitbart a flickering beacon of nobility of spirit in a descent into barbarous times.
Here's the trailer that Peter Zeitlinger, the cinematographer, uploaded to youtube himself.
Invincible is the story of a naive Jewish blacksmith in eastern Poland who becomes a famous strongman performer in Berlin, and a lightning rod for tensions between the rising Nazi party and the local Jewish community. The story begins when Breitbart gets into a fight in a restaurant with some local anti-Semites, and competes against a travelling strongman for a prize to pay back the damages. He’s seen by an agent, who books him to perform in a variety/occult club in Berlin, working for Tim Roth, a hypnotist and clairvoyant who is cruel and demeaning to his lover Anna Gourari, and is courting for a position of power in the Nazi party. Ahola is first dressed up as Siegfried in a blonde wig and viking armor, but eventually decides to be true to his own identity and declare himself the new Samson. The real Breitbart died in 1925, but Herzog uses the man as inspiration for this story.
The more of his films I watch, the more satisfied I am at my choice of Herzog to be the centre of this philosophical project. Having familiarized myself with his classic period, 1970-82, I can easily spot the common themes and ideas in his more contemporary work that originated there. The faux-metaphysical proto-new-age nonsense that Roth spouts onstage during his hypnotism act reflects Herzog’s irritation at the attitudes of most professional hypnotists that he developed while working on Heart of Glass. It also brought a smile to my face when I recognized Herzog's son Rudolph, himself a magician, in a cameo as the club's magician, and Herzog's voice denouncing Ahola from off camera. Invincible is the most direct engagement Herzog ever made in his work with what he calls the barbarism of the Nazi period. Even here, he never addresses the war directly: he doesn’t need to, because in 2001, when the movie was made, we all know what will happen.
One thing that struck me when I was researching the film was the criticism of its acting. Among the three leads, only Tim Roth is an actor by trade. Jouko Ahola is a strongman athlete, and Anna Gourari is a classical pianist (her performance of Beethoven’s third sonata is the centrepiece of the film’s story and the fulfillment of the character arcs of herself and Ahola). Roth gives a highly nuanced performance, embodying stealth, viciousness, ambition, while slowly engendering sympathy as his plans are ruined. Ahola, in comparison, is almost naive in the transparency of his performance; Gourari is stilted and uncomfortable at almost all moments when she isn’t playing piano.
But watching the film, particularly the development of its story, the style of performance was itself integral to the narrative. Invincible doesn’t really have a plot, if by plot you understand events that push the characters to a climax. It has a storyline: these three characters are brought together and transform each other’s lives, physically and ethically. Roth’s hypnotist is a con man who has lived his entire life as a series of cruel deceptions, and when he meets Ahola, he presumes that this Jewish performer in Berlin will also embrace a new identity. But Ahola’s strongman is honest about himself, his feelings, and his motivations. He tears away his disguise because the only way for him to live is to be who he is.
Ahola’s strength is obvious, physical, part of his very identity. Roth’s strength comes from his mind, his ability to deceive and manipulate: physically weak, he finds ways to turn the strength of others to his advantage. He succeeds with Ahola at first, but the strongman eventually learns how to direct his strength of body and character in a more noble direction as a symbol for the confidence of his people. The simplicity of his performance fits the simplicity of his character’s spirit, given purpose in collision with a duplicitous man. Herzog created in his Breitbart a flickering beacon of nobility of spirit in a descent into barbarous times.
Here's the trailer that Peter Zeitlinger, the cinematographer, uploaded to youtube himself.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Keep Your Daughters Out of Ballet
Darren Aronofsky and I have a troubled relationship. I think his films are brilliantly constructed, but so viscerally disturbing that I can never watch them more than once. At the same time, there’s a ridiculousness to them that I find funny in those few moments of relief from bodily terror. The Wall Street and Kabbalistic conspirators who hunt the protagonist in Pi are so amateurish that they become fools. If Ellen Burstyn’s character in Requiem for a Dream wasn’t so pathetic, her hallucinations of a jumping and belching fridge would set me cackling. If the endings of these films weren’t so unsettling, they’d be black comedies. Maybe that’s the best way to characterize the general tenor of Aronofsky’s work (The Fountain aside): black comedies for sociopaths.
Dennis Lim at Slate examines the weird sense of humour in Black Swan, which I saw last week and thought was pretty amusing in that ridiculous way. I wasn’t really sure what to make of Natalie Portman’s performance, though. I have a good friend who has gone through the gauntlet of professional ballet, and from what she’s told me, Portman’s psychological breakdown is horrifyingly accurate to the mental state of the average professional ballet dancer.
These are people treated more as machines than humans, driven into anorexia and hideous personal collapse. Nina in Black Swan is a perfect illustration of the double bind of ballet dancers. She’s pressured to stay grotesquely thin, while her work requires tense athleticism. She’s molded into a concept of femininity as innocent childish asexuality, then sexually manipulated by her director and the demands of a role that she has no concept of how to portray.
Her hallucinations as she loses her grip on reality are multifaceted and fascinating, and constitute the character just as much as the actual performance and dialogue. The self-mutilation is a typical Aronofsky stomach-churner, and the autonomous mirror images are typical Aronofsky techniques to unsettle you mentally. Some of her swan transformations are actively hilarious, and the final black swan dance sequence is genuinely beautiful, a triumph of the character, which because this is an Aronofsky film, doesn’t last.
What Lim describes as the biggest aesthetic puzzle to the film is where it lands in the matrix of camp. Everyone in this film is an over the top caricature except Natalie Portman. Mila Kunis plays the less-talented oversexed party girl. Barbara Hershey is the overbearing self-obsessed hyper-possessive mother. Vincent Cassel is a walking cliché of a genius greaseball director. It helps that he’s French. Winona Ryder’s bitter, forcibly retired diva is the most obvious throwback to Showgirls, which I am increasingly convinced is slowly becoming one of the most influential films of the end of the twentieth century.
Now look at Natalie Portman in the middle of all this. Her character has no sense of humour at all: every situation she’s in is heightened to an incredible emotional intensity. Everyone in the film understands, to some degree, the ridiculousness of the world of professional ballet. It’s the most campy, over the top, laughably zany of all the traditionally high arts. Everyone can see, to some degree, the partial silliness of this world. Except Nina.
She takes all this with an immense seriousness, giving weighty significance to everything that happens to her. Her mother, sitting in her studio of mediocre self-portraits, has some sense of what a cartoon she is: that’s what she paints. Her director talks the pretentious talk when he’s wooing investors, but he knows it’s all a matter of kissing ass. Her rival just loves looking good on stage and getting laid. But for Nina, Swan Lake is the culmination of her existence. The tragic dimension of the movie is seeing that such a serious, perfectionist attitude ultimately gains you nothing. If there's a lesson to be learned here, it's that if you're considering enrolling your four year old daughter in ballet, watch this movie first, and make sure she understands what kind of thinking will turn her into Nina.
The next day, I ended up seeing Tron, which was awesome, and 3D, and had Jeff Bridges in it.
Dennis Lim at Slate examines the weird sense of humour in Black Swan, which I saw last week and thought was pretty amusing in that ridiculous way. I wasn’t really sure what to make of Natalie Portman’s performance, though. I have a good friend who has gone through the gauntlet of professional ballet, and from what she’s told me, Portman’s psychological breakdown is horrifyingly accurate to the mental state of the average professional ballet dancer.
These are people treated more as machines than humans, driven into anorexia and hideous personal collapse. Nina in Black Swan is a perfect illustration of the double bind of ballet dancers. She’s pressured to stay grotesquely thin, while her work requires tense athleticism. She’s molded into a concept of femininity as innocent childish asexuality, then sexually manipulated by her director and the demands of a role that she has no concept of how to portray.
Her hallucinations as she loses her grip on reality are multifaceted and fascinating, and constitute the character just as much as the actual performance and dialogue. The self-mutilation is a typical Aronofsky stomach-churner, and the autonomous mirror images are typical Aronofsky techniques to unsettle you mentally. Some of her swan transformations are actively hilarious, and the final black swan dance sequence is genuinely beautiful, a triumph of the character, which because this is an Aronofsky film, doesn’t last.
What Lim describes as the biggest aesthetic puzzle to the film is where it lands in the matrix of camp. Everyone in this film is an over the top caricature except Natalie Portman. Mila Kunis plays the less-talented oversexed party girl. Barbara Hershey is the overbearing self-obsessed hyper-possessive mother. Vincent Cassel is a walking cliché of a genius greaseball director. It helps that he’s French. Winona Ryder’s bitter, forcibly retired diva is the most obvious throwback to Showgirls, which I am increasingly convinced is slowly becoming one of the most influential films of the end of the twentieth century.
Now look at Natalie Portman in the middle of all this. Her character has no sense of humour at all: every situation she’s in is heightened to an incredible emotional intensity. Everyone in the film understands, to some degree, the ridiculousness of the world of professional ballet. It’s the most campy, over the top, laughably zany of all the traditionally high arts. Everyone can see, to some degree, the partial silliness of this world. Except Nina.
She takes all this with an immense seriousness, giving weighty significance to everything that happens to her. Her mother, sitting in her studio of mediocre self-portraits, has some sense of what a cartoon she is: that’s what she paints. Her director talks the pretentious talk when he’s wooing investors, but he knows it’s all a matter of kissing ass. Her rival just loves looking good on stage and getting laid. But for Nina, Swan Lake is the culmination of her existence. The tragic dimension of the movie is seeing that such a serious, perfectionist attitude ultimately gains you nothing. If there's a lesson to be learned here, it's that if you're considering enrolling your four year old daughter in ballet, watch this movie first, and make sure she understands what kind of thinking will turn her into Nina.
The next day, I ended up seeing Tron, which was awesome, and 3D, and had Jeff Bridges in it.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Finding Philosophy With a Mad German
So a couple of months ago, I had an insane idea. I’m working on my doctoral thesis right now, a philosophy of ecology. It’s a way of thinking about nature that focusses on the contingency of human existence, and the continuity of humanity with nature, understanding humanity and its technology as a natural creation. All this involves re-thinking concepts of nature, subjectivity, life, and existence. Even though I won’t start actually writing this for another four or five months, and don’t expect to finish for a year and a half, I’m already thinking of the sequel.
The doctoral thesis, which I hope to publish as a book of philosophy, will work as a framework for an ecological ethics. And I want to approach ethical problems differently than the tradition of philosophy tells me I should. The traditional approach to ethics is to look for universal and wide-ranging normative principles that can be applied to particular situations. The problem is that I expect that my concept of existence won’t be amenable to such a dualist ethical thinking.
Instead, I’m thinking that an ethics based on characters would work better. In an ethics based on normative principles, one meets a situation and asks what universal imperatives apply here. In an ethics based on character, one asks what kind of person would you become by acting in different ways. Now think about working in a framework of ecology, thinking about problems of ecological destruction. The kind of person you would become in dealing adequately with these problems would be a human whose existence and personality included all the creatures and ecosystems around you. You would think about yourself less as an isolated human body, and more as a field of interconnected activities. The question now remains: How does one learn to think in this way?
My suspicion that most people would consider insane is that I can find the answer by engaging with art. In particular, I intend to work with the art of Werner Herzog. I’ve always been aware of his giving animals, architecture, landscapes, and forests prominent roles in his films. Sometimes, the actions of these elements are key expressions of the aesthetic structures of the entire films. Herzog’s films themselves are bodies that include non-human actors among their most important constituents. They are bodies where multiples species and ways of being intersect in clear and creative ways.
His protagonists often become other than human over the course of the story. Sometimes they journey among forms before returning to a similar shape to that as which they began. Sometimes, they try to impose their rigid human shapes on worlds alien to them, like the jungle, or the Antarctic, with mixed results. There is nothing necessary about the success or failure of conformity to non-human forms, or trying to force a non-human form to conform to one’s own. There is no universal principle to be found: success or failure of a plan of differentiating or imposition depends on the situation. Sometimes, it’s a matter of contingent features beyond the actor’s control, dumb luck. Sometimes, it’s the protagonist successfully anticipating contingencies.
These ethics do not deal with rules and applications. They deal with characters and situations. I’m not sure how successful my own philosophical project here will be, but I am hopeful that I’m onto a very productive path.
The doctoral thesis, which I hope to publish as a book of philosophy, will work as a framework for an ecological ethics. And I want to approach ethical problems differently than the tradition of philosophy tells me I should. The traditional approach to ethics is to look for universal and wide-ranging normative principles that can be applied to particular situations. The problem is that I expect that my concept of existence won’t be amenable to such a dualist ethical thinking.
Instead, I’m thinking that an ethics based on characters would work better. In an ethics based on normative principles, one meets a situation and asks what universal imperatives apply here. In an ethics based on character, one asks what kind of person would you become by acting in different ways. Now think about working in a framework of ecology, thinking about problems of ecological destruction. The kind of person you would become in dealing adequately with these problems would be a human whose existence and personality included all the creatures and ecosystems around you. You would think about yourself less as an isolated human body, and more as a field of interconnected activities. The question now remains: How does one learn to think in this way?
My suspicion that most people would consider insane is that I can find the answer by engaging with art. In particular, I intend to work with the art of Werner Herzog. I’ve always been aware of his giving animals, architecture, landscapes, and forests prominent roles in his films. Sometimes, the actions of these elements are key expressions of the aesthetic structures of the entire films. Herzog’s films themselves are bodies that include non-human actors among their most important constituents. They are bodies where multiples species and ways of being intersect in clear and creative ways.
His protagonists often become other than human over the course of the story. Sometimes they journey among forms before returning to a similar shape to that as which they began. Sometimes, they try to impose their rigid human shapes on worlds alien to them, like the jungle, or the Antarctic, with mixed results. There is nothing necessary about the success or failure of conformity to non-human forms, or trying to force a non-human form to conform to one’s own. There is no universal principle to be found: success or failure of a plan of differentiating or imposition depends on the situation. Sometimes, it’s a matter of contingent features beyond the actor’s control, dumb luck. Sometimes, it’s the protagonist successfully anticipating contingencies.
These ethics do not deal with rules and applications. They deal with characters and situations. I’m not sure how successful my own philosophical project here will be, but I am hopeful that I’m onto a very productive path.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
My Kind of Waking Life
A couple of weeks ago, I came across a very interesting movie called After.Life. It’s an intriguing premise that apparently resulted in a wretched film. Christina Ricci is a woman (a spoiled, horrid, difficult, self-absorbed, idiotic woman) who is in a car accident and wakes up on Liam Neeson the undertaker’s slab. Apparently, Ricci is a spirit who hasn’t been able to understand that she’s dead, and Neeson has the power to convince her to accept her fate. As their conversations continue, she gains an increasingly deathly pallor, her body catching up to her actual situation of being dead.
This fancy little idea is not the actual point of the movie, however. I don’t mind spoiling it for you, because the movie is supposed to be pretty terrible, and the movie itself isn’t why I’m writing. It turns out that Neeson’s character is just a creepy serial killer who’s using the ‘confused souls’ story as a cover: He’s slowly injecting Ricci with chemicals to make her appear as if she’s dying, cutting off more and more pieces of her clothing for no good reason, and will end by burying her ‘alive.’
After reading the reviewer’s dismissal of the film as “veering into Saw territory,” I was pretty disappointed too. I thought the idea of an undertaker who had to deal with his self-reanimating corpses was pretty brilliant in itself. There’s no need to turn it into a samey serial killer story. In fact, this could make a brilliant black comedy. Consider this: What kind of person would die and refuse to believe that they’re dead. The character Ricci plays in the movie is actually quite like what one of those people would be: Someone so self-absorbed, so convinced that the world revolves around them, that they would find it incredible that the world would go on without them, or that they would die in an absurd accident, that their deaths would be anything other than epic or noteworthy. Can you imagine having to talk someone like that into humility?
That’s where the comedy comes in. This poor undertaker, who I would imagine as a bit more nebbishy, or at least a little less fit, than Liam Neeson, just wants to get on with his business of dressing the dead for their funerals. It’s fine when it comes to the nice old ladies and well-adjusted people dying of sudden heart attacks or terminal illnesses. But so much of his time is filled with exasperating conversations with utterly wretched people. Plus, he has a funeral deadline to convince them to make.
I think I’ll put this on my list of short stories to write. It will finally give me a chance to use Erin May, this reporter character I developed a couple of years ago for a novel treatment that went nowhere (too pretentious). She can investigate his funeral home after the Ricci character starts walking and talking during her own funeral, cajoling people about how little they appreciate her. I've been wanting to write something articulating her plucky jadedness for a while now, and this story might suit it perfectly. It would be a good practice for writing irrealism too.
This fancy little idea is not the actual point of the movie, however. I don’t mind spoiling it for you, because the movie is supposed to be pretty terrible, and the movie itself isn’t why I’m writing. It turns out that Neeson’s character is just a creepy serial killer who’s using the ‘confused souls’ story as a cover: He’s slowly injecting Ricci with chemicals to make her appear as if she’s dying, cutting off more and more pieces of her clothing for no good reason, and will end by burying her ‘alive.’
After reading the reviewer’s dismissal of the film as “veering into Saw territory,” I was pretty disappointed too. I thought the idea of an undertaker who had to deal with his self-reanimating corpses was pretty brilliant in itself. There’s no need to turn it into a samey serial killer story. In fact, this could make a brilliant black comedy. Consider this: What kind of person would die and refuse to believe that they’re dead. The character Ricci plays in the movie is actually quite like what one of those people would be: Someone so self-absorbed, so convinced that the world revolves around them, that they would find it incredible that the world would go on without them, or that they would die in an absurd accident, that their deaths would be anything other than epic or noteworthy. Can you imagine having to talk someone like that into humility?
That’s where the comedy comes in. This poor undertaker, who I would imagine as a bit more nebbishy, or at least a little less fit, than Liam Neeson, just wants to get on with his business of dressing the dead for their funerals. It’s fine when it comes to the nice old ladies and well-adjusted people dying of sudden heart attacks or terminal illnesses. But so much of his time is filled with exasperating conversations with utterly wretched people. Plus, he has a funeral deadline to convince them to make.
I think I’ll put this on my list of short stories to write. It will finally give me a chance to use Erin May, this reporter character I developed a couple of years ago for a novel treatment that went nowhere (too pretentious). She can investigate his funeral home after the Ricci character starts walking and talking during her own funeral, cajoling people about how little they appreciate her. I've been wanting to write something articulating her plucky jadedness for a while now, and this story might suit it perfectly. It would be a good practice for writing irrealism too.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
What Happened? Have You Done Anything?
Of the movies I’ve seen in the past year, none have stayed with me more than A Serious Man, and not just because “Somebody to Love” by Jefferson Airplane is such a great song. There’s a wonderful article on Slate that gets to the heart of its story quite concisely. Larry Gopnik, the protagonist, is a man whose misfortune appears out of the blue because he didn’t see it coming. It wasn’t that there was very much concealing going on - he just never looked.
It’s a meditation on a perennial human failing: we never ask until it’s too late, we never fix the bridge until someone falls. Trying to rationalize our own inattentiveness to the important events results in a lot of empty calls to a God whose job isn’t to answer. Larry never tries to figure out the answers to what has gone wrong in his life for himself. “I haven’t done anything!” he says repeatedly throughout the film. This is really the problem in his life. The only times he acts positive at all are in his dream sequences. At all other times, he’s barely reacting, watching his life fall apart. It’s true that it isn’t his fault, but he never tries to put it back together. He hasn’t done anything, and still doesn’t.
This movie made me think about what we use reason for, to explain our world and try to improve it. That’s one of its higher goals at least, but most of our time is spent using our reason to make excuses for why the world is as it is. Larry goes to talk to the three rabbis of his community for some advice about his life, and all he’s told is that what happens is God’s will. “Look to the parking lot,” goes the empty platitude of one. Another tells a pointless story of a dentist who found the Hebrew letters “Help me!” written on the back of a gentile customer’s teeth. What does the dentist do? He couldn’t figure out the mystery, so he returned to his practise as he always had before. How does that help me? asks Larry. How can we understand God’s will? answers the rabbi.
The last rabbi won’t even leave his office to say hello.
Weakness is more common to us than we like to think. So many of us like to believe that we’re in control of our lives, but it’s remarkably easy to mistake stability for control. If there are no disruptions to test whether I control my life, then there’s nothing to prevent me from believing that I control my life. Therefore I control my life. Spelled out as directly as this, the thought process seems utterly ludicrous, but I think it’s more common to a lot of us than we like to think. A person can be very uncomfortable facing how weak they actually might be. It takes fortitude to test yourself.
When Rabbi Marshack, the oldest, most venerable rabbi in the community, finally speaks, he speaks not to Larry, but to his son Danny, who is too high to listen. “When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, what then?” Sometimes control is a fantasy, and hope is all we have. A Serious Man suggests that a happy life might be one that’s just lucky enough to avoid disruption.
It’s a meditation on a perennial human failing: we never ask until it’s too late, we never fix the bridge until someone falls. Trying to rationalize our own inattentiveness to the important events results in a lot of empty calls to a God whose job isn’t to answer. Larry never tries to figure out the answers to what has gone wrong in his life for himself. “I haven’t done anything!” he says repeatedly throughout the film. This is really the problem in his life. The only times he acts positive at all are in his dream sequences. At all other times, he’s barely reacting, watching his life fall apart. It’s true that it isn’t his fault, but he never tries to put it back together. He hasn’t done anything, and still doesn’t.
This movie made me think about what we use reason for, to explain our world and try to improve it. That’s one of its higher goals at least, but most of our time is spent using our reason to make excuses for why the world is as it is. Larry goes to talk to the three rabbis of his community for some advice about his life, and all he’s told is that what happens is God’s will. “Look to the parking lot,” goes the empty platitude of one. Another tells a pointless story of a dentist who found the Hebrew letters “Help me!” written on the back of a gentile customer’s teeth. What does the dentist do? He couldn’t figure out the mystery, so he returned to his practise as he always had before. How does that help me? asks Larry. How can we understand God’s will? answers the rabbi.
The last rabbi won’t even leave his office to say hello.
Weakness is more common to us than we like to think. So many of us like to believe that we’re in control of our lives, but it’s remarkably easy to mistake stability for control. If there are no disruptions to test whether I control my life, then there’s nothing to prevent me from believing that I control my life. Therefore I control my life. Spelled out as directly as this, the thought process seems utterly ludicrous, but I think it’s more common to a lot of us than we like to think. A person can be very uncomfortable facing how weak they actually might be. It takes fortitude to test yourself.
When Rabbi Marshack, the oldest, most venerable rabbi in the community, finally speaks, he speaks not to Larry, but to his son Danny, who is too high to listen. “When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, what then?” Sometimes control is a fantasy, and hope is all we have. A Serious Man suggests that a happy life might be one that’s just lucky enough to avoid disruption.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
A Strange Erotic Journey from Milan to Minsk to LA
Walking around my neighbourhood is one of my most productive times to think. A wandering mind on an absent-minded walk is a very fertile field. This is not to be confused with my walks around a supermarket, which raise my blood pressure to the degree that I’ve become convinced that if I ever have a fatal heart attack, it will be while navigating the condiments aisle.
But I actually wanted to describe an idea I had while walking to the bank and the supermarket this afternoon. You may remember a running gag in Seinfeld, continued in Curb Your Enthusiasm: a mediocre art film called Rochelle Rochelle, the story of a young girl’s strange erotic journey from Milan to Minsk (later adapted into a Broadway play starring Bette Midler). It ocurred to me this afternoon that the story of Rochelle Rochelle would be perfect for a respectable pornographic film. The fictional art film apparently has just as much nudity.
Feature-length pornographic films are ideal for these kinds of stories, literal road movies. What little plot there is in most pornographic films exists to link a variety of graphic sex scenes. A feature length porno is a picaresque erotic comedy, a series of emotionally gripping and touchingly funny scenes as a young girl experiences her sexual and social awakening on a strange and occasionally surreal journey from Milan to Minsk. The Rochelle Rochelle plot also offers an oddly ironic layer as well: a repressed innocent in sexy, liberated Italy transforms herself into a supremely confident vixen as she approaches grey, oppressive Belarus.
Here is where my thoughts this afternoon took a turn for the meta. I realized that in order to produce such a film, I’d need to secure the rights to the story, which are controlled and owned by Larry David. So I would need to go to Los Angeles and ask his permission to make Rochelle Rochelle into a feature length pornographic film. I would have to convince him that I and my fellow producers were serious artists aiming to make a modern Last Tango in Paris. It all sounds rather like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
So I thought, why not make it one? Fly to LA to convince Larry David to give permission to make the feature length pornographic Rochelle Rochelle, then promote the film by building an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm around it. I would play a parodic version of myself, convincing the fictional Larry David to give permission to make the Rochelle Rochelle porno. Throughout the season, David would be periodically roped into the production, feeling uncomfortable yet titillated all the time. The arc would end with the film a huge success, and Larry David and I sharing an AVN Award for the film.
I think this has great artistic, comedic, and financial potential. Mr David? Are you reading this? Contact me if you’re interested.
But I actually wanted to describe an idea I had while walking to the bank and the supermarket this afternoon. You may remember a running gag in Seinfeld, continued in Curb Your Enthusiasm: a mediocre art film called Rochelle Rochelle, the story of a young girl’s strange erotic journey from Milan to Minsk (later adapted into a Broadway play starring Bette Midler). It ocurred to me this afternoon that the story of Rochelle Rochelle would be perfect for a respectable pornographic film. The fictional art film apparently has just as much nudity.
Feature-length pornographic films are ideal for these kinds of stories, literal road movies. What little plot there is in most pornographic films exists to link a variety of graphic sex scenes. A feature length porno is a picaresque erotic comedy, a series of emotionally gripping and touchingly funny scenes as a young girl experiences her sexual and social awakening on a strange and occasionally surreal journey from Milan to Minsk. The Rochelle Rochelle plot also offers an oddly ironic layer as well: a repressed innocent in sexy, liberated Italy transforms herself into a supremely confident vixen as she approaches grey, oppressive Belarus.
Here is where my thoughts this afternoon took a turn for the meta. I realized that in order to produce such a film, I’d need to secure the rights to the story, which are controlled and owned by Larry David. So I would need to go to Los Angeles and ask his permission to make Rochelle Rochelle into a feature length pornographic film. I would have to convince him that I and my fellow producers were serious artists aiming to make a modern Last Tango in Paris. It all sounds rather like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
So I thought, why not make it one? Fly to LA to convince Larry David to give permission to make the feature length pornographic Rochelle Rochelle, then promote the film by building an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm around it. I would play a parodic version of myself, convincing the fictional Larry David to give permission to make the Rochelle Rochelle porno. Throughout the season, David would be periodically roped into the production, feeling uncomfortable yet titillated all the time. The arc would end with the film a huge success, and Larry David and I sharing an AVN Award for the film.
I think this has great artistic, comedic, and financial potential. Mr David? Are you reading this? Contact me if you’re interested.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
A Basterd's Work Really Is Never Done
So after over a week of classes starting again, the first-day party, having to wake up four hours after the first-day party for a class for which I’m a tutor, then hitching onto the Dave Campbell PhD defense party train, I was completely unable to blog. My ideas about Inglourious Basterds have been stewing in the back of my brain ever since then, and now I finally get the opportunity to lay them all out in a place where they might actually be read.
When the movie first came out, I remember some reactions saying Tarantino was anti-Semitic because it was so ahistorical. There’s always the temptation, because the Second World War carried out violence on so massive a scale that humanity itself could have approached destruction, to treat the period with reverence. To play with its history on anything more than a minor scale, like inventing fictional units that still conformed to the major sweep of the period which every such film did, could have been considered blasphemous.
But the only thing remarkable in the Second World War was the technological growth that made such mass mechanized slaughter possible. Humanity is always this brutal, and if the technology to do so had existed in any war in the past, it would have been used. The wars Hitler and Hirohito started were motivated by the same drives as any war of conquest and hatred throughout history. To fear the war as an absolute exception to humanity is to ignore its reality, to forget that it can be repeated and most likely will. The likelihood of the war’s repetition increases as we dehumanize its practitioners into figures of pure monstrousness, because we forget that the Nazis were people too, and as such we share their violent potential.
I think that’s why I was so refreshed by Inglourious Basterds. Daniel Mendelson’s review at Newsweek put the point very clearly when he said that Tarantino has turned Jews into Nazis. His mistake was that he considered this a negative point about the film. Inglourious Basterds explores the drives that make all people violent. Leil Leibowitz in Tablet talks about the Manichean worldview of good and evil that makes the Basterds the team you root for, while they are equally violent as the Nazis. But the trend among reviewers seems to be that while everyone remembers the massacre and fire at the cinema that destroys the German High Command, no one thinks of the girl who set that fire, Shosanna.
Mélanie Laurent’s Shosanna barely escaped the murder of her family by SS Colonel Hans Landa at the start of the film, and when circumstances lead her, years later, to be the owner of the theatre where the entire High Command will gather for the premiere of Goebbels' masterpiece, she takes the initiative on her own. She and her lover, Marcel the projectionist and the only black person in the film, formulate their own assassination plot alone. They never intend to survive the massacre themselves, and Shosanna herself meets a pathetic end.
The soldier/actor Fredrich Zoller (in my opinion, an even more disturbing sociopath than Landa, because when he acts innocent, you believe him) she finally guns down in her projection booth. And in an act of mercy, she leans down to comfort him as he lies dying on her floor, but he pulls a gun and blows massive holes in her abdomen as his last act. She doesn’t even get to see the footage she’s recorded and spliced into the propaganda film where she gloats over the High Command as the Jew who murdered them. However much we admire mercy, the merciful will always be taken advantage of and crushed by those who feel no pity.
As a final point, one thing I’ve noticed in discussions of the film from reviews and interviews is that many people don’t know why Tarantino misspelled Inglorious Bastards in his title. But the reason is clear if you can watch the film with an eye for detail that Tarantino himself has: visible for less than a moment, scrawled on the butt of Brad Pitt’s rifle in the central scene of act two, is the name of their unit: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.
The semi-literate Lt Aldo Raine misspelled the name of his own outfit. The wood being too tough to carve curves, he wrote the letters with jagged straight lines. The ‘s’ that ends both words is written just as is the logo for the SS, jagged lines that resemble lightning bolts. The message is clear, if distasteful to people who expect violence to be conquered with peace. We may admire people who refuse to bloody their hands in the face of their own death. We may admire those who refuse to compromise their peaceful morality and hide rather than fight. But those people are dead.
Christof Waltz as Landa makes a chilling speech at the beginning of Inglourious Basterds, talking with a farmer sheltering Shosanna’s family at his house about the image of the Jew as rat. He admires was he sees as the rat-like qualities of Jews, the ability to hide and cower their way through the hostility of their enemies. But this strategy always fails eventually, because someone will always get absolutely sick of a rat and call the exterminator.
Aldo Raine and Shosanna refuse to live under the floorboards any longer. They become just as brutal as their enemies, but when your enemy is as powerful as the Nazi state, the first to compromise with mercy or pity is the first to die. The Nazis weren’t defeated by the Jews, Roma, and gays who died in the gas chambers and killing fields. They were defeated by violent resistance movements, and the brutal Russian and American armies. It’s hard to admit that sometimes survival is a matter of your own violence and mercilessness, but truth hurts.
When the movie first came out, I remember some reactions saying Tarantino was anti-Semitic because it was so ahistorical. There’s always the temptation, because the Second World War carried out violence on so massive a scale that humanity itself could have approached destruction, to treat the period with reverence. To play with its history on anything more than a minor scale, like inventing fictional units that still conformed to the major sweep of the period which every such film did, could have been considered blasphemous.
But the only thing remarkable in the Second World War was the technological growth that made such mass mechanized slaughter possible. Humanity is always this brutal, and if the technology to do so had existed in any war in the past, it would have been used. The wars Hitler and Hirohito started were motivated by the same drives as any war of conquest and hatred throughout history. To fear the war as an absolute exception to humanity is to ignore its reality, to forget that it can be repeated and most likely will. The likelihood of the war’s repetition increases as we dehumanize its practitioners into figures of pure monstrousness, because we forget that the Nazis were people too, and as such we share their violent potential.
I think that’s why I was so refreshed by Inglourious Basterds. Daniel Mendelson’s review at Newsweek put the point very clearly when he said that Tarantino has turned Jews into Nazis. His mistake was that he considered this a negative point about the film. Inglourious Basterds explores the drives that make all people violent. Leil Leibowitz in Tablet talks about the Manichean worldview of good and evil that makes the Basterds the team you root for, while they are equally violent as the Nazis. But the trend among reviewers seems to be that while everyone remembers the massacre and fire at the cinema that destroys the German High Command, no one thinks of the girl who set that fire, Shosanna.
Mélanie Laurent’s Shosanna barely escaped the murder of her family by SS Colonel Hans Landa at the start of the film, and when circumstances lead her, years later, to be the owner of the theatre where the entire High Command will gather for the premiere of Goebbels' masterpiece, she takes the initiative on her own. She and her lover, Marcel the projectionist and the only black person in the film, formulate their own assassination plot alone. They never intend to survive the massacre themselves, and Shosanna herself meets a pathetic end.
The soldier/actor Fredrich Zoller (in my opinion, an even more disturbing sociopath than Landa, because when he acts innocent, you believe him) she finally guns down in her projection booth. And in an act of mercy, she leans down to comfort him as he lies dying on her floor, but he pulls a gun and blows massive holes in her abdomen as his last act. She doesn’t even get to see the footage she’s recorded and spliced into the propaganda film where she gloats over the High Command as the Jew who murdered them. However much we admire mercy, the merciful will always be taken advantage of and crushed by those who feel no pity.
As a final point, one thing I’ve noticed in discussions of the film from reviews and interviews is that many people don’t know why Tarantino misspelled Inglorious Bastards in his title. But the reason is clear if you can watch the film with an eye for detail that Tarantino himself has: visible for less than a moment, scrawled on the butt of Brad Pitt’s rifle in the central scene of act two, is the name of their unit: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.
The semi-literate Lt Aldo Raine misspelled the name of his own outfit. The wood being too tough to carve curves, he wrote the letters with jagged straight lines. The ‘s’ that ends both words is written just as is the logo for the SS, jagged lines that resemble lightning bolts. The message is clear, if distasteful to people who expect violence to be conquered with peace. We may admire people who refuse to bloody their hands in the face of their own death. We may admire those who refuse to compromise their peaceful morality and hide rather than fight. But those people are dead.
Christof Waltz as Landa makes a chilling speech at the beginning of Inglourious Basterds, talking with a farmer sheltering Shosanna’s family at his house about the image of the Jew as rat. He admires was he sees as the rat-like qualities of Jews, the ability to hide and cower their way through the hostility of their enemies. But this strategy always fails eventually, because someone will always get absolutely sick of a rat and call the exterminator.
Aldo Raine and Shosanna refuse to live under the floorboards any longer. They become just as brutal as their enemies, but when your enemy is as powerful as the Nazi state, the first to compromise with mercy or pity is the first to die. The Nazis weren’t defeated by the Jews, Roma, and gays who died in the gas chambers and killing fields. They were defeated by violent resistance movements, and the brutal Russian and American armies. It’s hard to admit that sometimes survival is a matter of your own violence and mercilessness, but truth hurts.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
After Five Years, The Same Film Can Be Completely Different
So Sunday night, I watched Sideways again for the first time since I saw it in theatres back in 2004. When I first saw the movie, I laughed almost all the way through. The reason for that is because the relationship between Miles and Jack in the movie was very much like what I thought the relationship between me and one of my old friends would be like by the time we hit our mid-thirties. I’m not going to say my friend’s name because I’m Miles, and I wouldn’t want to make him have to make any unnecessary explanations to his partner(s).
As if anyone actually reads this blog. But I’ve made that mistake before.
Anyway, when I watched it again after five years of being alive, I had a very different reaction. First, I was able to notice a lot more of the little details in the film, the hidden aspects of Miles’ life that I didn’t remember from the first time. I didn’t remember the trip to his mother’s house at the start of the film, or his taking a pile of her money. And I certainly hadn’t noticed in 2004 the extra moment Miles spends looking at the picture of his father on the desk. And that made me pay more attention to what I could call Miles’ hidden story.
It’s a term I stole from Roberto Bolaño. He used to say that all his novels were not about what the main points of their narrative were, but that they were driven by a hidden story, some event or set of events that drove all the action of the obvious narrative while rarely if ever being explicitly mentioned. For Sideways, that hidden story is Miles looking after his father after the older man is badly debilitated by a stroke, and the mysterious circumstances of his death. Being able to spot that hidden story and understand it gave me a very different appreciation of the film than I had before.
Now here is where it gets a little emo. While I was smiling all the way through, I found it so much more depressing, and Miles was even more like me. In 2004, I saw similarities between us in the way he related with Jack. I saw his drinking his best wine at the fast food joint as embracing the joyful advice Maya had given him, that a wine this good is a special occasion. But this time, his depression and loneliness was much more evident and affecting to me. He was pathetic the way he slept with Maya even though he knew he was lying, and I don’t even think he felt bad about Jack’s deception by the time he went home with her.
Since I first saw that movie, I had gone through an even longer amount of time than Miles without a woman, and had become similarly torn up and spit out over someone just as Miles was over a woman. I had become a much more bitter and less forgiving person. The selfish aspects of Miles were even more evident in the way I thought about myself and about other people.
Not only that, but we had also both written bittersweet novels with considerable autobiographical input, and I’m becoming equally pessimistic as he was of ever getting it published. And even though I’ve been successful so far in my career, I’m growing increasingly pessimistic about actually being able to get a professor’s job once I’m on the market in a few years, and about whether anyone but me will see any value in my philosophical work. As I learn more about the professional academic scene, the less I think I’ll fit in. And rebels are not tolerated in academia.
Yet even while Miles and I have converged so much in all the most depressing and pessimistic ways, I love this film even more. It’s because I can see so much more of the hidden story now than I could, and because Miles is so much more flawed, mean, and beaten-down than when I first saw him. I think that happens to all of us eventually.
When I first saw Sideways, I was young and hopeful, thinking that my goals would come to me fairly easily. Now I’m still young (but spotting my first grey hairs on the sides of my head and chin), but quite a lot more jaded, and accepting of the fact that chances are I won’t succeed to the degree I want, and that I’ll have to fight much harder than I thought I would.
Sideways is now going on my list with Five Easy Pieces and À Nos Amours as the movies that I love because they’re brilliantly made and speak to how I think of my life. Alexander Payne needs to make another film.
As if anyone actually reads this blog. But I’ve made that mistake before.
Anyway, when I watched it again after five years of being alive, I had a very different reaction. First, I was able to notice a lot more of the little details in the film, the hidden aspects of Miles’ life that I didn’t remember from the first time. I didn’t remember the trip to his mother’s house at the start of the film, or his taking a pile of her money. And I certainly hadn’t noticed in 2004 the extra moment Miles spends looking at the picture of his father on the desk. And that made me pay more attention to what I could call Miles’ hidden story.
It’s a term I stole from Roberto Bolaño. He used to say that all his novels were not about what the main points of their narrative were, but that they were driven by a hidden story, some event or set of events that drove all the action of the obvious narrative while rarely if ever being explicitly mentioned. For Sideways, that hidden story is Miles looking after his father after the older man is badly debilitated by a stroke, and the mysterious circumstances of his death. Being able to spot that hidden story and understand it gave me a very different appreciation of the film than I had before.
Now here is where it gets a little emo. While I was smiling all the way through, I found it so much more depressing, and Miles was even more like me. In 2004, I saw similarities between us in the way he related with Jack. I saw his drinking his best wine at the fast food joint as embracing the joyful advice Maya had given him, that a wine this good is a special occasion. But this time, his depression and loneliness was much more evident and affecting to me. He was pathetic the way he slept with Maya even though he knew he was lying, and I don’t even think he felt bad about Jack’s deception by the time he went home with her.
Since I first saw that movie, I had gone through an even longer amount of time than Miles without a woman, and had become similarly torn up and spit out over someone just as Miles was over a woman. I had become a much more bitter and less forgiving person. The selfish aspects of Miles were even more evident in the way I thought about myself and about other people.
Not only that, but we had also both written bittersweet novels with considerable autobiographical input, and I’m becoming equally pessimistic as he was of ever getting it published. And even though I’ve been successful so far in my career, I’m growing increasingly pessimistic about actually being able to get a professor’s job once I’m on the market in a few years, and about whether anyone but me will see any value in my philosophical work. As I learn more about the professional academic scene, the less I think I’ll fit in. And rebels are not tolerated in academia.
Yet even while Miles and I have converged so much in all the most depressing and pessimistic ways, I love this film even more. It’s because I can see so much more of the hidden story now than I could, and because Miles is so much more flawed, mean, and beaten-down than when I first saw him. I think that happens to all of us eventually.
When I first saw Sideways, I was young and hopeful, thinking that my goals would come to me fairly easily. Now I’m still young (but spotting my first grey hairs on the sides of my head and chin), but quite a lot more jaded, and accepting of the fact that chances are I won’t succeed to the degree I want, and that I’ll have to fight much harder than I thought I would.
Sideways is now going on my list with Five Easy Pieces and À Nos Amours as the movies that I love because they’re brilliantly made and speak to how I think of my life. Alexander Payne needs to make another film.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Philosophy and the Essential Ambiguity of Film
To begin, an example of how my thought processes work. Monday night, after Conan was over, tv inertia found me switching over to Bravo and watching the last half of an old episode of Without a Trace. The plot was about a missing teenager whose girlfriend had been involved in a near-daily series of sex parties held at his best friend's house. The girl had been a regular at the parties until she met her boyfriend, when she stopped going. But after the host started spreading rumours that the boyfriend had cheated on her, she returned, and the fight they had when he discovered this fact happened right before his disappearance.
The actors playing the party host and the girlfriend looked incredibly familiar, but I couldn't remember the name of the episode, or the names of the actors. But this morning, as I woke up, I remembered where I had seen the party host before: Canadian teen sitcom Student Bodies, which I used to watch semi-regularly when I was in high school. The actor was Jamie Elman, and on his imdb page, they had listed the name of the Without a Trace episode, "Sons and Daughters." The girlfriend in that episode was Kat Dennings, who starred last year in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist with Michael Cera.
Now, here's the idea I had in the shower this morning, after looking up this thread of interconnecting movies. I noticed another item on Jamie Elman's filmography, When Nietzsche Wept, in which he played a young Sigmund Freud. After searching through some reviews on the internet of this movie, I discovered that there were none, except a couple of forum posts on nytimes.com, one of which was a one-sentence endorsement, and the other of which said it was fit for MST3K. Apparently, Armand Assante had a decent performance, but the film was a gross oversimplification of his views.
It reminded me of an opinion I've held for some time about philosophy movies: that they should not be made. Why they shouldn't be made is a matter of the very different form of philosophy and film. Philosophy is a clearly written argument or exploration of an idea. Philosophy is largely making declarative statements and arranging them to articulate a concept or an argument. It is a matter of words, and occasionally illustrative diagrams, but mostly words. The purpose in philosophy is to explain, and interpret those explanations.
But film is a medium of images, and images don't declare anything: they just are. Sure, you can film a lecture, but a fascinating lecture is a boring film, and attempts to represent philosophies in film are best done through characters whose motivations can be understood as being rooted in or inspired by particular philosophies. If characters actually talk about their philosophical motivations, usually in long, ludicrous speeches, it becomes boring. Philosophy strives for clarity, but films strive for ambiguity. A well crafted image is a display that can consist almost entirely in interpretation. Interpretation in philosophy only begins after the text has been clearly stated. Philosophical interpretation must begin from a clear standing point in the text, and if the starting text itself is obscure, the interpretation will collapse. This is the key difference between the image and the text.
This is why novels work so much better in stating philosophical ideas. The works of Marcel Proust, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Milan Kundera are three examples that come immediately to mind. The adaptation of Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is an excellent example of the difference between novels and films when it comes to philosophy. The novel was largely an exploration of Kundera's philosophical engagement with Nietzsche, and his interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return concept. (I think Kundera committed the common mistake in Nietzsche readers, thinking of the eternal return as the sameness of repetition, when it's actually the repetition of difference, but that's neither here nor there.) The characters were cyphers for the philosophical exploration. The novel was a philosophical exploration that happened in a political and personal narrative context, and as such, it was a brilliant success.
In his adaptation, Philip Kaufman understood exactly what to do with his film. To have the characters state explicitly Kundera's philosophical engagement with Nietzsche and have the film revolve around that would have sent the audience to sleep. Instead, Kaufman's film focussed on the articulation of these ideas in the actions of the characters themselves. The audience sees the characters engage with the world, and we can work out through their actions the ideas that animate them. There are some wonderful images of Daniel Day-Lewis in the film that illustrate his philosophy of being's lightness much better than any speech ever would. Wondering whether he should rejoin his wife Juliette Binoche, who has fled the superficial and selfish society of Zürich for Prague, he stands in a pond playing with ducks, his arms outstretched on a foggy afternoon. After finding tranquility together working on their farm in rural Czechoslovakia, Day-Lewis, driving a tractor, raises his arms in mocking thanks to God, sitting on a line between the brightnesses of blue sky and green fields, Binoche watching and laughing. These images are ambiguous in themselves, and their explanatory content depends centrally on the audience.
After first conceiving this idea, I thought of a narrative inspired by that Without a Trace episode that would be an excellent philosophical novel, and if I eventually decide to pursue it, would be the first genuinely philosophical novel I write. I hope you don't mind my spoiling the end of a six year old episode of Without a Trace. At the end of the episode, we discover that the county sheriff was engaged to Kat Dennings' mother, and had discovered that his own daughter from his previous marriage was a participant in Jamie Elman's parties. Irrational with rage over seemingly having lost his biological daughter to a nihilistic lifestyle, he follows his soon-to-be-daughter-in-law back home. That night he sees the boyfriend visit and try to reconcile, only for Kat Dennings to turn him away. Dennings had told her mother that she was raped to cover up her involvement with Elman's parties. The sheriff, thinking the boyfriend was Dennings' rapist, captures him as he leaves Dennings' house, and takes him into the woods where he strangles the boyfriend to death. The end of the episode sees him confessing to Anthony LaPaglia and being led away to jail.
I wondered what could the motivations possibly be of a lawyer who would try to get him off, someone whose defense strategy would have to consist in badgering the highly traumatized witnesses to force them to break down on the stand and tricking them into contradicting themselves. This lawyer would have no ethical values other than his own power in convincing people that his desires were the truth that should motivate them. I can think of no motivation for anyone to convince a remorseful confessed killer to plead not guilty and allow his lawyer to destroy the psyches of the prosecution's witnesses. This lawyer would go ever farther than not believing in an absolute good, because you can believe in a plurality of good and still be ethical. That's me. This lawyer would have to believe that there is not, and cannot be, any good at all. Each case would be, for him, an expression of his own power. He would be a living exercise in what we could call, paraphrasing Nietzsche, a monstrous nihilist, a man happy to have overcome the values of the society in which he lives, but who sees no need to create new values.
The actors playing the party host and the girlfriend looked incredibly familiar, but I couldn't remember the name of the episode, or the names of the actors. But this morning, as I woke up, I remembered where I had seen the party host before: Canadian teen sitcom Student Bodies, which I used to watch semi-regularly when I was in high school. The actor was Jamie Elman, and on his imdb page, they had listed the name of the Without a Trace episode, "Sons and Daughters." The girlfriend in that episode was Kat Dennings, who starred last year in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist with Michael Cera.
Now, here's the idea I had in the shower this morning, after looking up this thread of interconnecting movies. I noticed another item on Jamie Elman's filmography, When Nietzsche Wept, in which he played a young Sigmund Freud. After searching through some reviews on the internet of this movie, I discovered that there were none, except a couple of forum posts on nytimes.com, one of which was a one-sentence endorsement, and the other of which said it was fit for MST3K. Apparently, Armand Assante had a decent performance, but the film was a gross oversimplification of his views.
It reminded me of an opinion I've held for some time about philosophy movies: that they should not be made. Why they shouldn't be made is a matter of the very different form of philosophy and film. Philosophy is a clearly written argument or exploration of an idea. Philosophy is largely making declarative statements and arranging them to articulate a concept or an argument. It is a matter of words, and occasionally illustrative diagrams, but mostly words. The purpose in philosophy is to explain, and interpret those explanations.
But film is a medium of images, and images don't declare anything: they just are. Sure, you can film a lecture, but a fascinating lecture is a boring film, and attempts to represent philosophies in film are best done through characters whose motivations can be understood as being rooted in or inspired by particular philosophies. If characters actually talk about their philosophical motivations, usually in long, ludicrous speeches, it becomes boring. Philosophy strives for clarity, but films strive for ambiguity. A well crafted image is a display that can consist almost entirely in interpretation. Interpretation in philosophy only begins after the text has been clearly stated. Philosophical interpretation must begin from a clear standing point in the text, and if the starting text itself is obscure, the interpretation will collapse. This is the key difference between the image and the text.
This is why novels work so much better in stating philosophical ideas. The works of Marcel Proust, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Milan Kundera are three examples that come immediately to mind. The adaptation of Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is an excellent example of the difference between novels and films when it comes to philosophy. The novel was largely an exploration of Kundera's philosophical engagement with Nietzsche, and his interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return concept. (I think Kundera committed the common mistake in Nietzsche readers, thinking of the eternal return as the sameness of repetition, when it's actually the repetition of difference, but that's neither here nor there.) The characters were cyphers for the philosophical exploration. The novel was a philosophical exploration that happened in a political and personal narrative context, and as such, it was a brilliant success.
In his adaptation, Philip Kaufman understood exactly what to do with his film. To have the characters state explicitly Kundera's philosophical engagement with Nietzsche and have the film revolve around that would have sent the audience to sleep. Instead, Kaufman's film focussed on the articulation of these ideas in the actions of the characters themselves. The audience sees the characters engage with the world, and we can work out through their actions the ideas that animate them. There are some wonderful images of Daniel Day-Lewis in the film that illustrate his philosophy of being's lightness much better than any speech ever would. Wondering whether he should rejoin his wife Juliette Binoche, who has fled the superficial and selfish society of Zürich for Prague, he stands in a pond playing with ducks, his arms outstretched on a foggy afternoon. After finding tranquility together working on their farm in rural Czechoslovakia, Day-Lewis, driving a tractor, raises his arms in mocking thanks to God, sitting on a line between the brightnesses of blue sky and green fields, Binoche watching and laughing. These images are ambiguous in themselves, and their explanatory content depends centrally on the audience.
After first conceiving this idea, I thought of a narrative inspired by that Without a Trace episode that would be an excellent philosophical novel, and if I eventually decide to pursue it, would be the first genuinely philosophical novel I write. I hope you don't mind my spoiling the end of a six year old episode of Without a Trace. At the end of the episode, we discover that the county sheriff was engaged to Kat Dennings' mother, and had discovered that his own daughter from his previous marriage was a participant in Jamie Elman's parties. Irrational with rage over seemingly having lost his biological daughter to a nihilistic lifestyle, he follows his soon-to-be-daughter-in-law back home. That night he sees the boyfriend visit and try to reconcile, only for Kat Dennings to turn him away. Dennings had told her mother that she was raped to cover up her involvement with Elman's parties. The sheriff, thinking the boyfriend was Dennings' rapist, captures him as he leaves Dennings' house, and takes him into the woods where he strangles the boyfriend to death. The end of the episode sees him confessing to Anthony LaPaglia and being led away to jail.
I wondered what could the motivations possibly be of a lawyer who would try to get him off, someone whose defense strategy would have to consist in badgering the highly traumatized witnesses to force them to break down on the stand and tricking them into contradicting themselves. This lawyer would have no ethical values other than his own power in convincing people that his desires were the truth that should motivate them. I can think of no motivation for anyone to convince a remorseful confessed killer to plead not guilty and allow his lawyer to destroy the psyches of the prosecution's witnesses. This lawyer would go ever farther than not believing in an absolute good, because you can believe in a plurality of good and still be ethical. That's me. This lawyer would have to believe that there is not, and cannot be, any good at all. Each case would be, for him, an expression of his own power. He would be a living exercise in what we could call, paraphrasing Nietzsche, a monstrous nihilist, a man happy to have overcome the values of the society in which he lives, but who sees no need to create new values.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Dreams Are Not For Sleeping, They're For Flying
A few days ago, I finished reading a semi-autobiography of Federico Fellini, a book I picked up in a bookstore in Windsor last month, one of the best impulsive literature purchases I've ever made. Everything in the book except the forward and afterword are transcripts of interviews the author, Charlotte Chandler, had with Fellini talking about his life during their fourteen years of friendship. All you read, though, are Fellini's rants, and none of the questions he was asked that inspired those rants. They cover recollections of his entire life, and while you don't discover much trivia about the production of his individual films, you learn a great deal about the conceptions of the films, the thoughts, philosophies, and imaginations that went into them. It was like reading Fellini's blog entries, as if this loud, huge, joyous man were in the room with you telling these stories.
For the sake of full disclosure I will tell you that I have only ever seen one Fellini film, 8&1/2, and nothing more. But now I want to see them all. Intervista especially seems fascinating. It's his second last film, a meta-film about filmmaking itself. A Japanese documentary crew is making a film about Fellini while Fellini himself is directing an adaptation of Franz Kafka's Amerika. And at one point, Fellini begins to fly over the studio sets he's built in Cinecittá. It's a recurring image throughout the book, that Fellini flies in his dreams.
Listening to Fellini's voice, I've reconsidered the importance of dreams and dreamlike images in the works I'm planning to write in the future. A Small Man's Town is a very realistic book, its narratives all taking place in solidly ordinary life. And my Undesireables project fits my realist leanings neatly as well. But my untitled cyberpunk project has considerable room for this kind of perceptual bending.
I imagine realistic conversations shifting seamlessly into frightening dream logic, as the protagonist Gina is confronted by a novel idea and sets off exploring her psyche and her memories. She has a dark past of which she knows nothing, and her rediscovery of that past is terrifying, a great shock to her suburban sensibilities. Her fugues of rediscovery are to be explorations of a strange place in her brain and in the past of which she knows nothing, yet are disturbingly familiar. She eventually becomes comfortable in her strange surroundings, though what surrounds her is no less strange, and she is just as alienated from her dry dull life at the end of the story as she was from the terrifying dreamscapes at the beginning.
The story has changed quite a bit since its original conception, introducing the dreamscapes and science fiction elements, as it now takes place in a community I think of as cyberpunk suburbs. I'm not yet sure what they'll look like. There is a character of a detective who becomes Gina's unwitting guide to her past, who in my initial conception of the story was a regular jaded ex-cop. But now, I see him as a cross between Nick Fury and Dirk Gently. See if that makes any damn sense.
For the sake of full disclosure I will tell you that I have only ever seen one Fellini film, 8&1/2, and nothing more. But now I want to see them all. Intervista especially seems fascinating. It's his second last film, a meta-film about filmmaking itself. A Japanese documentary crew is making a film about Fellini while Fellini himself is directing an adaptation of Franz Kafka's Amerika. And at one point, Fellini begins to fly over the studio sets he's built in Cinecittá. It's a recurring image throughout the book, that Fellini flies in his dreams.
Listening to Fellini's voice, I've reconsidered the importance of dreams and dreamlike images in the works I'm planning to write in the future. A Small Man's Town is a very realistic book, its narratives all taking place in solidly ordinary life. And my Undesireables project fits my realist leanings neatly as well. But my untitled cyberpunk project has considerable room for this kind of perceptual bending.
I imagine realistic conversations shifting seamlessly into frightening dream logic, as the protagonist Gina is confronted by a novel idea and sets off exploring her psyche and her memories. She has a dark past of which she knows nothing, and her rediscovery of that past is terrifying, a great shock to her suburban sensibilities. Her fugues of rediscovery are to be explorations of a strange place in her brain and in the past of which she knows nothing, yet are disturbingly familiar. She eventually becomes comfortable in her strange surroundings, though what surrounds her is no less strange, and she is just as alienated from her dry dull life at the end of the story as she was from the terrifying dreamscapes at the beginning.
The story has changed quite a bit since its original conception, introducing the dreamscapes and science fiction elements, as it now takes place in a community I think of as cyberpunk suburbs. I'm not yet sure what they'll look like. There is a character of a detective who becomes Gina's unwitting guide to her past, who in my initial conception of the story was a regular jaded ex-cop. But now, I see him as a cross between Nick Fury and Dirk Gently. See if that makes any damn sense.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
A Man for Whom Pain Was His Life as a Man
My journey to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was long and needlessly complicated, probably like that of most people. I first heard of it as a film that was based on a book, but I was more interested in other Terry Gilliam films, like Twelve Monkeys, Time Bandits, or Brazil. This was during high school sometime. Then when I came to university, I worked with a sports editor at The Muse who could not string a sentence together, but held incredible admiration for this man Hunter S Thompson.
A few months into my first year, a bunch of my friends and I went to an on-campus screening of Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I watched it for the first time chugging rum from a plastic bottle, laughing uproariously at the madness on screen. I remembered virtually nothing of it. One friend, who had organized the screening, was a few rows down on a couple of hits of acid. During the opening bat hallucination sequence, he had a rubber bat hurled at him from my row, freaked out, and ran away.
Since then, I have seen the movie a total of five times, only once while I was sober. I only learned more about Hunter Thompson in the flurry of tributes written upon his suicide in 2005. My friend who had dropped the acid during the screening said it was because he couldn't take living in a country under George W Bush. But as I read more about him, I understood that this was a man of incredible will, who would never buckle down to a political enemy, even one he found so repulsive and horrifying as Bush jr. No, this was a man who could not bear the physical pain of being alive anymore. He had destroyed his body, and he would not allow it to restrain him anymore. His funeral services, with his ashes launched from a giant fist-shaped cannon built by Johnny Depp, were suitably epic and weird. It still took me almost four years after this to read his most famous book.
I can understand its reputation among my friends as a manic drug comedy. It's filled with scenes of "bad craziness" of all kinds,
vivid descriptions of the wild alterations that drugs can do to a human body. Thompson's hallucinations veer disturbingly close to the actual experience of the world, not as revelations of some true nature, but of seeing all that there is and always was more accurately, with greater clarity. He was a man with an incredible insight into American ideals, capitalism, the fear of freedom, conformity culture, and his own corrosive flaws. Better writers than me have already talked to death Thompson's skills describing the items of this list. But of the last, he is most subtle in his descriptions.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas begins with a quote from Dr Samuel Johnson, "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." Thompson wrote with an elegant voice, his words flowing in a torrent, a river slicked with oil and lit on fire. In his voice, perhaps, he was most human. But the book depicts a man for whom paranoia, fear, bitterness, and existence on the edge of madness were the constants of his life. His drug intake is not to gain some kind of transcendence, not to find some plane beyond humanity that some philosophers call the vertical or the overman, and that some religions call nirvana.
The peace he sought was the peace of the wild animal, the peace free from thoughts of spiralling complexity. In drugs, he sought to become pure simplicity. Thompson's moments of sobriety in this book are his moments of greatest depression, greatest wretchedness. The joy returns as he becomes less human, as he becomes more drug, more movement, than man. The Thompson of this book is a man for whom humanity is torture, and to escape from that torture is to remove all complexity. Drugs are his means to this end. I loved this book, its wondrous flows of words, its comedy of satire and depravity. But this book terrified me as well, with its picture of a humanity degenerate, worthy only of being escaped, utterly hopeless. All Thompson's talk of 'The American Dream' that he and Oscar Acosta search for is ironic. This dream is the dream of the stupid and the willfully blind, like the cops at the district attorney's conference, or the gamblers/lizards who populate the casino.
My friend was wrong about Thompson's suicide in more ways than the one I mentioned earlier. George W Bush would not have been intolerable to Hunter S Thompson. He would be inevitable. Thompson would kick himself for not expecting this laughing fool, perhaps surprised that he had not risen sooner. W is the paradigm case of the stupid and the blind. No, Obama is the man incompatible with Thompson's worldview. This is a man who inspires hope and love in his rhetoric, and embodies that in his family. He's ambitious in his policy, and believes that Americans can overcome their impulses to pettiness and spite, becoming neighbours and brothers. And he is sincere in this belief. That is a man of which Hunter S Thompson could not conceive.
Among the few acknowledgments of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is thanks to Bob Dylan, for "Mr Tambourine Man." If he had lived long enough to see American politics today, perhaps he would have understood this song not just as a dream and a refuge, but as a prophecy or a foreshadowing.
A few months into my first year, a bunch of my friends and I went to an on-campus screening of Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I watched it for the first time chugging rum from a plastic bottle, laughing uproariously at the madness on screen. I remembered virtually nothing of it. One friend, who had organized the screening, was a few rows down on a couple of hits of acid. During the opening bat hallucination sequence, he had a rubber bat hurled at him from my row, freaked out, and ran away.
Since then, I have seen the movie a total of five times, only once while I was sober. I only learned more about Hunter Thompson in the flurry of tributes written upon his suicide in 2005. My friend who had dropped the acid during the screening said it was because he couldn't take living in a country under George W Bush. But as I read more about him, I understood that this was a man of incredible will, who would never buckle down to a political enemy, even one he found so repulsive and horrifying as Bush jr. No, this was a man who could not bear the physical pain of being alive anymore. He had destroyed his body, and he would not allow it to restrain him anymore. His funeral services, with his ashes launched from a giant fist-shaped cannon built by Johnny Depp, were suitably epic and weird. It still took me almost four years after this to read his most famous book.I can understand its reputation among my friends as a manic drug comedy. It's filled with scenes of "bad craziness" of all kinds,
vivid descriptions of the wild alterations that drugs can do to a human body. Thompson's hallucinations veer disturbingly close to the actual experience of the world, not as revelations of some true nature, but of seeing all that there is and always was more accurately, with greater clarity. He was a man with an incredible insight into American ideals, capitalism, the fear of freedom, conformity culture, and his own corrosive flaws. Better writers than me have already talked to death Thompson's skills describing the items of this list. But of the last, he is most subtle in his descriptions.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas begins with a quote from Dr Samuel Johnson, "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." Thompson wrote with an elegant voice, his words flowing in a torrent, a river slicked with oil and lit on fire. In his voice, perhaps, he was most human. But the book depicts a man for whom paranoia, fear, bitterness, and existence on the edge of madness were the constants of his life. His drug intake is not to gain some kind of transcendence, not to find some plane beyond humanity that some philosophers call the vertical or the overman, and that some religions call nirvana.
The peace he sought was the peace of the wild animal, the peace free from thoughts of spiralling complexity. In drugs, he sought to become pure simplicity. Thompson's moments of sobriety in this book are his moments of greatest depression, greatest wretchedness. The joy returns as he becomes less human, as he becomes more drug, more movement, than man. The Thompson of this book is a man for whom humanity is torture, and to escape from that torture is to remove all complexity. Drugs are his means to this end. I loved this book, its wondrous flows of words, its comedy of satire and depravity. But this book terrified me as well, with its picture of a humanity degenerate, worthy only of being escaped, utterly hopeless. All Thompson's talk of 'The American Dream' that he and Oscar Acosta search for is ironic. This dream is the dream of the stupid and the willfully blind, like the cops at the district attorney's conference, or the gamblers/lizards who populate the casino.
My friend was wrong about Thompson's suicide in more ways than the one I mentioned earlier. George W Bush would not have been intolerable to Hunter S Thompson. He would be inevitable. Thompson would kick himself for not expecting this laughing fool, perhaps surprised that he had not risen sooner. W is the paradigm case of the stupid and the blind. No, Obama is the man incompatible with Thompson's worldview. This is a man who inspires hope and love in his rhetoric, and embodies that in his family. He's ambitious in his policy, and believes that Americans can overcome their impulses to pettiness and spite, becoming neighbours and brothers. And he is sincere in this belief. That is a man of which Hunter S Thompson could not conceive.
Among the few acknowledgments of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is thanks to Bob Dylan, for "Mr Tambourine Man." If he had lived long enough to see American politics today, perhaps he would have understood this song not just as a dream and a refuge, but as a prophecy or a foreshadowing.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
A New Word: The Definition of the verb 'Norbit'
I've garnered a lot of respect for Anne Hathaway over the past few years, starting from when she first played a part that required more emotional depth than smiling and looking pretty: as Lureen Newsome in Brokeback Mountain. How she incorporated that film into her life showed a changing understanding of the importance of film. I could tell from her interviews on the promotional circuit that she had come to understand movies as having larger philosophical meanings than pure entertainment. While I haven't seen her new film, Rachel Getting Married, I've read enough reviews to know that I want to see it, and to know that Hathaway has a chance of winning a best actress Oscar for her part in the film.
Then Bride Wars came out, and it has the chance to Norbit her chances. "To Norbit" is a verb I'm going to try to spread around the internet and my circle of friends. It's defined as when an artist follows a remarkable aesthetic breakthrough with an unequivocal catastrophe that utterly blights any positive affects the earlier breakthrough could have had. The name is derived from the Eddie Murphy film Norbit, a film that was absolutely hideous in every possible way. The film Murphy made immediately preceding it was Dreamgirls, which was the best performance of his entire career. People were thinking about Murphy differently than they had in years. If he played his cards right, he could have began a new phase in his career as a serious dramatic actor. Then he made Norbit and flushed his credibility down the toilet.
Anne Hathaway is doing the same thing with the utterly superficial dreck that is Bride Wars, a film that raises the term 'chick flick' to new levels of offensiveness. It's bad enough that movies are made about brainless women who only care about frippery and shiny objects. There are women like this out there, and they need films for what they care about. But Bride Wars, from what I've read about it, combines that idiocy and superficiality with protagonists who are stupendously self-centred and mean. The result is a wretched piece of celluloid that could have been much better used making another David Gordon Green movie.
I'm not prepared to watch terrible movies now that I no longer work for radio stations or newspapers that are willing to pay for me to go. So I make judgements based on reading a consensus of critics I trust.
There's an old saying in Hollywood that's absolutely true: You're only as good as your last picture. If that's the case, then Anne Hathaway is no longer a brilliant young actress seeking bold, challenging, beautiful material. She is a crass hack who will do whatever miserable dreck has a paycheck attached.
I know she is talented, so I hope she chooses to let her next project make her brilliant again. Even if it's a full-length version of the short film below, it will be a step up from the Norbit-quality toxic garbage that so often floods the screens of mediocre cineplexes over the winter months.
Man Getting Hit By Football
Then Bride Wars came out, and it has the chance to Norbit her chances. "To Norbit" is a verb I'm going to try to spread around the internet and my circle of friends. It's defined as when an artist follows a remarkable aesthetic breakthrough with an unequivocal catastrophe that utterly blights any positive affects the earlier breakthrough could have had. The name is derived from the Eddie Murphy film Norbit, a film that was absolutely hideous in every possible way. The film Murphy made immediately preceding it was Dreamgirls, which was the best performance of his entire career. People were thinking about Murphy differently than they had in years. If he played his cards right, he could have began a new phase in his career as a serious dramatic actor. Then he made Norbit and flushed his credibility down the toilet.
Anne Hathaway is doing the same thing with the utterly superficial dreck that is Bride Wars, a film that raises the term 'chick flick' to new levels of offensiveness. It's bad enough that movies are made about brainless women who only care about frippery and shiny objects. There are women like this out there, and they need films for what they care about. But Bride Wars, from what I've read about it, combines that idiocy and superficiality with protagonists who are stupendously self-centred and mean. The result is a wretched piece of celluloid that could have been much better used making another David Gordon Green movie.
I'm not prepared to watch terrible movies now that I no longer work for radio stations or newspapers that are willing to pay for me to go. So I make judgements based on reading a consensus of critics I trust.
There's an old saying in Hollywood that's absolutely true: You're only as good as your last picture. If that's the case, then Anne Hathaway is no longer a brilliant young actress seeking bold, challenging, beautiful material. She is a crass hack who will do whatever miserable dreck has a paycheck attached.
I know she is talented, so I hope she chooses to let her next project make her brilliant again. Even if it's a full-length version of the short film below, it will be a step up from the Norbit-quality toxic garbage that so often floods the screens of mediocre cineplexes over the winter months.
Man Getting Hit By Football
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Starting a New Year Almost Too Well
Every blog on the internet is probably talking about year end lists and recollections and highlights and other summative activities. And I suppose I will too, seeing as how I'm here and I'm not that tired. Waking up at two in the afternoon will do it. So here are a selection of things I've done, seen, observed, began, finished, and whatever else you can say to describe 2008 for me.
As we began . . .
This is what I like to call an upswing year. After 2007, it could not have gotten much worse, barring utter catastrophe such as the death of close friends or a meteor striking the city and destroying it instead of giving me marginally badass superpowers. 2007 saw my first genuine professional crisis since deciding to be a university-based philosopher, with my MA thesis examination metaphorically akin to receiving severe shrapnel wounds. That year was bookended by the catastrophic shattering of two of my closest friendships, first KB and then RH. Things only began to look up on New Year's Eve, which I thought would be my last New Year's Eve in St John's. I spent it partying with one of my nearest and dearest, Chris. Arse that he can be at times, he's had my back at moments when no one else was willing, and stood up for me when no one else would and I deserved it least. He helped me end 2007 optimistically, and by the end of that year, optimism was practically a miracle.
Best Professional Deliverance: McMaster's Acceptance Call
On my way out of a Dance Party of Newfoundland sketch show, I turned my phone back on and immediately got a call from my mother. McMaster philosophy called my house while I was in the theatre with good news. I got home and called back to hear Elisabeth Gedge the department head congratulate me for my acceptance and give me a run-down of their funding package.
Since moving to Hamilton for the program, I have found an apartment perfect for me with low cost, in an excellent downtown neighbourhood, near everything that's important for my daily life: grocery store, restaurants, coffee shops, bars, the liquor store, and good neighbours. My friends Johnny and Allyson have both started at McMaster sociology, and I got them apartments in the same building as me. My supervisor, Barry Allen, is ideal for what I want to write, how I want to approach the project, and how I work. The people at my department support experimentation in writing style, outsized personalities, and professional ambition, all of which define me and my work. Right now, I'm ahead of the game on thesis planning, was one of the few grad students who needed no extensions on any course work, connect well with the undergraduates I teach, and have one publication and two conference presentations pending approval.
Most Awesome Energizer: Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, and Fucked Up
Since I don't work at a newspaper anymore, I don't have access to a pile of new music. However, some of what I've heard on youtube and sought out has treated me well. Probably the best new music I've discovered was a Toronto punk band called Fucked Up. Rarely has sound been so visceral than when it's coming out of speakers playing their second record, The Chemistry of Common Life. Being a punk band, one would gravitate to their being rage experts. But their lyrics revolve around all sorts of existential dread and elevation, all the possibility of human emotion distilled into rock and blasted at you. They take you apart and put you back together molecule by molecule.
As for Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, they wrote a work of classical music that drags me to places only Beethoven (among the classical genre) has done before. It's the perfect complement to a damn-near perfect film. More on that below.
Best Ethical Treatise: The Dark Knight
Since I don't work at a newspaper or a radio station anymore, I don't have access to free movies. But The Dark Knight completely redefined what I thought a pop movie could do. No studio head would ever be crazy enough to sink this much money into a film that embodies pure terror and forces it into the audience's gut. But The Dark Knight did, and actually made enough money to buy most of Africa. I saw it five times during its theatrical run, will buy the dvd, and probably see it during the re-release later this month.
The Dark Knight revolves around problems that I think are at the heart of ethics: What will you do in the face of horror so great it seemed impossible? It presents the intensity of every element of life under threat, and asks if it's possible to build the strength within yourself to hold on to your ideals when all that you love most and all that you've worked for is about to crumble. That the answer can be a credible, powerful, fully knowledgeable Yes makes this film all the greater.
Most Unexpected Re-Awakening of Political Ideals: Barack Obama
Speaking of saying Yes, this man is the new President of the United States. For a long time, I've been a cynic who reduced politics to fearmongering, corruption, a dreary pragmatism, and avoidance of violence. Then this guy wins an election by appealing to all the positive potentials of humanity, and is set to govern along those principles. Pragmatism is not dreary, but an inclusive merging and negotiation of formerly competing interests in the face of common problems. Corruption can be fought by enacting that ideal of a fraternal community in your words and deeds every day in your life. Almost everyone I know predicts his assassination, but I expect him to live into the 2050s. He's shown that we can better the world by demanding that the world be better and acting on that demand. My cynicism will never die as long as I can laugh at my enemies, but my pessimism has been strangled. I did it myself.
Most Accurate Picture of My Inner Life: Spaced
This was the best dvd purchase of my life, even more than my Doctor Who collection. The show has a story structure and headspace that displays almost precisely how I think: flying in a hundred directions at once, but all together making perfect sense. And a soul that just wants to be loved, and to love in return. And it's the funniest show in the world.
Sign of Future Film Stardom: Justin Madol
Justin is a friend from my Muse days who's directing a zombie movie in St John's. I ran into him on New Year's Eve when we were each at parties across the street from each other. We talked, drunkenly, for a while about our plans for the future. He talked about the film, and wanting to establish himself as a director. I talked about my novel, which is unfinished, but now almost three hundred pages and good enough at least to publish. He said that I should write something to adapt to film for him to make, and one of the ideas in my vault could work very well as a film. Undesirables is a plan for a novella about people trying to live quiet lives, but are resentfully excluded from it. One case is a Muslim immigrant suspected of terror ties, and the other case is a former sex offender. There might be a homosexual there too, but I'm not sure yet. It could make for a good low-budget drama. Call me when I finish the PhD, JM. Won't be long.
As we began . . .
This is what I like to call an upswing year. After 2007, it could not have gotten much worse, barring utter catastrophe such as the death of close friends or a meteor striking the city and destroying it instead of giving me marginally badass superpowers. 2007 saw my first genuine professional crisis since deciding to be a university-based philosopher, with my MA thesis examination metaphorically akin to receiving severe shrapnel wounds. That year was bookended by the catastrophic shattering of two of my closest friendships, first KB and then RH. Things only began to look up on New Year's Eve, which I thought would be my last New Year's Eve in St John's. I spent it partying with one of my nearest and dearest, Chris. Arse that he can be at times, he's had my back at moments when no one else was willing, and stood up for me when no one else would and I deserved it least. He helped me end 2007 optimistically, and by the end of that year, optimism was practically a miracle.
Best Professional Deliverance: McMaster's Acceptance Call
On my way out of a Dance Party of Newfoundland sketch show, I turned my phone back on and immediately got a call from my mother. McMaster philosophy called my house while I was in the theatre with good news. I got home and called back to hear Elisabeth Gedge the department head congratulate me for my acceptance and give me a run-down of their funding package.
Since moving to Hamilton for the program, I have found an apartment perfect for me with low cost, in an excellent downtown neighbourhood, near everything that's important for my daily life: grocery store, restaurants, coffee shops, bars, the liquor store, and good neighbours. My friends Johnny and Allyson have both started at McMaster sociology, and I got them apartments in the same building as me. My supervisor, Barry Allen, is ideal for what I want to write, how I want to approach the project, and how I work. The people at my department support experimentation in writing style, outsized personalities, and professional ambition, all of which define me and my work. Right now, I'm ahead of the game on thesis planning, was one of the few grad students who needed no extensions on any course work, connect well with the undergraduates I teach, and have one publication and two conference presentations pending approval.
Most Awesome Energizer: Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, and Fucked Up
Since I don't work at a newspaper anymore, I don't have access to a pile of new music. However, some of what I've heard on youtube and sought out has treated me well. Probably the best new music I've discovered was a Toronto punk band called Fucked Up. Rarely has sound been so visceral than when it's coming out of speakers playing their second record, The Chemistry of Common Life. Being a punk band, one would gravitate to their being rage experts. But their lyrics revolve around all sorts of existential dread and elevation, all the possibility of human emotion distilled into rock and blasted at you. They take you apart and put you back together molecule by molecule.
As for Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, they wrote a work of classical music that drags me to places only Beethoven (among the classical genre) has done before. It's the perfect complement to a damn-near perfect film. More on that below.
Best Ethical Treatise: The Dark Knight
Since I don't work at a newspaper or a radio station anymore, I don't have access to free movies. But The Dark Knight completely redefined what I thought a pop movie could do. No studio head would ever be crazy enough to sink this much money into a film that embodies pure terror and forces it into the audience's gut. But The Dark Knight did, and actually made enough money to buy most of Africa. I saw it five times during its theatrical run, will buy the dvd, and probably see it during the re-release later this month.
The Dark Knight revolves around problems that I think are at the heart of ethics: What will you do in the face of horror so great it seemed impossible? It presents the intensity of every element of life under threat, and asks if it's possible to build the strength within yourself to hold on to your ideals when all that you love most and all that you've worked for is about to crumble. That the answer can be a credible, powerful, fully knowledgeable Yes makes this film all the greater.
Most Unexpected Re-Awakening of Political Ideals: Barack Obama
Speaking of saying Yes, this man is the new President of the United States. For a long time, I've been a cynic who reduced politics to fearmongering, corruption, a dreary pragmatism, and avoidance of violence. Then this guy wins an election by appealing to all the positive potentials of humanity, and is set to govern along those principles. Pragmatism is not dreary, but an inclusive merging and negotiation of formerly competing interests in the face of common problems. Corruption can be fought by enacting that ideal of a fraternal community in your words and deeds every day in your life. Almost everyone I know predicts his assassination, but I expect him to live into the 2050s. He's shown that we can better the world by demanding that the world be better and acting on that demand. My cynicism will never die as long as I can laugh at my enemies, but my pessimism has been strangled. I did it myself.
Most Accurate Picture of My Inner Life: Spaced
This was the best dvd purchase of my life, even more than my Doctor Who collection. The show has a story structure and headspace that displays almost precisely how I think: flying in a hundred directions at once, but all together making perfect sense. And a soul that just wants to be loved, and to love in return. And it's the funniest show in the world.
Sign of Future Film Stardom: Justin Madol
Justin is a friend from my Muse days who's directing a zombie movie in St John's. I ran into him on New Year's Eve when we were each at parties across the street from each other. We talked, drunkenly, for a while about our plans for the future. He talked about the film, and wanting to establish himself as a director. I talked about my novel, which is unfinished, but now almost three hundred pages and good enough at least to publish. He said that I should write something to adapt to film for him to make, and one of the ideas in my vault could work very well as a film. Undesirables is a plan for a novella about people trying to live quiet lives, but are resentfully excluded from it. One case is a Muslim immigrant suspected of terror ties, and the other case is a former sex offender. There might be a homosexual there too, but I'm not sure yet. It could make for a good low-budget drama. Call me when I finish the PhD, JM. Won't be long.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Batman, Overman
There can be considerable overlap between art and philosophy, and not only in the obvious field of the philosophy of aesthetics. In a way, I think the best art is ethical philosophy, and the best ethical philosophy is such a work of art. That statement wasn't clear at all, so allow me to give a very broad example of what I think this overlap can do.
Just before I left Newfoundland, I had a conversation with a friend about what we both took The Dark Knight to be. One of his philosophical interests is post-colonial philosophy, which he shares with me. But I also love Nietzsche, and I've read more of this than he has. One of the things we talked about regarding Dark Knight was its conservative interpretation. Here we have a hero, Batman, who spies on the populace and allows himself to be provoked into torturing a villain, presumably for the greater good. On this interpretation, Batman is a figure who justifies the Bush-Cheney administration, taking on evil tasks to protect the innocent from a terrorist. I definitely think you can interpret Dark Knight in this way, but there's also another understanding of the film that resonates with me, and I think speaks a much more profound truth.
Harvey Dent says, having dinner with Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes, "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain." This phrase encapsulates how I understand Dark Knight. Just because he's Batman, that doesn't make everything he does morally acceptable. This isn't about justification of any action like spying or torture or police brutality. It's about the confrontation of a person who holds himself to be good with the abyss. And when you stare into the abyss, as Nietzsche said, the abyss stares back at you. Where I pick up from there is that when the abyss stares back at you, you have to be strong enough not to become an abyss yourself.
The three characters at the centre of Dark Knight's ethical confrontation that I've just described are Bruce Wayne, Harvey Dent, and Jim Gordon. The abyss, personified as The Joker, forces them to confront themselves, and what they are willing to do to achieve their ends. Because if you go too far, you betray the good intentions you started with. "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain." Of those three, Harvey wasn't strong enough to resist the abyss, and abandoned his ideals as he embraced revenge in his final rampage. Everything Harvey did as Two-Face was a surrender to The Joker's will to destruction. He believed everything The Joker told him in that hospital room, and acted precisely according to plan.
Jim and Bruce are strong enough to take up the burdens necessary to sustain their ideals. Bruce refuses to kill The Joker because that would betray his principles about murder. And he and Jim are both strong enough to cover up Harvey's crimes, and maintain the fiction of incorruptibility that keeps hope in Gotham alive.
My post-colonial friend expressed concern when I advocated an ethics inspired from Nietzsche's talk about strength, believing that this kind of thinking leads to fascism, and the triumph of the one with the bigger gun. But the strength I mean is the kind of strength to affirm your life, to overcome petty, reactive desires like revenge and resentment. This is the strength to maintain your ethical stance even in the face of the most incredible temptation to break it.
This strength is value neutral, of course. The Joker refuses to abandon his ethical stance, which is that all are corruptible, and he will corrupt them through fear, terror, and paranoia. The writing style of philosophy proper is working out ethical systems. Grammatically, they are a series of positive statements. Starting from premises about what is good or what standards the good must satisfy, the straight philosopher works out theories and corollaries that elaborate this concept of good. Just read John Rawls' A Theory of Justice as the best example of this I know.
But the actual collision of ethical systems is something I'm not sure this style of philosophizing I've described can help us with. When two incompatible ethical systems collide, can anything settle the collision except war? Are we really faced with what The Joker describes in his last lines in Dark Knight, "an unstoppable force meets an immovable object."? I'm not sure of the answer here yet, but I think stories like Dark Knight offer us a way of understanding these collisions, and how they would play out. The best way to solve this problem of the limitation of philosophy is, I think, to figure out how to combine the philosophical grammar of positive statements with the narrative grammar of the morally ambiguous situation.
I'm certainly thinking modestly here, aren't I?
Just before I left Newfoundland, I had a conversation with a friend about what we both took The Dark Knight to be. One of his philosophical interests is post-colonial philosophy, which he shares with me. But I also love Nietzsche, and I've read more of this than he has. One of the things we talked about regarding Dark Knight was its conservative interpretation. Here we have a hero, Batman, who spies on the populace and allows himself to be provoked into torturing a villain, presumably for the greater good. On this interpretation, Batman is a figure who justifies the Bush-Cheney administration, taking on evil tasks to protect the innocent from a terrorist. I definitely think you can interpret Dark Knight in this way, but there's also another understanding of the film that resonates with me, and I think speaks a much more profound truth.
Harvey Dent says, having dinner with Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes, "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain." This phrase encapsulates how I understand Dark Knight. Just because he's Batman, that doesn't make everything he does morally acceptable. This isn't about justification of any action like spying or torture or police brutality. It's about the confrontation of a person who holds himself to be good with the abyss. And when you stare into the abyss, as Nietzsche said, the abyss stares back at you. Where I pick up from there is that when the abyss stares back at you, you have to be strong enough not to become an abyss yourself.
The three characters at the centre of Dark Knight's ethical confrontation that I've just described are Bruce Wayne, Harvey Dent, and Jim Gordon. The abyss, personified as The Joker, forces them to confront themselves, and what they are willing to do to achieve their ends. Because if you go too far, you betray the good intentions you started with. "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain." Of those three, Harvey wasn't strong enough to resist the abyss, and abandoned his ideals as he embraced revenge in his final rampage. Everything Harvey did as Two-Face was a surrender to The Joker's will to destruction. He believed everything The Joker told him in that hospital room, and acted precisely according to plan.
Jim and Bruce are strong enough to take up the burdens necessary to sustain their ideals. Bruce refuses to kill The Joker because that would betray his principles about murder. And he and Jim are both strong enough to cover up Harvey's crimes, and maintain the fiction of incorruptibility that keeps hope in Gotham alive.
My post-colonial friend expressed concern when I advocated an ethics inspired from Nietzsche's talk about strength, believing that this kind of thinking leads to fascism, and the triumph of the one with the bigger gun. But the strength I mean is the kind of strength to affirm your life, to overcome petty, reactive desires like revenge and resentment. This is the strength to maintain your ethical stance even in the face of the most incredible temptation to break it.
This strength is value neutral, of course. The Joker refuses to abandon his ethical stance, which is that all are corruptible, and he will corrupt them through fear, terror, and paranoia. The writing style of philosophy proper is working out ethical systems. Grammatically, they are a series of positive statements. Starting from premises about what is good or what standards the good must satisfy, the straight philosopher works out theories and corollaries that elaborate this concept of good. Just read John Rawls' A Theory of Justice as the best example of this I know.
But the actual collision of ethical systems is something I'm not sure this style of philosophizing I've described can help us with. When two incompatible ethical systems collide, can anything settle the collision except war? Are we really faced with what The Joker describes in his last lines in Dark Knight, "an unstoppable force meets an immovable object."? I'm not sure of the answer here yet, but I think stories like Dark Knight offer us a way of understanding these collisions, and how they would play out. The best way to solve this problem of the limitation of philosophy is, I think, to figure out how to combine the philosophical grammar of positive statements with the narrative grammar of the morally ambiguous situation.
I'm certainly thinking modestly here, aren't I?
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