The Contrarian

It has come to this

2010-03-06T14:32:00.000-08:00

I keep getting Asian porn spam in my comments so until further notice comments are turned off to all but other members of the blog. Not that this really inconveniences anyone....

Not a Movie for People Who Hate Movies

2010-02-21T11:26:00.000-08:00

I'm on a bit of a jag against IFC lately. Shortly, I will post a brief rant against their programming in general, as well as what will be a likely separate and somewhat longer consideration of their documentary Indie Sex. Today, I want to say a couple things about one of the movies promoted by that documentary, John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus. Interested parties should consult my other blog, Movies for People Who Hate Movies, for my thoughts about a movie, and a filmmaker, that deals with analogous subject matter with greater sensitivity, depth and profundity, Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs.

Shortbus

Don't believe the hype, most of which you will hear in that unintentionally comical IFC documentary, Indie Sex. This is an astonishingly mediocre movie, you know the kind that gets called Indie because it wasn't shot on a Universal back lot and has no known stars in it and it's kind of quirky in one or two hackneyed ways. There are gay guys in it! The plot centers around a woman who is searching for her elusive first orgasm! They all hang out at a sex club! Filmmaker, John Cameron Mitchell, ups the ante and gives his Indie cred a shot in the arm by showing real sex: penetration, cumshots. But as I say, if you are used to porn, there's nothing surprising here, just a run-of-the-mill parade of cliches.

For starters the acting in what is supposed to be an ensemble, actor's piece is pretty dreadful. They are all more or less one-note stereotypes. Utterly perplexing in this “honest, unflinching exploration of sexuality” is the fact that these one-dimensional characters hang on to their single dimension during sex! We never see different facets to these personalities. We never see unexpected reactions. The only interesting actor for me was the brief appearance by an old man at Shortbus who introduces himself as a “former mayor of NYC” (I think he's supposed to be Ed Koch! Am I hip because I get the reference?) He has a nice little speech and old people are interesting to watch and hear, but beyond that the performances in this movie are pretty lame. Maybe it takes so much out of you to reconcile yourself to the fact that you are fucking on camera that you have nothing left to give to actual acting? I don't know; I'm just speculating. Just thinking out loud.

I suppose I should be more forgiving of the story as a stylization, but the fact that all these people do is talk about sex and have sex is pretty obnoxious, it becomes grating after awhile. This is what I don't understand about movies like this that claim to be realistic. The most truthful part of Shortbus is when James tells Jamie he can't have sex right now because he just jerked off. As opposed to the next scene, in which Sofia, a professional therapist, slaps her client, Jamie, and then confesses to the couple that she's sorry she lost control, but she's a bit on edge because she's never had an orgasm. I don't know. Is that supposed to be funny? I can appreciate the absurdity of it, I suppose. I have been telling people this movie is like John Waters film without jokes, but maybe I'm missing the jokes. Some of the “top critics” at Rotten Tomatoes certainly talk about it as if it were a comedy.

Maybe I misconstrue it because of Mitchell's serous tone in the aforementioned Indie Sex. To hear him talk about it, you would think this is the most serious film ever made. I would add that the comments of the other talking heads confirm the importance of his film, so it is fair to say that the film itself endorses Shortbus as an important, crucial moment in cultural history. So I took it as such. The thing is I don't think this mission of releasing us from our sexual shackles is a pertinent crusade. I'm pretty sure sex is all over the place. Porn is mainstream enough that I can watch the AVN awards and specials about the most recent adult entertainment industry expo on basic cable. Every show on MTV and VH1 entails finding a mate for Brett Michaels, or a C-level model, or a D-level R&B artist. Every beer commercial, soda commercial, deodorant commercial and shampoo commercial hinges on sexual innuendo or various levels of exposure. I don't understand. Who is uptight? Where is it that our society needs to loosen up? Are you telling me Shortbus is reaching out to the Tea Baggers? Cause they ain't gonna be converted by a movie that shows three guys blowing each other.

The time has passed for shocking content. Everything is permissible now. Don't be taken in by Fox News and the Tea Baggers. Nothing is shocking, remember that Perry Ferrell said that when Reagan was president. Does anyone honestly believe that as a whole the culture has become more puritanical in the past twenty years? We don't need shocking content. We need now what we have always needed: shocking style; unique, profound, naked modes of expression. Grafting Hollywood style on to a couple of explicit scene won't get the job done. One need look no further than than the scene in which “a former mayor of NYC” talks to Ceth. Their in the middle of a party; there's a live band, and they are practically whispering to one another in the middle of it all. The background, which is not background at all, but all around them is conveniently mic-ed down so all we here is their conversation clear as a bell. Sorry, but I will not suspend this particular disbelief. Moreover, as they talk they are being watched across a crowded, noisy room by James and Jamie who can obviously tell what they are talking about. They even nod to Ceth in approval after he gives the old man a hug. This is classic look-think-feel as Ray Carney describes it in his essay “Two Forms of Cinematic Modernism:
Notes Towards a Pragmatic Aesthetic.” (http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/acad/forms.shtml) As Carney explains, these characters can read the thoughts and feelings of one another from across the room. In mainstream cinema its a perfectly acceptable device, but if we are asking for new modes of expression, and I am, it will not do.

Dear IFC, Please stop now.

2010-01-02T17:03:00.000-08:00

I suppose it has been long enough since the last time I complained about IFC. For some reason, those letters stand for Independent Film Channel. Anyway, I was digging through my notebooks and found some scratchings about watching Beyond the Valley of the Dolls on IFC, and I felt compelled by the hand of the lord to share those thoughts. Let me say that I enjoy breasts from the seventies as much as any heterosexual man should, maybe more, but I musty insist that there are places to see them other than what is ostensibly a venue for low budget American art cinema. The fact is that if it were at all true to its name, IFC would show movies by Cassavetes, Robert Kramer, Su Friedrich, Jay Rosenblatt, Stan Brakhage, Caveh Zahedi, Mark Rappaport, Shirley Clarke, Andrew Bujalski, the Duplass Brothers, Joe Swanberg, etc. But you can't find any of these directors there. Instead, IFC provides The Land of the Spiders, a B-movie about tarantulas taking over a town in Texas that stars William Shatner, and the Roger Ebert penned, Russ Meyer directed Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Has the word “independent” undergone such a transformation in our culture that it is now synonymous with “ironic”? Because we know that these are not Indy movies, don't we? Is it not that IFC bow sells Indy attitude more than Indy product, and part of that attitude is the ability to enjoy exploitation movies and B-movie hokum from an ironic distance?

I have an idea for IFC: why not make a fucking documentary about Russ Meyer? It is an interesting enough story. He's somewhere between the Robert Crumb and Ed Wood intellectually. He was a real “independent” filmmaker before the term was a buzzword. The documentary would be more interesting than his crappy movies precisely because it would explore the tension between his do-it-yourself ethic and his terrible ideas. Maybe through documentary we could discover the true meaning of Christmas – namely that making a film independent of the studio does not mean that you are making unique or spiritually “independent” art. After all, IFC loves an excuse to jam sex into a documentary under the guise of intellectual investigation. If you missed their review or would-be “study” of sex in cinema, do yourself a favor and continue to miss it, unless you happen to have a hole that can only be filled by pseudo-intellectual clap-trap.

Random Thoughts on CCR

2010-01-02T16:27:00.001-08:00

Lately I have been listening to a lot of Creedence Clearwater Revival. I do not know why I have neglected them for so long, except to say that I suppose one goes through phases. There is so much great music available, and I tend to obsess over a band or two at a time, however long that time may last. Obsessing is good because it directs one's attention toward detail, and leads to richer appreciation. I am blown away by “Suzie Q,” a song I used to find boring and repetitive. First, the guitar tone is great. Maybe I overstate, because I previously overlooked it. But the Fogerty brothers have a really warm, organic overdrive with real depth. I doubt any pedals were used here, just amps cranked as loud as they can go (I'm not a historian and I encourage readers who are to provide any necessary details). Those solos are so simple, but great tone makes them interesting. I find that if a guitar is producing a deep, rich, complex tone, the solo can be a single note, and it will sound good. It's not about cramming in scales and arpeggios; it's about attack, timing, sustain and overdrive.

These songs conceal their complexity, because the layers are tonal, not virtuostic (musicologists forgive my slaughter of these terms. Don't worry, we are about to move out of technical criticisms). Outside of the musical experience of CCR I am struck by the weird, randomness of popularity, of staying power and of fame in general. As far as I know, everyone likes this band. I grew up in the rural Midwest, and I cannot remember anyone ever complaining about too much Creedence. Everyone from redneck to hillbilly to hardcore bigot to future tea-bagger loves “Willie and the Poor Boys,” “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” “Up Around the Bend” and everything else from Chronicle 1 and 2. “Suzie Q” made it into Apocalypse Now and “Lookin' Out my Back Door” is in The Big Lebowski, two films essential to the college zeitgeist of my generation. There is certainly no rational explanation for this, at least not the part where conservatives like them.

Consider the following CCR hits: “Proud Mary,” “I Put a Spell on You,” “Good Golly Miss Molly,” “Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “Night Time is the Right Time” were all huge hits for the black performers that originally recorded them, so right away we can say that it makes no sense for someone who is openly bigoted to like this band that owes at least half a dozen of its biggest hits to black songwriters. Then there's the Woody Guthrie-esque populism and feeling of one's roots that I guess is mistaken down-homey. There are songs about drug use, unless you think “Lookin' Out My Back Door” is about something else. I submit: “Tambourines and elephants are playing in the band/Won't you take a ride on the flying spoon?/Wond'rous apparition provided by magician.” Chances are pretty good that most of the tea-baggers who would love CCR, have never actually heard those words, much less considered their meaning – something to do with their overall lack of attention to detail I imagine.

And they certainly have never thought about the words to “Fortunate Son.” I don't know what goes into popularity, but in many cases, lack of attention and sheer obliviousness seem to be key ingredients. I remember a commercial for Ralph Lauren that came out in the months following 9-11, you know, when all the soulless wretches in marketing departments all over the country decided it was ethically sound to cash in on people's sorrow and fear by flying a flag in every commercial. I may have actually cried the first time I saw that commercial where the Budweiser clydesdales bowed in front of the hole where the towers used to be, but if I died it was from a deep disappointment that advertisers could be so callous. A new frontier of cynicism had been reached, and I got dragged across the threshold unwillingly. Anyway, the Ralph Lauren ad plays the song “Fortunate Son,” but only the first two lines: “Some folks were born made to wave the flag/Ooh, that red, white and blue.” Then they show a flag and the viewer is reminded that loving America means loving expensive jackets, polos and rugby shirts.

Now, if you had never heard the song before, and you were a fearful, xenophobic lunatic, you might think what a good song to express such a noble sentiment. The trouble is that these are the rest of the words:

And when the band plays "Hail To The Chief",
oh, they point the cannon at you, Lord,

It ain't me, it ain't me,
I ain't no senator's son,
It ain't me, it ain't me,
I ain't no fortunate one, no,

Some folks are born silver spoon in hand,
Lord, don't they help themselves? oh.
But when the taxman come to the door,
Lord, the house look a like a rummage sale, yes,

It ain't me, it ain't me,
I ain't no millionaire's son, no, no.
It ain't me, it ain't me,
I ain't no fortunate one, no.

Yeah, some folks inherit star spangled eyes,
ooh, they send you down to war, Lord,
And when you ask them, how much should we give,
oh, they only answer, more, more, more.

It's a fucking anti-war song! And whatever you may think of marketing tactics in general, the fact remains that this commercial came out during a time in which every mainstream media voice was calling for the blood of whoever did this to “us” and if we cannot find them, then anyone who kind of looks like them or lives near where they live will do. Just making sure you understand the context for this blatant disregard of context. “Fortunate Son” is quite beyond the satirical and bittersweet “Pink Houses” or the ironic “Born in the U.S.A; it is incendiary. It spells out a complete critique of the ties between war-mongering and patriotism, between nepotism and power. Zach de la Rocha could have written it.

R.E.M. Double Live

2009-11-15T18:58:00.000-08:00

There aren't a lot of people around these days that care much for R.E.M. At least I don't run in to many of them. The people I talk to either hate them (in my opinion, because they are homophobic) or they think they used to be cool, but now they suck. I've heard that one since Out of Time. Lately I have been wondering how this came about. I suppose they did just get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, whatever that means, and I know that if they went on tour it would be a stadium venture that would sell out everywhere. But we know that people go to shows who don't care about the bands. I suppose I just expect R.E.M. to hold the same status as U2. Perhaps I'm showing my age, but that is how I always experienced them. These were my two favorite bands for as long as I can remember being aware of their existences. I have always thought of R.E.M. as our, meaning America's U2, as the most important American producer of rock and roll since Bob Dylan.

I don't wish to dwell on all this, I just want to let you know who it is that is reviewing their new album, a double disc live set from a theater in Dublin. They call it a rehearsal, go online and read the details, I want to talk about the songs.

Merely to read the names of the tracks on set list offers many surprises. There are songs from the newest album and a few here and there from most of the albums back to Life's Rich Pageant. But the set is dominated by songs from the first three albums and the EP that preceded them. Songs from Chronic Town, Murmur, Reckoning, Reconstruction of the Fables (of Reconstruction) are performed with clarity and completeness the early recordings lacked. I would not say either version is better, just that the new performances of the old songs come alive in different, often unexpected, ways. There are no different arrangements, just details: you can understand the lyrics now, Mike Mills' backing vocals are more self-assured and more frequent and there are more textures of guitar. There are just more sonic layers overall which, again, is not to say that the songs are better than they used to be.

I listen and do not really here songs that are new to me, but performances that sound like the songs are new to the artists. These are not aging rockers going through the motions of playing their old shit. R.E.M. seem to have discovered that they wrote some very good songs 25 and 30 years ago. They don't trot out these tunes the way the Rolling Stones trot out Satisfaction. The songs from the first four recordings are vital, energetic and urgent. Perhaps this is why there's barely anything in the set that would count as a hit. No “Losing My Religion” or “Shiny Happy People.” No “Stand,” “The One I Love” or “End of the World as We Know It.” They perform “Drive” but not “Man on the Moon” or “Everybody Hurts.” All the quasi-hits are the old hits, but even then they are few and far between. “So. Central Rain” and “Driver 8” appear but not “Don't Go Back to Rockville” or “Radio Free Europe.”

For me this may be the best album they could have made. It makes me dream of the possibility that the bands I love will see this as an option. No Line on the Horizon is great, but I wonder U2 would make of October and Boy these days? I think this is one of the unique possibilities rock and roll affords. One need not be forever coming up with new material. Revisit and re-imagine the old material. Find new vitality in it.

Further Notes on the Contemporary American Man

2009-11-15T09:25:00.000-08:00

My intellectual life is aimed directly at confronting Hollywood and everything it represents. My whole ideology is set in opposition to the values it represents and helps to indoctrinate. Even on an instinctual, emotional level I am predisposed to hating that which the mainstream. Somehow my life has brought me to this strange place: I have a sustained social interaction with an acquaintance who works in the writing branch of film studio. His day job as I understand it is to make notes and punch up scripts. This is the meal ticket for his freelance work that includes mainstream online publication at a major sports news outlet and selling a romantic comedy to a studio. Our interactions, which take place entirely over the internet, are sometimes polite and tolerant, but often bitter and sardonic. I don't like him, mostly because I have no respect for his work, but my dislike is exacerbated my fear that anything I say against him will be interpreted by others as jealousy.

Part of the problem for me is the self promotion. When he recently posted a link to an article he had written, I was immediately annoyed. The people in our peer group are generally a creative bunch. Most of us write; some of us perform, but none of us fish for compliments and/or brag about our successes save for one. Against my better judgment I followed the link and read. It was pretty typical of everything else on the website, which I may as well reveal is ESPN Page 2. All of it is nonsense more or less, inflating that which barely matters in human existence to life or death proportions. It is the raison d'etre of Page 2 to treat sport as if its shallow emotional resonances were deep, as if its mathematical calculations of statistics were intellect, as if the seriousness with which we look at it is spiritually appropriate. The best stuff on Page 2 has always been by Chuck Klosterman and the late Hunter S. Thompson precisely because they don't love sport. They are more interested in mass love of sport than in personal fandom. Little wonder that they are few and far between at Page 2, and that they were well-established cultural critics in their own right before being invited to contribute to ESPN.

First Notes on the Contemporary American Man

2009-11-15T09:24:00.000-08:00

I recently had to cut off the tap that ran from ESPN into my brain. At least the so-called “analysis” portion which is really just guys who talk about their fandom and grossly overestimate the value of sport. I recall Dave Damashek once musing: “In these troubled times I fell sorry for people who don't have sport. What do they do? How do they escape?” These guys worship uniforms. And the question Damashek asks is buried so deeply beneath a foundation of unknowing, I would have no idea how to answer him in terms that would make sense. People read books, Damashek. They try to figure out what the hell is going on instead of hiding from it. They try to learn how to live life rather than escape from it.

I'll still watch a game or twenty, but my days for listening to podcasts are over. Except for Bill Simmons. I should explain. It isn't that I consider him an exception to the standard idiocy; in many ways he is a champion flying the Idiot flag. Though I am sympathetic to him in some ways, and though he occasionally offers genuine insight (but only when talking about the NBA), I would not call him a good writer. He knows a little about sports. I feel sorry for him when he talks about music. I cringe for humanity when he talks about movies. It is not that my standard is high, just that it is a standard at all. This is the problem with Page 2, with culture at large, everyone is just going through the motions.

I read Simmons because to me he represents the Contemporary American Man, and I have to keeps tabs on that spirit/ideology, because I regard it as what I am up against. He is the champion of the middle brow. The Contemporary American Man loves his any art that makes him feel smart and greets anything that confuses him with suspicion and hostility. Simmons loves mediocre sentimentality in movies and resents anything that looks like it may have been made by someone smarter than him. He has two phrases for this: “artsy-fartsy” and “too cool for school.” These terms cover anything that makes him feel stupid. This infantilism is the affliction of the Contemporary American Man. I suffer from it too, but my advantage is that I have diagnosed it correctly.

Here We Go Again....

2009-09-07T17:56:00.000-07:00

Some weeks ago I was explaining to a friend why I will never watch Saving Private Ryan. To me it seemed pretty self evident. I regard Spielberg as a hack, and I detest gratuitous violence. I would define gratuitous rather broadly with regard to film. The Cinema's propensity to depict graphic images of violence and sex is its cross to bear. Sex and violence are only the most prominent cliches a visionary film artist must overcome. Many filmmakers who would call themselves visionary mistakenly believe that the path to overcoming is through immersion. My aforementioned friend refers to the first twenty minutes of Private Ryan as “sublime,” and I suspect that Rob Zombie, who has churned out another Halloween remake, would like savvy viewers to say that about his torture movies as well.

What exactly is measured by the degree of violence I can tolerate? Is it my intellect? Is it my coolness? Like Quentin Tarentino, Zombie would probably say that I'm dumb if I don't understand how cleverly he uses violent imagery. If he thinks that he is making “classic slasher films,” whatever that means, Zombie may be right, because the point of the genre has always been to create for teenagers, or anyone else with an adolescent mentality, a carnival spook-house. I imagine Zombie thinks he is making his audience confront their fears, and therein lies the value. The problem is that Zombie's fears are the fear of an adolescent boy. No. I am misrepresenting adolescent boys. Zombie's fears are the fears that adolescent boys use to distract themselves from their real fears.

I fail to see a substantive difference between the violence he portrays and that which Spielberg portrays.

Happy Labor Day!

2009-09-07T13:06:00.000-07:00

I grow weary of the ideological debate everyone else seems to be energized by these days. It is particularly sad to see my liberal friends slide ever deeper into the us vs. them quicksand. It is an illusion. This country is run by business interests and nothing besides. The corporate masters are interested only in dollars, and in that fundamental sense they are a-political. They are disciples of Milton Friedman before they are anything else. This is not a Cabal by design, but the system is very good at protecting the rich by constantly pitting superficially opposing sides against one another in the media and in the government.

Consider that almost every Hollywood actor, producer, writer, director; every so-called (by Fox News) liberal journalist or reporter all serve media conglomerates. This by the way is the heart of my effort to constantly debunk mainstream film. It's nice that George Clooney and Julia Roberts do a lot of charity work, but their films (their REAL work?) espouse a different ideology. It is nice that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas say the “right” things in their films, but the very style of those films espouses a different ideology. None of them or their peers would ever make the following accusation, and I doubt many would understand the implications it, but if you think that there is a meaningful difference between the CEO of Wal-Mart or Nike and the CEO of Dreamworks or Miramax, you are fooling yourself.

The point is that the system would fall apart if either side was to fully win their apparent war. Further, the conclusion is that neither side can ever win, because the system seems to be perfect. So when liberals talk of this country turning into Hitler's Germany, I think they are missing the big picture. Do they not realize that the right wing is also making that claim? Perhaps liberals would say they are merely using it as rhetoric, but that claim would only betray a fundamental lack of respect for the people they supposedly wish to help via education and information.

These doomsday predictions are distracting whether they come form the left or right. Our situation is dire enough without worrying about the possibility of a fascists takeover. I suspect, in fact, that we find ourselves trapped in a system perhaps too perfect to change. Surely the unshakeable, resilient nature of the beast is more frightening than an ideological structure that is unstable enough to allow or even encourage change? We may not have a way out of this.

From Rome to the Nazi State it strikes me that all comparisons of the United States to historical empires are inaccurate. The picture that I am starting to see more clearly all the time, is that there has never been anything like America. Perhaps it is not merely the nation, for there has never been a power structure like the one that rules us – there has never been multi-national corporate power; and there has never been a media conglomeration that walks hand in hand with this power in the guise of its antipode – there has never been a Hollywood. I simply do not think anyone knows how this ends or if it even can, and that should be a lot more terrifying than the remote possibility of fascism.

The Invisible Hand of the Market Continues to Dominate You

2009-08-16T16:39:00.000-07:00

In previous entries I have suggested that if we do not determine aesthetic standards and apply them to art works diligently, if we do not assert values the market will do it for us, or rather, to us and our culture. I said this in relation to watching and reading Žižek , because I think his aesthetics lack evaluative terminology, or rather, since the whole of his thought is aesthetical, as one of my philosophy professors once told me speaking of Nietzsche, he does not develop specific terms of aesthetic judgment. I argue with friends and colleagues about Žižek's writing on film, and they continue to remind me that he does not do film criticism; he uses popular film to illustrate Lacanian ideas. I continue to assert that this does not excuse him. Žižek is one of the most prominent intellectuals alive who writes about film. He has a lot of influence in other words. I am certain that he could put together a course in Lacan that would elucidate some of the most sophisticated aspects of his theory entirely through a study of Hitchcock. This is well and good, but I still wonder at what point does it become yet another class devoted to the single most studied and most overrated filmmaker in the history of the medium at the expense of a chance for students to see Ozu, Akerman, Dreyer or Bresson?

Last night I was talking to a colleague about his summer course on the Vampire Film. He tells me its a theory course. He tells me that vampires are the hottest thing going these days, and it is a good way to introduce students to various ideas. Again, it is well and good to introduce students to “important” ideas, by which I'm sure he means the ideologies popular throughout academia – feminism, Marxism, identity politics etc. At some point, however, film departments teach nothing but these courses. The ideas of individuals such as the filmmakers listed above no longer matter. More importantly, we no longer teach how to relate to art properly. And if you don't think this is a case of the market determining cultural values, consider that my colleague told me, “Look, I don't want to teach Vampire Film, but I have to offer something that will put butts in seats. The difference between six and twelve students taking my class is two thousand dollars in my pocket.” Yes, the university pays its instructors per student. Do I have to explain why that is fucking obscene?

Ode to a Great Contrarian

2009-08-02T16:24:00.000-07:00

People often ask me why I don’t like anything – music, movies and the like. As I have said before, this question usually means “Why don’t you like the same things that I like?” The chances are good that I have addressed that problem on this very blog. It is called The Contrarian after all. Today I don’t want to be contrary, though. I want to give you one good reason to read everything you can get your hands on by Lester Bangs: he takes no shit. Reading his interviews with Lou Reed in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung is a deep cleansing breath fresh air. Given the current state of discourse in our culture, Lester Bangs seems like a revelation. Because we are living in a time in which criticism (as the word is used in common parlance) is immediately taken as disrespect, the fact that Bangs would try to start an argument with someone he clearly admires, that he would take to task a hero, is stunning. Imagine being face to face with an artist and telling him which of his works are mediocre and why. Of course Lou Reed doesn’t just accept this criticism dumbly; he dishes it right back to Bangs, explaining that he is not as good as he used to be either. Granted each and every scenario is embellished if not made up entirely, but the point is that Bangs envisions a world in which honesty is a possibility. Standards don’t come into it any more than decency. The important thing is to call it like you see it. Or rather that’s the first thing. It is an important consideration in this age when everyone who knocks out any old piece of “creative work” is entitled to praise and thanks as Jamie Kennedy and many of the artists he interviews suggest in Heckler. That is the zeitgeist isn’t it? Everyone should be creative and their creativity should be praised? I don’t like it. I mean our Lester Bangs is Chuck Klosterman, and he goes out of his way to resist judgment at every turn. Klosterman wants to “observe and report,” because who is he to judge? So goes the sentiment. I think if you asked Lester Bangs that question he would say: “I’m Lester Fucking Bangs and I’m smarter, sharper, quicker and more perceptive than you; that’s why I get to judge.” I know it gets sticky once you claim to have a right to judge, but that’s life. It gets messy. Is it particularly interesting to sit back and let everyone have his own opinion? Is it good for culture? As Zizek says, “I’m entitled to my opinion” really just means “leave me the fuck alone.” We have to have dialog, and there is no such thing as dialog without disagreement.

Unsatisfied Fools

2009-07-19T17:30:00.000-07:00

I am new to Karl Pilkington. That is to say I have yet to read the books, and I have only just ingested the years of radio shows and podcasts. Of course I have also spent considerable time searching out clips on youtube and the like. While I certainly enjoyed the three part program I found on youtube (probably originally for BBC TV) entitled Karl Pilkington: Satisfied Fool, I think it is rather misnamed. Surely the point is that he is unsatisfied. Is it not this quality of his that makes him so interesting? Most fools (by which I mean most people, but I will get into Karl as a representation of the population at large in a moment) are entirely satisfied, at leas the appear to be. They don't ask questions, they don't make documentaries about their quest for answers to questions (however stupid those questions may be). Perhaps Karl named the documentary himself?

In the program Karl searches for an answer to his question: “Is it worth it to be smarter?” Since Karl is an idiot, he naturally thinks that being smarter means knowing more stuff, so what underpins his asinine question is the belief that if he worked harder at being smart i.e. if he read more, he would amass a repository of more facts and bits of information and thus would be smarter. Of course he leans toward not doing this, toward not learning, because what little he does pick up from reading – and it should be mentioned that he is a terrible, terrible reader with no attention span and no sensitivity to nuance – does no make him any happier. This is also crucial – he thinks knowledge should equal happiness.

The fascinating thing about all this is that it seems irredeemably idiotic when you watch this man bumble his way through these ridiculous questions, but somehow he represents a fundamental human problem. I think we all have it in our heads, even those of us who try to exercise it like a demon, that happiness is the ultimate goal. Whether one views it as a birthright or a responsibility, we treat life as a quest for happiness. Every other activity gets filtered through that lens. Will knowledge make me happy? Will money make me happy? Sex? Drugs? Marriage? Religion? Health? Hobbies? Instead of attempting to balance these these things to achieve some semblance of a whole human most people focus on one or two. Most of us do not have sufficient time for emotional, intellectual, spiritual and physical fulfillment or satisfaction. We pick the area that tickles us, the one that is easiest, and focus on that. The reason why this never results in happiness is that the other aspects of existence or consciousness have been neglected and the simple fact of the matter is that all need to be nourished. The intellectual lives in quiet desperation, unable to relate to his fellow human beings emotionally. The poet dies young because he neglects his body which he sees as the cage that traps his spirit. And so on.

Karl is not going to keep his desperation quiet and this is his illuminating quality. He is a fool, but perhaps no more so than most people. (One could argue that the title card inserted at the end that shows his Mensa test score of 83 in relation to the average score of 100 would indicate that he is indeed stupider than most people.) It's just that most people keep their mouths shut. My junior high school science teacher was fond of telling us, “You know if you didn't open your mouth, no one would know how stupid you are.” Alot of us learned that lesson despite the deluge of reality shows in which people give vent to every fleeting eighth-grade emotion and inane notion in their heads and despite that we are taught that self-expression is the supreme purpose in life. This contradiction causes a problem: when people do open their mouths they have a delusional sense of entitlement because they have learned that every utterance is a sacred expression of self-hood than no other person has a right to judge. Nobody wants to speak up, but when they do, you had better thank them for it.

I go through this in every course I teach. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's attempts to educate Karl sound like exactly my experience with students who are supposedly much smarter than Karl is. I beg them to talk. I try to interest them in anything so I will have a point to jump in. But somehow they think that it was the talking that was the important thing in itself. When they start talking and I correct them or critique them in any way, they are flabbergasted. Why am I talking if I am not going to receive adulation and affirmation? In one season of the radio show, Ricky would give Karl books to read – little introductions to various historical figures of note like Churchill and Rasputin. The comedy of it was that Karl kept thinking that he was supposed to get out of it whatever he got out of it, when Ricky was trying to get him to learn specific, key points about the subjects of the books. A lot of this has to do with Karl's reading comprehension and short attention span. This is why Karl's “search” is ultimately doomed to fail – he isn't really searching because he does not how. I think of the student who refuses to accept a single premise proposed by the course, but insists that he is really trying hard. Trying is not only a decision. It is also a skill. Learning is not the addition of information. It is acceptance of ways of knowing that sometimes nullify the ones you used previously.

Karl believes that Knowledge is a collection of facts. In his conception the only advantages to being smart are for “chat” and to avoid coming across “daft.” Substitute “chat” for “classroom discussion” and “not coming across daft” for “getting a good grade” and you have the average college student. Almost every student I ever had wants me to tell them a list of things they can repeat to me in class and in papers. They just want to know what it takes to impress me. How can I not think of Karl exclaiming to the man who quotes Socrates, “See? That's what I want to be able to do.” All of the people Karl interviews tell him the same thing: intelligence is not merely knowing a bunch of stuff. Karl just does not get it. He glazes over like a dog shown a card trick and says, “Yeah but I just think if I had some quotes....” He thinks being smart is the same as impressing other people with quotes. The rub is that a lot of academics think so too! Karl might be better off though, because he knows that he just wants to appear to know stuff, where academics typically think they know a lot of stuff.

I am drawing parallels to the academic world, but it should be clear that Karl's inadequate understandings are indicative of what we might call, for lack of a better term, “human nature.” Perhaps “human tendency” would be better. We all want recognition. What is recognition but an appearance? When a student tells me he really is trying so hard, he is usually merely putting on the appearance while resting firmly within previously established boundaries. These limitations are precisely what stops learning from ever happening. One of the worst arguments I had with a student was over a paper she had written about Stranger Than Paradise. In the prompt I carefully specified that her essay should address the slow pace of the film without using the word “boring.” I regard this as a fairly straight-forward technique. The idea is to encourage the student to think about a very conspicuous aspect of the work without the facile category she would want to plug it into. Perhaps forcing one to use different words will engender new ideas. “If you are bored, you're boring,” someone once said. John Cage said if you are bored for two minutes, try it for four minutes; if you are still bored try it for eight more, and so on. I said that Stranger Than Paradise is slow but it isn't boring. Explain why it is slow. You can imagine what she wrote. After she saw her “D” she screamed at me about how she's entitled to her opinion and all the familiar excuses against thinking and learning I mentioned at the beginning.

Gervais is in Satisfied Foool for about 30 seconds, and he says simply, “Karl won't learn anything from this.” Maybe it's because he really is stupid, and maybe my student who thinks Stranger Than Paradise is boring is stupid. We are not all created equal. Yet there is something fundamentally human about the way Karl will ask a question, but not accept the answer because he already has an idea of what the answer should be. I think of the time (I don't know if it was the podcast or the XFM show) Ricky tries to convince him that dinosaurs and humans never shared the planet and he just cannot entertain the notion. “Surely their paths would have crossed at some point,” he says. He does not conceive of how vast the past is; he only knows that it happened before he got here. In some form or another, we all have that problem. We all know we don't know everything. Most of the time we are dissatisfied with our inadequate understanding of life, the universe and everything. It is only when we are being told answers that we suddenly feel protective of everything we already know.

Hazards of Academia Part 249

2009-07-14T14:50:00.000-07:00

Just a heads up to draw whatever attention I can to a couple essays recently posted on my website: Sculptingintime.net.

One of them is the result of a commission of sorts gone haywire. I was asked by a scholarly journal to write a review for Black Dog Press's Tarkovsky Anthology. No easy task for me to tackle a collection so disparate and voluminous and treat all the contributions fairly and equally. I gave it a shot, but in the end my ideas of fairness and equality did not match those of the editors. I believe the phrase "conclusionary screed" was used. Moreover, and this was the irresolvable conflict, the essay I submitted was too damn long. The version that appears at my site, which I cut several pages from, comes in just over eight thousand words. Apparently I was to shoot for something closer to 4500 maximum. I was given the chance to trim it down to 5500, and they even gave me a headstart by slashing the first three or four pages which constitute the entire aesthetic foundation as far as I am concerned. In the end I was unable to hack it up to fewer than six thousand, and I found that version to be a semi-cohernet rant at best, an author by author denunciation of each essay in the Anthology. I had hoped to publish that hatchet-work version then post a link to it so that readers could compare the two essays side by side, and perhaps learn something about academic freedom. Unfortunately, it was not to be and I can offer only the "original" review.

The other essay is something I wrote years ago about Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter I suppose that I am primarily a film scholar insomuch as I usually write about films. On occasion I do write about books. I have some training in that discipline after all. Recently I unearthed this essay which I had submitted as partial completion of my Master's degree in English. Surprised at how good it was (I had not considered anything in it for six or seven years), I punched it up and sent it to a major American literary journal that shall remain nameless. Upon rejection I decided to post the entire text at the website. Some might say I should have tried another journal, but the old song and dance that accompanies nearly every rejection I receive i.e. "lack of critical engagement with recent scholarship" has won the day. I cannot fight for everything, and besides Sculptingintime.net needs some fresh content. So I'll let you be the judge. Does the piece need "a better sense of the contemporary and ongoing debates" over the novel in question? Would it benefit from a more up to date bibliography; the editor used the phrase "since the 1980's"? (I should note that all quoted passages above are cut and paste from the email I received from the editor.)

Please check out the essays. Perhaps you will find them amusing.

Variety is a Good Place to Start Figuring Things Out on Your Own

2009-04-11T16:39:00.000-07:00

I have written before about the illusion of freedom of choice as it pertains to the cinema. Rosenbaum calls it a conspiracy; I recognize it as the invisible hand of the market. Yet it speaks of something else as well. Just look at the Oscars: Kate Winslett, Sean Penn, Ron Howard; Nazis, oppressed minorities, important historical moments – the same people doing the same thing year after year. If it is a conspiracy it is one that we are all too happy submit to. It is every bit as much a psychological yearning as cultural one that is answered by repeatedly rewarding the same people for the same accomplishments. Quite simply, we (do I mean “Americans” or do I mean “humans?” I am not sure) like to be reassured that important stuff is important, that our tastes are refined and that we are in on the good stuff. Any stream of criticism that interrupts the flow reassuring hegemony (never recognized as hegemony of course) is quite naturally met with resistance. That there is a wide world of endless variety not sanctioned by the forces that shape cultural norms is denied at seemingly every level of discourse.

I know this is true because I read guitar magazines. There are basically two of them that dominate the scene, Guitar Player and Guitar World. After reading both for a number of years, I have reached the conclusion that they exist to put Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads, Jimmy Page, Dimebag, Zakk Wylde and Metallica on various lists: fastest guitarists, most influential guitarists, greatest song, greatest album etc. It is not just the uniformity; it is that they would give the impression that they are inclusive. Of course they are anything but. In a recent anniversary issue the editors apologized for being caught up in the “grunge” moment in the early nineties and over-estimated the importance of the likes of Thurston Moore, Lee Renaldo, Kim Thayil and Billy Corgan. Thankfully they found the way back to real guitar players like Zakk Wylde.

For the moment my point is not whether one kind of guitar playing is better than the other. My discussions with people about movies and music often lead to the accusation that I must not like anything. “You don’t like Van Halen? You don’t like Nickelback? You don’t like Steve Miller? Jesus, you must not like anything!” Part of this is the simple problem of equating what one likes with all that is available to be liked. But beyond this is what I would call the real problem we have culturally and psychologically: all that different stuff we like really isn’t that different from each other. That is what drives me crazy about these guitar magazines. They occasionally give us a break from the onslaught of Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads to talks about the guitarist from Disturbed or Slipknot or Avenged Sevenfold. What about Peter Buck? Robert Smith? Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto? Is playing a lot of notes really fast the only standard by which we judge?

I have been thinking a lot lately about the meaning of taste, and all I come up with is that the word needn’t be used anymore. Most people cannot really be said to have “taste” since all that they “like” is all that is familiar to them, and everything is judged by how well it fits in with what they already know/like. Little wonder that most of us the same things i.e. sports, sitcoms, reality shows, Grammy music, McDonalds. That isn’t really taste. It’s just cultural conditioning. Taste is never a meaningful position; it is always an out. We use phrases like: “Not my cup of tea,” “Not my thing,” “not what I’m into” and the like to insulate ourselves from criticism and avoid reflection and conversation. For most people not liking something amounts to a rejection of that which is unfamiliar. It is easy to see how we conflate this with taste, because it lends itself to an analogy with food: I don’t like this flavor in my mouth because it is unfamiliar to me. That’s why little kids and a lot people we grew up with spit out new bites of food. The problem with the word “taste” as it is used in common parlance is that it conflates a sense of cultivation and erudition with taste buds on the tongue. It attributes taste buds to eyes, ears and ways of thinking.

Thinking about taste led me to go back and re-read a chapter from Giorgio Agamben’s Man without Content about the “Man of Taste.” Agamben has his own ideas about the role taste plays in aesthetic consciousness and how that role has changed over the last 350 or so years, and some of them are interesting. I recommend this book to any interested reader, as I am not interested in summarizing Agamben’s thoughts, but in a path not taken in his essay. Early on he says that what has developed into something called “aesthetic judgment,” in our times, began in seventeenth century Europe (mostly France and Italy) as something called “taste.” I would emphasize the notion of development because it would mean that aesthetic judgment is the cultural maturity of taste, NOT that aesthetic judgment is ultimately reducible to taste. The significant conclusion to draw from this, for my argument, is that we don’t really have “taste” anymore. There is no substance to the notions of good and bad taste, and in any event we don’t use the word to mean anything like what it meant when it first appeared. I think what we have now is a spectrum of better and worse aesthetic judgments, and we call them personal taste to avoid submitting them to the kind of critical inquiry one would expect of an aesthetic judgment.

Let me save aesthetic judgments for another time. The point is not that I like R.E.M and U2 better than Slayer and Metallica, but that I can listen to both. Life is about being open to the new and the other. It is about trying food that you would not normally eat, going places you would not usually spend your time, talking to people you may not immediately like and soaking up all the art you can find. But this is not merely an issue of quantity vs. quality. Rather I would argue that one learns about quality from quantity. The curator of the Metropolitan does not think that all the paintings in the collection are equal. A place is made for all of them so that people can learn by comparing and contrasting. A lack of difference atrophies perception and clouds experience. A person who listens to nothing but the fast guitarists that Hard Rock and Metal have to offer will lack not just appreciation of Music in general, but will ultimately lack any real understanding of Hard Rock or Metal either!

Against My Better Judgement, Here's This:

2009-02-22T17:50:00.000-08:00

I’ll keep this short and sweet. The basic shape of the thing look like this: The first third consists of talking heads, mostly other comics, commenting on how they deal with hecklers. Suddenly the subject shifts as Kennedy informs the viewer that he equates criticism with heckling. Now the talking heads give their thoughts about critics and Kennedy throws in some footage of himself confronting various people who dismissed his film Son of the Mask. There’s also some footage of Uwe Boll boxing people who don’t like his movies.
All in all I think Jamie Kennedy is duping me. I think this movie is a put-on. The irony, if that’s what it is, doesn’t make it any more or less of a movie, however; it just makes it a different kind of stupid. If this movie is for real, as every reviewer at Netflix and Rotten Tomatoes seems to think, then it is offensive. If it is a put-on, a sort of mockumentary, then it is merely dimwitted.
There is a clip of Reagan telling someone to shut up while he’s trying to give a speech, and I can’t figure out why its’ there. Am I supposed to think Reagan is cool in that moment? Never mind his policies of taxing the poor coupled with and corporate deregulation. Never mind the multiple covert wars. Forget that he invited fundamentalist Christians to dictate social policy so we end up with things like the war on drugs and the “pro-life” movement. Forget that before he was a politician Reagan was a B-movie actor whose claim to fame was his position as informant for Joseph McCarthy. Reagan needed to be heckled. He is exactly the kind of person that deserves all the heckling he can get. It would have been interesting if Kennedy had thought a little bit about heckling authority figures as a form of criticism. It also would have helped if he had remembered that every comedian got his start by heckling his teacher in school.
It could be that I am a simpleton and the movie is so masterfully ironic, that it critiques that footage of Reagan. What it fails to do is define its terms accurately, and this is why, mockumentary or not, it is superfluous. Simply put: Criticism is different from reviewing. Reviewing is only another part of the promotional program for film. Whether of the professional or anonymous on-line variety, the reviewer is not a critic. A critic does not waste his time writing about Son of Mask. He has bigger fish to fry.
Put-on or not, as the movie continues it turns into my own personal anger machine. From taking Bill Hicks out of context (Kennedy should really have more respect for the Gods of Stand-Up) to appearing to praise Ronald Reagan to showing Boll pummeling teenagers for not liking Alone in the Dark, a movie in which Tara Reid portrays an archeologist, the underlying message seems to be that I should not criticize rich people when those rich people are trying their best to just entertain me. I feel like I could put Heckler in my DVD player and churn out a rant any time I get stuck. It is in that spirit that I dedicate the rest of this commentary to world-class blowhard, George Lucas, and his ten-second appearance in the film.
Lucas tells Kennedy, “There are two kinds of people in the world, creators and destroyers… (dramatic pause) I prefer to be a creator.” I wonder how many times Lucas has trotted out this line to insulate himself against criticism of his hackey, B-movies. Granted that it is impressive that he can, with a straight face, refer to the way in which he injects his understanding of a book by Joseph Campbell into a puppet show for pre-adolescents as “creation.” However, this is precisely the problem with Lucas’ statement. He is not a creator at all; he is a maintainer of the status quo. What he does with Campbell is literally the definition of kitsch. According to Clement Greenberg, who defined the term as we use it today, a distinctive feature of kitsch is the predigested quality of all the knowledge contained in the work of art. Applied to Lucas’ Star Wars films, this means that his art does not arise organically and then require a Joseph Campbell to unpack all of its mythologies. Quite the contrary, Lucas read Campbell, and used his theories as a template. That is not how mythologies are made. Nor is taking an idea you read somewhere and grafting onto a story a process for creating a work of art.
I imagine Lucas did not read Campbell enough to get to the part where he talks about Indian/Hindu mythology. Had he made it this far, Lucas might have a different idea about destroyers. It is evident from his tone that Lucas views the dichotomy between creator and destroyer as interchangeable with that between good and evil wherein creation is good and destruction is evil. Suffice it to say, without launching into a summary of eastern philosophy, that this view is excruciatingly on-dimensional. If Eastern philosophy is not your cup of tea and you do not feel like reading the Vedas or the Tao Te Ching, take a look at William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Suffice it to say that it is little wonder that a man with such meager intellectual, spiritual and emotional chops would be capable of little more than eye candy for children.
Here is where I would continue my rant against Kennedy for bringing to his cause every hack and lightweight he could find. Director Michael Addis has espoused the belief that documentaries are not supposed to profess a position about their subject, but merely transmit information. I would ask: what, then, is editing? It seems like a cop-out to me. Also, I would not put it past Addis and Kennedy to continue confusing the issue in interviews and other personal comments about their film. For all I know it could part of a massive ironic performance piece. This is why I am trying to limit my comments to problems that are legitimate regardless of the ontological nature of the film.
There are two fundamental problems. What makes them fundamental and crucial is that they are unacknowledged. This is why the film does not work for me as a put-on any more than as a sincere tirade against critics and bloggers. The first problem I acknowledged already: no distinction is made between critic and reviewer. The second problem, or perhaps it is part of the same problem – that being the mistake of making intellectual arguments without distinct intellectual categories, is that so many of the talking heads in this film, folks like Henry Winkler, Joel Schumacher, Carrot Top, Joe Rogan and, most notably, Kennedy himself, think that having good intentions insulates one from criticism. Comic after comic and rich Hollywood producer after rich Hollywood producer keeps repeating some version of the idea that the people who criticize have no respect for how hard the entertainer has worked to come up with something to entertain them. How dare the audience be so ungrateful! This is when I am almost certain that Heckler is a mockumentary. They can’t be serious can they? Their feelings are hurt when they try so hard to entertain me and I tell them that I’m not entertained? And all their money doesn’t help? As someone with ten years experience teaching 100 and 200 level college courses, I think I know a bit about working very hard to present ideas that I think are very important and being met with disdain. I know about dealing with people who a totally ungrateful and uninterested in what I am trying to give them. And for my troubles I was compensated to the tune of about $1000 a month.

And this is why I think they must be joking. Surely no one is that narcissistic. But then I remember that they are all in Hollywood, and I think, of course they are not joking. If they were not really that narcissistic they would not be in Hollywood in the first place. So it is for the rest of us, those of us who lack the pathology toward fame, that I issue this reminder: Everyone has good intentions. That should be printed on the jamb above your front door so that you have to read it every morning when you leave the house. And not because it should encourage you to give everybody a free pass! Jamie Kennedy’s when he makes this movie, J. Knecht when he writes about that movie, George Bush, Dick Chaney and Donald Rumsfeld when they make up a reason to go to war, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot when they ship undesirables and dissidents to concentration camps – WE ARE ALL TRYING TO DO THE RIGHT THING. It is a mistake to judge someone according to his or her intentions. In some cases it is a grievous error.

What Are the Chances That We Are Going to Grow Up Sometime Soon?

2009-02-02T19:19:00.000-08:00

Just a quick thought about David Denby and his new book, Snark. He was talking about it on the Diane Rehm Show last week, and I quote from the website: “The author argues that a certain mean spirit is infecting the national conversation and debilitating America.” Are we running out of things to talk about in this country? Or is it rather that we cannot turn our attention to things that really need to be discussed? I can accept that a certain degree of grace and tact, what we used to call manners, facilitate discourse. But are these things ultimately so crucial? Isn’t the real problem in this country not that people say things in mean ways, but that they really have nothing to say beyond their attitude? Isn’t the problem that so many people with a public forum are all personality and no substance? Is this not less a question of mean spirit and more a question of weak mind? I cannot stand Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter or Bill O’Reilly either, but their problem is that they are wrong about everything, not that they are mean. The question of mean spiritedness is entirely subjective. It is really just a question of one personality responding to another in a positive or negative way. The problem with criticizing mean spiritedness is that it then becomes an out for any encounter one may have with an unwanted idea. In other words, if you tell me something I do not want to hear, it is now very easy for me to accuse you of being mean to me. After all, if you were nice you would agree with me, yes?

Heckler: A Pre-View Review

2009-02-02T19:18:00.000-08:00

Last week I was listening to Adam Carolla Show co-host, Teresa Strasser, praise Jamie Kennedy’s documentary, Heckler. At first I was intrigued because she said that Bill Hicks was in it, and I am always interested in any archival footage of Hicks that is unearthed. Strasser started to lose me, however, when she described an extended sequence in which Uwe Boll boxes, and reportedly beats senseless, several online writers that trashed his films. She said it was really satisfying to see him beat these men after the terrible things that had said about his movies. It is unsettling indeed that a Jew would praise a German for using force to get those who disagree with him to submit to his will. What is really at stake in her assessment is class allegiance. Clearly Strasser was taking sides with the “artist” against his “critics.” This problem is underscored by the trailer for the film which features the line “the battle between those in the spotlight and those in the dark.” I will wait until after I see the documentary for a more detailed review, but it does seem that Kennedy has already tipped his hand in the preview. I should admit that I am wary of the film, because it seems to be based on the idea that entertainers should not have to suffer criticism from the unwashed masses.

I put this movie in my Netflix queue and then did something I have never done before: I began to read the user reviews. I have no idea where this urge came from. I do not read use reviews, because the “users” are typically an uninteresting lot. They tend to praise mainstream movies that everyone else in the world praises, and they tend to find art films boring. If one of the points of Heckler is that the internet gives people who have not earned their voice the opportunity to express their opinions, I certainly agree. I have a lengthy C.V. that attests to my authority as a critic, and I certainly do not like the idea that anybody with an internet connection can spout off about things they do not understand any time they feel like it. What Kennedy needs to understand is that this is a purely intellectual problem. He seems to turn it into a status problem. Where I would simply choose not to read what idiots have to say, it seems that Kennedy wants to prove that they have no right to say it.

In any event, I read these Netflix reviews, and the majority of them did not like the documentary because they disagreed with Kennedy’s attack on critics. At first glance this seems intuitive enough. If they perceive him to be attacking their rights to spout off, certainly these anonymous critics are unlikely to support his position. On the other hand I happen to know for a fact that most people hate critics, and I wonder why I found not one review that praised Kennedy for finally sticking it to them. This would involve some cognitive dissonance to be sure, but I would expect nothing less from the average online reviewer. I would add that it takes a remarkable degree of cognitive dissonance for Kennedy to make this film in the first place. Comedians, so far as I understand, are social and cultural critics. I wonder if Kennedy defines his art this way, and I wonder how thoroughly he delineates the relative values of his kind of criticism (if indeed one would call it that; I have never seen his act) versus the opinions of lay persons.

Pop Culture is Easy!

2009-01-17T17:41:00.000-08:00

I was again thinking about Kurt Cobain and how sick to death I am of hearing people mock him for killing himself, complaining that they don’t understand “the whole tortured artist thing.” The problem with this is that Cobain was not a tortured artist. He was a tortured person for certain. He was a person who rose to fame and fortune thanks to the dollars of people who he despised. A possible conclusion to reach when one is unpopular is that popularity is evil. Deep down Cobain must have felt that if so many people liked him he must be doing something morally wrong. This is well enough documented in popular magazines and television documentaries. What goes unnoticed by those who call him a tortured artist, is that it was always his fame that tortured him. Cobain’s particular neurosis had nothing at all to do with his art. Van Gogh was a tortured artist. He painted in such a way and with such devotion to his vision that there was really no place for him on this planet. Van Gogh was compelled by an internal truth to change the way humanity looks at the world. Cobain just wanted to make music that made him happy.

Popular music is great not because it gives birth to new forms, but because its forms arise democratically. One does not need to be trained to write a song. On does not go to Conservatory to learn how to write a pop song. One does not need to know music theory to make music. One does not need to know how to read music to write songs! One gets a hold of a guitar or a piano, learns three chords, then hums a melody over the chord progression with maybe a few words about love or about Rock and Roll or about the government. Do this and you become a songwriter.

It is little wonder then, that appreciating good pop art is so much easier than appreciating fine art. I can break this down into two questions one needs to ask of popular art to decide if it is worthwhile.
1. How many hands are in on the creative process?
Every good band is either a group of people writing songs together or one person bringing in a song he or she has written and teaching it to the rest of the band, hammering out individual parts and so forth. Every good television show (and these you can count on one hand) is the same. The best shows are sketch performance and cartoons. Both tend to be made by writer/performers, in other words performers who do their own writing. Dr. Katz was basically three people. Home Movies was basically three people. Monty Python are six guys. Kids in the Hall are six guys. This is why the original SNL was the best. Most television, most movies, most mainstream music, by which I mean the garbage that litters the various awards shows, is all soulless and watered down. All of it is created by teams of writers and producers to be given to someone else to perform and direct. These works are more marketing campaign than art. They are not the expressions of individuals or small groups but huge corporate endeavors designed for focus groups and target demographics.
2. How well do the creators of the work know the rules of the game?
Bands like 3 Doors Down, Nickleback, Matchbox 20 and Creed are not formed by record companies like all that American Idol/Brittany Spears nonsense. They make their own name for themselves, but they do it by making music that is strategically mediocre. They care more about making it big than making music. Though I have said elsewhere than film is a Salon art and not a popular art, we can apply this rule to the co-called autonomous directors in Hollywood as well. It is true that Spielberg, Scorsese, the Coens and the like can make whatever they want, but only because what the want to make are blockbusters. They may be autonomous financially, but intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, they have nothing original to offer.

No Country for Men Who Think Violence Is neither Cool nor Funny

2009-01-17T17:40:00.001-08:00

I wanted to write a pithy little review of No Country for Old Men in which I mad following argument:
I am Tommy Lee Jones, unable to understand the world in which I suddenly find myself living. The Coens are Anton, ruthlessly doing as they please as if guided by some higher morality that renders the rest of us expendable, sub-humans.
But I waited to long and now I don’t care anymore. I am growing tired of writing about movies that are about nothing and say nothing. A friend of mine thinks this movie is deep. Deep what? Can the Coens be deep without being cool? Can they be cool without being violent? Is violence cool? Is cool deep? These questions keep coming up as I continue to watch movies that are not worth my time. What gets me every time is that so many people who strike me as politically and socially savvy, manage to look at culture from a decidedly lower vantage point. The left wants to change the world but they think they can do that by keeping their entertainment dumb.
The problem is that they don’t think their entertainment is dumb. This is the paradox. In the larger picture the Hollywood responsible for all the movies beloved by so many left-leaning folks is a significant part of the machinery of domination. Anyone who does not think Hollywood is part of the cultural hegemony is not looking at it very closely. It is pretty basic Gramsci. Chomsky has explained it a million times through his numerous critiques of the media. Do the liberals not think he’s talking about their favorite Tarentino movie when he says that in a so-called democracy, as opposed to a totalitarian state, thought control takes the place of force? This is pretty easily demonstrable if one puts down the Spivak, Sedgwick and Dyer for five minutes, and picks up some Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse.
But the question is also interesting psychologically as well. Don’t liberals abhor violence? Why then are so many of them interested almost exclusively in Scorsese, Coppola, Spike Lee, Cronenberg, the Coens, David Lynch, David Fincher, Quentin Tarentino? Are there no interesting filmmakers that make movies about things other than murder and violence? Is it murder and violence that makes a movie important? Is there no other serious subject matter? Is it because they would argue that all these movies are not so much celebrations of violence, but rather critiques of violence? My guess would be that they think ironic celebrations of violence function as artistic statements against violence. But they are fooling themselves. A History of Violence is a celebration of a violent person, a portrait of a badass. Just like Clint Eastwood, he’s the man who does not want to fight – above all else he does not want to fight! – but if you make him fight, so help you. How many times to we need to eat up that cliché? In No Country for Old Men, Fight Club, Pulp Fiction, Taxi Driver, The Godfather Trilogy and on and on, violence is cool and/or funny. Violence makes a character interesting. This betrays a rather limited imagination, yet it has been the fuel that has powered popular American cinema since the 1960’s. It only took Godard and Truffaut a few years to work this junk out of their systems with movies like Breathless, Alphaville, and Shoot the Piano Player. The Coens, Scorsese, Cronenberg et. al. never got over it.
I am thinking of this in relation to the Coens especially. Maybe I got old too fast, but I say for Black Comedy go back to Dr. Strangelove. Burn After Reading is ironic enough. I suppose one could describe it as dark, though that seems to me to be giving it rather too much credit. But comedy it is not. Is it hilarious when the boastful Harry shoots hapless Chad in the head, then freaks out bout it, because he’s never shot anyone before? Did you laugh and laugh when Osbourne Cox was hacking away at gym manager Ted in his shorts, slippers and bathrobe? Oh and it was extra clever because the scene was a reference to the scene in Fargo where Grimsrud burst out the front door wielding an axe after Carl, only this time you actually get to see the hatchet split open the prone victim’s head. Then the two CIA agents recount all the violence so matter-of-factly. People are dead everywhere and they couldn’t care less. Hilarious! What a goddamn hoot! Or is it biting social commentary that isn’t meant to be funny at all, but make me think?
I don’t know what these movies are about anymore. All they seem to do is remake their own movies. Burn After Reading is Fargo set in Washington DC. No Country for Old Men is more or less Blood Simple part two. It seems to me that they have just been spinning their wheels post Barton Fink. Not that that film was particularly earth shattering. There was hope in it though. It was clear that the Coens were very clever with respect to certain narrative conventions and that they where somewhat inventive in terms of visual style. One sees in Barton Fink and the films that preceded it the potential to make interesting films. Instead they got bogged down in their own cleverness. The way that they wittily re-write genre and break down generic conventions has become it own genre. Almost Every new movie is a Coen Film Noir that says nothing about anything. I would call it eye candy, but it is rather much more bitter than sweet. This makes their success all the more puzzling to me. In the absence of something to think about, there should at least be something to enjoy.

A commentary on Hollywood that regurgitates every Hollywood cliché is not a commentary.

2008-12-30T18:52:00.000-08:00

It drives me nuts when people I love and trust recommend shlock to me. “What do you mean Tropic Thunder is good?” I ask, “I’ve seen the trailers.” To me it looked like another stupid, Hollywood being self-conscious and ironic about its own excess. I was told this is not that case. I was told that the social commentary was incisive and accurate. “This ain’t Zoolander,” they told me, so I dove in. Now here is my question: Where is the commentary? Is it a commentary to be ironic about all the clichés used in the movie? Is that really all it takes? One can recycle every hackneyed device in popular cinema, provided one makes it clear that all recycling is done tongue-in-cheek. All the clichés are there to draw attention to themselves as clichés, and thus be undercut. Well, does drawing attention to itself actually undercut it? Does irony make the cliché less of a cliché?
Let me put it a different way. What did you learn from this movie? Social commentary teaches, correct? – It shows you something in society you had not noticed before? It diagnoses a new problem, sheds light on an old problem, and perhaps offers solutions? This is my understanding of how social commentary works, so again I ask of Tropic Thunder: Is there a fresh or unique point of view in there somewhere? Is there some information that is being revealed for the first time? Also, it is a comedy, yes? Are there some jokes in there that make you laugh in unexpected situations? Is it even funny? I would forgive the first couple offenses if it was funny. I find that Hollywood movies rarely have anything to say that is important, interesting or the least bit truthful, but sometimes they are clever; sometimes they can turn a phrase. Big Lebowski is about nothing. It expresses nothing the least bit important, but at least it has funny jokes. Bob Roberts, to give an example of ostensible social commentary, is far from the most eye-opening, earth-shattering revelation of truth I ever saw on film, but at least the jokes are funny.
The question seems to be: “Who is the audience for this social commentary?” As I understand social commentary, it should be for those who are either ignorant of the problem commented upon or those on the opposite side of the fence from the filmmaker or writer who addresses that problem. It is bad, ineffective, superfluous social commentary that addresses a like-minded audience to apt them on the back for “getting it,” and this is what Tropic Thunder does. One nods ones head with satisfaction and then silently thinks of (or unconsciously senses) that the movie is a nice intellectual multivitamin for the rest of the idiots in the world that Ben Stiller crushed up and stuck in a teaspoon of honey so they wouldn’t know they were taking in something healthy.
I would argue this movie does not teach the average moviegoer anything more than it teaches the savvy one. The person who goes to the movie to hear a litany of clichés and see a hundred of explosions gets another heap of clichés and explosions, while the person who listens to the reviews on NPR gets a pat on the back for being able to read the ironic tone and thus pick up all the subtext.
The movie is really the opposite of everything it appears to be! How long do we (I’m talking to the people who should know better, not the people who want to see shit blow up, but the self-professed “critical thinkers”) continue to buy this? How long are we going to continue to accept ironic self-consciousness and self-reference as deep thought? Ben Stiller is a guy who has parlayed the critique of his own celebrity into fairly massive celebrity status. Can we not at some point soon call a goddamn duck a duck and move on to someone who might have something to say that we don’t already know? Yes, Ben Stiller, we get it. We have seen you in Zoolander and Reality Bites (just substitute “celebrity” for what it means: “mainstream/successful”). We have seen you parody yourself in Extras and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Is it not more than a little cloying, more than a little disingenuous?
Such is Tropic Thunder from beginning to end. It is Hollywood sending up itself. It is the White House correspondents dinner hosted by Frank Caliendo, Dana Carvey or Rich Little. Sure there is a little political content to the jokes, but ultimately they are benign and everybody goes home mildly amused and totally unscathed. In the Hollywood version everyone makes a million dollars, they pat themselves on the back for the doing the right thing and Tom Cruise’s name starts getting dropped for awards! Put a bald cap on a crappy actor and ask him to yell, and you have instant genius. But this is our culture. This is our country. Doing the right thing can be as simple as pointing out a problem as long as you layer your observation with cliché, present it as entertainment and make another million dollars off it.

We are Diseased Part 1

2008-12-24T13:38:00.000-08:00

There is a sickness that is not necessarily called “middle-class,” but one must be middle-class to suffer from it, and in fact almost all middle-class people do indeed suffer from it. It is not just laziness, though laziness is an attribute of it. It is a kind of resignation – a desperation so quiet that even the desperate one does not hear it. Maybe this desperation is not at all new, but just the thing about which Thoreau tried to warn us.
We middle-class folk can do nothing for the rest of our lives and not really care. Yes, we are unsatisfied deep down, but it is incredibly easy to push that feeling beneath the façade of satisfaction. One can absolutely refuse to deal with it as long as the television tunes in a few dozen channels, as long as one can afford alcohol, drugs and whatever meaningless hobby he or she fancies.
Maybe the secret to life is to make one’s hobby have meaning. What would happen if everyone decided to devote their lives to the thing each does in his or her spare time? (I am Assuming one’s hobby is something more creative than putting together jigsaw puzzles or collecting figurines.)
Is it fear and only fear? Is this fear the cornerstone of our social structure? I want to answer: “Of course!” It seems correct. This is why people in this country are so mad for celebrity. Actors, musicians, athletes and, to lesser extent, politicians earned their money and fame doing what they want to do. It is not admiration at all, but envy.

Nobody Wants to Be Mature Anymore

2008-12-24T13:36:00.001-08:00

In the early nineties Bill Hicks said this in response to an audience member who seemed unconvinced by his assertion that, as a nation, we are emotionally immature (I am quoting from memory): “Really? You don’t think so? Go watch Who’s the Boss and then get back to me.” I believe his point was that entertainment that is ostensibly aimed at adults is quite beneath what a grown man or woman should expect. Our entertainment demeans us intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. This point is still worth making as entertainment marketed toward adults nowadays has retarded and regressed even further in the scant fifteen years since Hick’s observation. But something else has happened since then as well. There is a new tweak in the mediocrity. Adults now watch television shows and movies that are clearly made for children. It began perhaps with college kids watching shows like Saved by the Bell as a goof, or smoking pot and ironically laughing at old cartoons from one’s childhood like The Super Friends and Johnny Quest. Somehow this phenomenon has transfigured into people my age (I’m thirty-three at the time of writing this), many of whom have no children, are watching movies like Shrek, Shark Tale and Ratatouille and then discussing the movies with each other as if this is perfectly normal behavior for adult humans. (Miyasaki, on the other hand, is genuinely child-like. The difference is that his movies show innocence rather than immaturity. There is no irony in them.)

This is related directly to the way every man and woman cherishes the right to unabashedly love the juvenile crap he or she was into in Jr. High School. How many adults do you know who spend their free time reading comic books, watching pro wrestling or old Saturday morning cartoons, renting Disney and Pixar movies or listening to tweener pop and hair metal? How many of them are your friends? How many of them think they are being ironic about it when they do it? The fact that one is supposed to mature beyond this junk is not as valid as it once was, because we look at guys like Kevin Smith and figure if he likes comic books it’s okay for us to like them too, because he’s famous. As if he is famous for liking comic books!

Thoughts on Film Canon While Re-Reading Some Books by Rosenbaum

2008-12-24T12:58:00.000-08:00

While much of what Rosenbaum says in Movie Wars is clear to anyone who goes to the movies or who reads about them, my experience as a college student, as one who has taken film courses in three different universities over the past decade, gives me a perspective that a self-taught critic does not have. I have been taught the canon of schlock, and if not for sheer luck of the draw, I may have never known better. Even with Ray Carney directing the graduate program in film studies, Boston University was hardly a challenge to the status quo. During my two years I took courses in both the Horror and Gangster genres. I was enrolled in a course called American Masterworks once and a teaching assistant another time. In both classes we watched one film by Spike Lee, John Ford, Spielberg, Coppola, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Altman and Oliver Stone. Both courses screened The Graduate, Dr. Strangelove, Rebel without a Cause and Citizen Kane. Do the Right Thing and Dr. Strangelove are the only two films from either course that were made outside of Hollywood. I watched three Spielberg films in classes at BU: The Color Purple, Jaws and Poltergeist. I saw Godfather II twice and Godfather three times (Gangster course and both American Masterworks courses)! At Ohio University I saw more Hitchcock and more Hollywood schlock. The school of film offers, or has offered, courses that address science fiction film, teen film, cult film and Marxism in film. Once there was even a course called “White Male Masculinity in the Action Film.”

As Rosenbaum says, if the critics and academics do not build a film canon, the academy of motion pictures and the box office receipts will do it for us.

Rosenbaum also argues that academics are making a canon anyway, but a canon of essential theoretical texts rather than essential films. (pgs. 84-85) “In English and literature departments a mistrust of canons devoted mainly to the works of ‘dead white males’ has clearly diminished the possibility of teaching literature from a literary standpoint; the social sciences have taken over the study of fiction and poetry to a crippling degree, and in a way this has only completed the damage often done in grammar school and high school by neglecting to enforce grammar for related ideological reasons. Some perceptive remarks by Michael Chaouli, assistant professor of German and of Comparative Literature at Harvard, in the Times Literary Supplement, are telling:

The wider the range of objects of study, the more specific and specifically policed the style of presentation becomes. This may be one reason why in our graduate curriculum the literary canon is being inexorably displaced by a rather narrow theoretical canon. If during the reign of the literary canon one lived in fear of having one’s work labeled ‘trivial’ today’s dreaded word must be ‘untheorized.’

In its intelligent versions, cultural studies urges literature departments no to promulgate a canon indebted to the notion of the romantic genius, but rather to devote themselves to studying the ordinary without abandoning the value of value. But given the workings of our field, a democracy of objects of study may easily be vitiated by an aristocracy of subjects. The trade-off is quite clear: the more ordinary the object of inquiry, the more extraordinary the critic; all the cultural capital that is given up in choice of object flows back in the breathtaking creativity with which meaning can be made to appear anywhere. The romantic genius returns, this time not as poet, but as critic.

A couple problems I find with Rosenbaum’s arguments are worth noting. First, his faith in people strikes me as flat-out utopian. His belief that people will make smart choices if they were presented with better choices is just naïve. He fails to acknowledge that there already is a niche market for art film made up in large part of people who have heard the buzz about a particular film, and consider it there cultural responsibility to see art movies just as they would go to the ballet or the opera. Sadly, the bulk of the market for films like Ordet or Au Hazad Balthazar consist of folks who would also line up to see Sideways and Closer. Of course without this market I would not be able to get Balthazar on DVD, but the matter of having or not having an audience is not a question of marketing.

I also disagree with Rosebaum’s suggestion that the commercial failure of art film is related to the PR they get. It is not an issue of coverage. People will not make smart choices if they do not first understand why they should, and advertising campaigns are not really designed to delve into that kind of aesthetic question. Marketing an indie movie or an art film is always an effort to make it look like something more recognizable. Look at the trailer for an indie like Junebug or a re-issued masterpiece like Grand Illusion. Junebug looks like Jerry McGuire and Grand Illusion looks like some Spielberg ode to his favorite war. Imagine how angry, confused and bored the viewer would be who was led to Junebug by such a preview! Of course it has to look like conformity because if the trailer looks like anything as weird as Junebug or as boring as Grand Illusion, the numbers (of seat filled, of copies sold) would diminish. It is a mistake to think that people want something different from what they are getting. They need it surely enough, but they do not want it.

Our culture needs to be overhauled. We need art programs on TV. We need to foster a population that reads books. We need to make culture a priority in primary school. None of that will ever happen. The average American might have accidentally watched a program on Van Gogh or a performance of some Balanchine piece on PBS when there where only four or five channels to choose from, but no one would have to resort to that now. Most basic cable and satellite packages come with about four channels each of sports and music. Who is going to watch Balanchine when there’s a game on? PBS knows the answer to that question as well as we do, so they do not show programs anymore. Programmers for public television can hardly be blamed; they have to compete with the other networks for ratings, because the jackass administration that oversees them insists on treating them as a business concern rather than a public service. This country is about to lose public TV and radio altogether because neither is popular enough, and in America if it isn’t popular, it must be excised.

The point of all this for us and for film canons is that art is not popular. It is extremely unpopular, in fact; hardly anybody wants anything to do with it. I make the students in my introduction to the arts course watch independent, experimental and foreign films every quarter, and almost all of them hate every movie I show. It is important that you understand that I do not use “hate” for some literary purpose. “Hate” is the exact word. The films I show make the students who manage to stay awake miserable. They rarely adjust over a ten week period. Amount of exposure doesn’t seem to be the problem. Many of my students have seen independent films before, and they come to class hating them already. When I tell them the movie we will watch is black and white, they groan, “This isn’t an independent film is it?” It is as if I promised them cake only to reveal, just before serving it up, that I made it from a mixture of road-kill. Suddenly no one wants any part of Dr. Jones’ fun-time movie class. How much exposure does it take? One summer I showed a class juniors and seniors fourteen films over an eight week period. Every movie was stylistically different from the last. Their papers and our class discussions made it clear: exposure and instruction is not enough.

On Being Contrary

2008-12-20T15:09:00.000-08:00

Isn't a contrarian someone who merely wishes to get you to try something different? Is it human nature to resist this? Is it really? There are so many people who say, “I find what I like and I stick to it,” or the line I often here when I recommend a movie or a rock band, “It really isn't my thing.” I never understand this remark. Why on earth do you have a thing? Are you so rigid? So self-defined?

I have often called my generation “sloppy” and “lazy,” and I would argue that the contempt so many of my fellows have for “nay-sayers,” “killjoys,” and other contrarians speaks of their own inabilities and deficiencies. It is quite common for a person between the ages of forty-five and twenty-five to adopt an attitude of intellectual leze fair. Or perhaps It would be more accurate to phrase it this way: “Dude, I've got my own opinion, and I really don't need to hear yours.” My instinct in these situations, which I am learning to control, is to say: “Actually you do need to hear mine, because it isn't really an opinion. An opinion is what a person has about a subject in which he is not an expert. An opinion is something that one grabs out of the air, something that can be decided upon without any more thought than one would devote to choosing a belt to wear for the day. What I have to offer are carefully considered evaluations. I speak not from hasty decision but from years of watching, thinking, writing, teaching and arguing. Your request to be left alone assumes our “opinions” are equally valid, and they most certainly are not.”

I don't say this though, because it upsets people. All anyone wants is to be left alone. Even in my classes! Students think they are entitled to their opinions. This never ceases to astound me. I always end up thinking, but rarely saying, saying things like, “If you don't want me to tell you how to think, then why am I the teacher?” And this speaks to the heart of the matter. They don't really believe that the subjects I teach – literature, film, the arts – are subjects that can be taught, at least not the same way objectively verifiable subjects can be taught. The crucial division is between the cultural and social spheres of existence.

Almost everyone I know in this generation is not the least bit shy about arguing politics. Indeed they have a degree of respect for social nay-sayers, at least for the historical ones: the Abolitionists, Suffragists, Civil Rights activists and anti-war protesters. These people were involved in something real. I would argue that this position rather demeans culture, and any time I detect it in the words of people who work in the culture industry or academia I am led to wonder why they devote their lives to something they know is of lesser importance.

Culture is not something we take seriously. We let the market create it.

A Review of a Wildly Popular Movie!

2008-12-20T15:05:00.000-08:00

Dark Knight

I feel the occasional need to watch the latest serious movie du jour in order to keep myself up to date on what passes for deep thinking in certain corners of culture. To this end I went to the movie theater to watch Christopher Nolan's latest comic book movie, Dark Knight. I should admit that I would have seen this movie regardless, because I find comic book movies entertaining. It's an adolescent weakness, but one I see no harm in occasionally indulging. The fact that the movie is being taken seriously by almost every critic that I have read and almost every person I know who has seen it only added another dimension to my overall assessment. I enjoyed the movie. I liked looking at it the way I liked looking at a video game, Metal Mania on VH-1 Classic, or something shiny. I recognize it as something generally bad for me that for some reason I want to have, and so I let myself have a little from time to time. Politics aside, there is nothing wrong with eating at McDonald's every now and then, provided that you eat reasonably healthy the rest of the time. The problem is that you can never put politics aside altogether, because our collective cultural values are so confused that many people have a hard time telling the difference between guilty pleasure and deep thought.

Does it sound like I'm overstating it a bit? Read the reviews for this movie. I'm not going to quote anybody, I'm just going to point you to metacritic.com and acknowledge that Dark Knight is the highest rated film currently in theaters. People are taking this movie seriously. I don't expect at this point that anyone will even be nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar besides Heath Ledger. He's winning it; everyone knows it. Rather than bash apart critics on a case by case basis, I would like to refute the general arguments made in favor of this film. When you go to metacritic, note that every reviewer struggles to find a different way to say “It's action-packed and it makes you think!” Who says that talking points are strictly for political punditry? I take no issue with the “action-packed” label, but here are the reason that I don't believe it “makes me think” and more than whatever Jessica Alba or Ashton Kusher plan to unleash upon us in the Fall.

It's dark. That's what they keep telling me. The psychological depth is surprising. It takes you places you wouldn't expect. I did not have this experience. It is darkly lit; I'll admit that. One of the actor's is trying his hardest to show you how depraved he is with every breath (more on this later) Is it some new depth of dark that hasn't been covered by Silence of the Lambs, Schindler's List, Pulp Fiction or a million other overrated entertainments? What is new about this darkness? The really good guy gets corrupted by the mental anguish of personal tragedy and becomes a really bad guy? The other really bad guy seems to sink into deeper evil every time he's on screen? No matter how hard the hero tries to do the right thing, and have it all work out perfect, people get hurt (even the people he loves!)? This is not new territory folks.

Since I brought up the crazy character let me say some things about Heath Ledger's performance of the Joker. I'll do this by way of expanding upon previous examples: Like Anthony Hopkins, Ralph Fiennes, Travolta and Jackson (and Jack Nicholson's performance of the same character), Ledger's Joker is decisively and wholly one thing and one thing only. (I'll grant you that the aforementioned Travolta and Jackson a touch more nuanced in Pulp Fiction.) Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow from Batman Begins was far more interesting, because he was multi-dimensional. To be totally dominated by one personality trait has long been considered good acting. Everyone seems to love Slingblade, Rainman, Scent of a Woman, Tom Hanks and pretty much anything in which an actor lets a handicap, mental instability or sexual preference utterly define his character. Why this is considered good acting is beyond me, and anyone who watched Heath Ledger hoist upon his shoulders that sappy parade clichés that was Brokeback Mountain and turn into a watchable film through the sheer force of his performance, should be ashamed to praise him so highly for the Joker. You know why Ledger was great in Brokback? - because he was a real person. He was complex, confused, difficult to relate to and difficult to understand; he was everything in that movie that he was not in Dark Knight. It is not at all the same kind of acting. It is the difference between making yourself vulnerable and hiding behind a facade.

While I am on the subject of acting, it seems a good time to point out that there is nothing new there either. Michael Caine is wistful, melancholy, British and prone to giving speeches in conversational situations. I think I have seen that before from him. Morgan Freeman is wizened, bemused and black and speaks mostly in pithy, folksy rejoinders. Again, a pretty familiar role for him. I trust I do not have to catalogue the performances to drive home the point. Actually I do not remember any acting in this film – no behavior, no communication, just a lot of people saying lines at each other at varying volumes. It is difficult to call it dialogue since what they are doing, rather than talking to one another, is telling the audience where they are at in story, where they are going next and how they should feel about it. There is certainly nothing new in that, the the level of speech-making achieved is a peculiar Nolan trait. In fact, I think Gary Oldman speaks exclusively in speech-making mode throughout the film. Certainly he provides us with the Nolan trademark at the end, when he summarizes everything that happened and explains why it happened. I don't know why Nolan thinks this is interesting. I find it to be insulting, and I wonder how it fails to cross Nolan's mind that we get it and got it a long time ago and there is no need to hammer the point home at the end of his inevitably overlong movie.

4. What Oldman is ostensibly summarizing, like Bale and Liam Neeson before him in Batman Begins and like Bale and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige, are the film's deep thoughts. My argument against this would be that any time the movie needs a character to remind of what all the deep thoughts are, they probably aren't that deep. Art does not work that way. It does not make profound arguments and then summarize them for you. Art does not provide you with deep answers, it merely asks deep questions and leaves it to you to figure them out. There is nothing new and deep in Dark Night. It is just a repackaging of the cultural zeitgeist: “Sometimes the good guy has to be the bad guy. In order to help the people he has to be willing to let them treat him as an outcast.” How old are we? If Nolan had found a way to critique this, to comment upon, perhaps the film would approach some depth, but articulating it is not deep, not new and not interesting.

Bonus:

Just a few other things that are exactly like ever other movie you have ever seen:

1. Editing and score. I'm putting these together because they are so ingrained in our consciousness, that most viewers take both equally for granted, unable to imagine how different a movie would really be if the shots were longer and the music was done away with. If Dark Knight had an average shot duration of thirty seconds and couple shots that went on for several minutes and if it had no mood music, no orchestral swells to let you know how to feel, then we would have something new on our hands.

2. Kids and dogs. Let me talk for a moment about suspension of disbelief. How old are you? Are you about the age of the people in Dark Knight? Are you somewhere between thirty and sixty? If you are younger let me tell you, people in that age range have children. The only person with children in this movie, (and I mean the entire movie; find me another kid!) is Gary Oldman's character. Unlikely, and actually a bit disgusting when you consider that the only reason these children are in the film is to pull at your heart strings in a moment of tension. They certainly aren't characters. Watch some Hollywood movies and pay attention to the way children are used. Unless it's a kid's film (a problem unto itself) children are used in this emotionally manipulative way as something for the adults, the characters who matter, to care about. For whatever reason, it is difficult to imagine a world in which people of all ages have personalities. Animals suffer the same fate as kids. Those readers who live cities know that there is a guy walking a pit bull or rottweiler around every corner. Surely you know some people who own pets? Maybe you even have some of your own. But animals don't exist in movie worlds unless they are guarding or attacking something. The reason why is simple enough, but it reveals a great truth about mainstream movies that is that even the smallest dose of reality will unhinge the fake world the movies create. Cats just cannot act. They wander about when you are trying to shoot a scene, distracting the would-be viewer from the plot, the actor's face or the carefully constructed mise en scene. I do not want to get into this too much here, but this is a fundamental problem with our culture. We regard our art only in terms very basic, material wish fulfillment. The fantasy must be maintained and anything that threatens it is excised.

Extra Bonus:

Even if you accept it for what it is, you have to hate the turning of Two-Face. Let me get this straight: You want to take revenge. Your girlfriend has been murdered and you are willing to kill the person or persons responsible. So the guy who killed her comes to you, puts a gun in your hand and holds it to his head, but you don't kill him, and you do go on to kill a bunch of other people who played really, really minor roles in her death, because the murderer gives you a speech about embracing the chaos. That is some slick narrative right there. That's a leap of faith that would make Kierkegaard blush.

We Don't Need Another Hero

2008-12-20T15:04:00.000-08:00

I don’t watch a lot of television. Actually I do watch a lot of TV; I watch entirely too much, but I watch comparatively less TV than most people I know. The list of things on television which I tolerate is very short, but there’s no need to get into it here. For the purpose of introducing this piece, all you need to know is that I watch the VH-1 Classic channel quite a bit. I tell myself that I watch this channel because it is the only place to see long lost videos I haven’t seen since college, but that isn’t really true now that we have youtube. I tell myself that I watch this channel so that I can see great live performances, and indeed they do show some of this. But mostly I watch VH-1 Classic for the documentaries. It isn’t that I like the documentaries or that I think they have anything interesting to say, quite the contrary, I watch like a rubber-necker at a traffic accident. I scream at the TV for giving me such bad information and presenting it melodramatically, until my wife has to leave the room annoyed with me. It’s getting so bad that whenever there’s a new one I already know everything they’re going to say. I don’t think this makes me especially perceptive. Unfortunately I think these shows are made with precisely that goal in mind: to confirm once more some cultural “fact” that we already know.

VH-1 is running this thing called the Seven Ages of Rock, inexplicably narrated by Dennis Hopper, and supposedly meant to cover the seven great movements in the history of rock and roll from Chuck Berry to something they call “British Indy Rock” which apparently has a lot to do with Oasis. Now I know that this idea is absurd, but I watch wondering if there’s any chance that something new will find its way into the narrative. To make a long introduction short, there’s nothing new here and I am particularly interested in the nothing new-ness of an episode called “American Alternative.” This is the installment where we rehash how Nirvana changed the world. The way they set it up is excruciating. Every segment between commercials relates to Nirvana in some way until we reach the final segment that details their rise and fall. It’s a story that’s been told so many times that it’s actually emerging as one of the master narratives of our culture. There was college rock; the REM got big; then there was Seattle; then Kurt Cobain killed himself; and no one has made music in America since.

I am trying to understand why the people in my generation need to be reminded again and again that Nirvana changed the world. Never mind that they really didn’t. One of the most cloying things Hopper says in the episode is that with the success of Nirvana, the “outsiders” won. What does that even mean? It’s such a shallow way to understand cultural events. No outsider won. Rather the insiders found a way to market the outsider to the mass market. Is that a victory? Do you think Kurt Cobain felt the satisfaction of victory that comes with the knowledge that jocks and date rapists dig his song “Polly?” Does In Utero sound like music that people make when they’re satisfied with a job well done? It is insane to say that Nirvana or Pearl Jam or REM or U2 ever changed anything about the culture at large. The same view that conceives of such misconception also leaves one helpless to understand why someone with so much success would kill himself.

But I should finish up with the subject at hand. I think it is more than simple nostalgia that keeps us coming back to the Nirvana story and clinging to it like a relic. Apparently we need to feel that something important culturally happened in our lifetime. And why Nirvana? Why something that happened when we were in High School? Because we have no patience. And since we lack patience we are without the context and perspective fostered by a reflective attitude. Look, here’s what has happened in American music that has been really, really, earth shatteringly important: Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry and maybe Bob Dylan. If you want to talk about significant cultural change, in terms of popular music, those three are the beginning and the end of the conversation. After them you have to go into crazy areas like poetry, painting, theater, dance and performance art, architecture and independent film. But that would mean you have to dig. You have to look for culture that isn’t sold to you. It seems that my generation is no different than the others at finding our own way.

The Career I have Chosen Part Two

2008-12-20T15:00:00.000-08:00

For a group of people who are supposed to be liberal, it seems to me than academics do an awful lot of things simply because they are supposed to. I won’t rattle off the entire list here; I want to summarize a conversation I had with my advisor about the two requirements that I find the most insane, and open the question to readers, who may or may not be professors: Can you tell me why these things matter?

1. Do you belong to any professional organizations?

No I do not. Last year I paid $30 to be a member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Since it did not seem to help me get a paper accepted to their annual conference or get a publication in Cinema Journal, I have trouble understanding why I gave them money. My advisor told me I should pick a professional organization and pay my dues, so that I can put it on my vita. Why? Because it shows that you are serious about your scholarship. From him I accepted that, or at least I let the conversation end, but I do not see how membership in something is a measure of my academic seriousness. Am I really expected to pay $30 a year for a line on my vita? It makes no sense to me. My vita is three pages long, and I can explain everything on it. I can tell you much more than the lines as written, and I know why every line is important. If I join some professional film studies club and someone asks me about it in an interview, shouldn’t I have something better to say than: “My advisor told me that membership is a professional organization would show people like you that I’m serious. Apparently the stack of degrees, the teaching experience and the publications don’t do that already.” I am sorry, but I don’t get it.

2. Have you thought about applying for any post doc research grants?

No. I’m not an art historian. I don’t need to go to a cloister somewhere and read a manuscript that is only located there. I don’t need to go to the location of specific bits of architecture to study them. I write about films. My research is watching movies, reading books, thinking about them and taking notes. Why is every corner of academia expected to be a research discipline? My advisor tells me just to come up with some reason to go to Russia. He tells me essentially to appease what he calls the “pedants” in charge of distributing money, so that I can have a trip to Moscow. I know this is something academics often do, but I find it really difficult to play that game. If I can’t think of reason to go to a place and research, I have no knack for bullshitting appeasements for pedants. Just look at this:

My opinion is that, in academia, rather too much emphasis is put upon what is typically called “research.” My goals as a scholar revolve around what seems to me more accurately referred to as “practice.” My scholarship is based on reading, watching, thinking and writing. Those four activities are most important. Only my obsession with particular artists, Tarkovsky for instance, would take me into traditional research areas. I would appreciate the opportunity to travel to film archives to look at different edits or to search out notes for projects and set designs for various films. This kind of research is useful toward understanding the artistic process; it affords one the perspective to consider Tarkovsky’s poetic choices. But I must maintain that such investigative work is secondary to the business of reading, watching, thinking and writing. Therefore, while I would certainly not dismiss the chance to research, I find that the best film scholarship results from repeatedly watching films and puzzling over them.

That is what I sent to Bard College when they asked for a “Research Statement” as part of my application for a film studies position. No, I haven’t heard from them yet.

Has It Always Been This Way?

2008-12-20T14:58:00.000-08:00

From time to time over at www.cassavetes.com, Ray Carney invites mailbag reader to weigh in on various topics. I’m starting to think that I weigh in too often, particularly as I have my own stupid blog. Therefore instead of continuing to inundate Dr. Carney with more of my rants, I bestow them upon the two, and possibly as many as four people, who read this site. The questions concern his usual theme: Why is art film in America, in such dire straits, commercially speaking? My answer relates specifically to his uncertainty as to whether or not things have always been this way.

It depends on what one means by, “this way.” I could recite a litany of painters, composers, poets and rock bands to suggest that artists rarely receive respect, reward or even attention in their lifetimes. This cannot be very surprising. Art is not for everyone and it never has been. A recent letter writer to Carney’s site suggested that we need our Shakespeare – a Shakespeare of film and a Shakespeare for our times. He implied that the world would be a better place, and that society would change, if only this artist would emerge. It seems to me a strange suggestion. I only know some of the plays, and not much of the social history of England, but I am reasonably certain that Shakespeare’s plays did not promote social change of any measurable sort.

How could they have? Art changes a person, not people. People, as such, do not change. To paraphrase Tarkovsky, art does not help humanity progress. We have had great art for thousands of years, yet we still have not figured out how to stop killing one another. And surely there is no other lesson art could have to teach us. If the question, then, is whether or not people have ever been more receptive to art than they are in this country in this day and age, I lean toward, “no.”

Our times are different, and the problem is particularly acute in the US, in that the general attitude about art fostered and promoted both socially and culturally, is contemptuous. In this country sensitivity to art, like all true wisdom, is a quality to be mocked by conservative types and to be regarded as illusory, as a pretension to an actual quality, by so-called liberals and progressives. Our society and culture have been bought and sold by a marketing ethos which instructs us that the best thing a person can do with his or her life is have fun. Fun as the meaning of life is, I believe, uniquely American (though from what I gather the Japanese and the South Koreans would like to give us a run for our money).

This base desire underscores every other cultural problem in this country. Why are we fascinated by beauty and celebrity? Why do pay attention to famous people? Because they seem to be having fun and we have be taught to believe that if we could be pretty and famous too, we could also have fun. Money works the same way. People kill themselves to make as much money as they can as fast as possible so that they can retire young and start having fun.

To have fun is the meaning of life, and if you are not having any fun, people may feel sorry for you and they may be suspicious of you. It is one thing to disagree with someone’s politics or their religion, people can understand that. But to spend your free time taking life seriously, watching serious movies that try to teach you something, going to museums and standing in front of a painting with a notebook when you aren’t even enrolled in an art history class, spending money on classical music CDs and making time in your day to sit a really devote attention to them – to most people these activities make no sense. You could be skiing, or relaxing in front of the TV or reading the new Harry Potter book. It’s all escape. Escape from this horrible world in which we have no choice but to live and work.

And if you don’t participate in this system that they have sold us, you are an asshole. If someone calls you out for not being part of the next fun thing that your group of co-workers is doing, you try to explain that you have better things to do. No. You cannot say “better,” because then you are a snob. “More rewarding” things to do? Now you are pretentious. I am uncertain how deeply rooted these attitudes are. I tend to believe that most people live quietly and desperately, keeping everything bottled up. The fun ethos is very superficial and anyone willing to cast it off would not have to dig to deep to find the strength, except that our culture doesn’t really encourage soul digging.

You can find an egregious example almost anywhere. I was struck recently by a piece from New York Post columnist and right-wing dip-shit, John Podhoretz, who took the death of Ingmar Bergman as an opportunity chastise anyone who wants to think while watching a movie. We are so far gone in this country that the corpse of a great artist barely has time to cool before writers at major publications can begin pissing on it.

Yet, as bad as the conservatives are, the so-called progressives are often much worse. I have colleagues at this university who are earning the same piece of paper that I am – a document which will have printed upon it the words: Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Arts – who repeatedly tell me to stop praising art works and artists because the art object is moot and we no longer have to worry about what the creator of the work is trying to communicate to us (as if this is some shackle form which we have been liberated).

I don’t know how this came about, but my tendency is to blame the generation of university professors and public intellectuals who made art the focus of their academic interests because it was fun. Thus we arrived at the notion of “how to do things with texts” as opposed to “trying to understand good texts.” And film studies emerged in the middle of all that. We owe film studies as a discipline to people like Andrew Sarris whose primary interest in film is that he loves movies. There is no seriousness here, no sense of responsibility, just a way to fashion a career out of a past time.

This is why the academy is full of people who like to have fun with texts. It is why the texts don’t matter: you can play whatever deconstructive, psychoanalytic or semiotic game equally well with Harry Potter and Henry James. Ultimately, it is why people outside the academy thinks academics are full of shit. Playing these kinds of games is pretty rarified pleasure. What are we left with? – Academics have a different kind of fun than regular working folk.

Autonymous Art?

2008-12-20T14:47:00.000-08:00

Over at Ray Carney's mailbag, he's having what I believe is an important conversation with a fellow named Michael Brotzman. Check it out at the top of this page: http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/aboutrc/letters80.shtml; and at the bottom of this one:
http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/aboutrc/letters82.shtml. I would like to respond to Brotzman's comment in detail, but it would seem silly as he will likely never read them.

Instead I will post edited selections from a conversation I have been having with a close friend of mine, that seems to be moving along similar lines. The point where these two exchanges intersect most saliently is here: intelligent people, when asked, have ideas about art, even though they have no training at all in art appreciation. Since they are intelligent, it is difficult for them to believe that they would need any kind of special training to arrive at conclusions different from the ones they have already reached. Above all else, the thing I am trying to communicate to my friend is exactly what Dr. Carney is trying to show Mr. Brotzman: you can't think about art the way you think about everything else. Art teaches you new ways to think. It breaks down all the categories you brought to it that you thought would help you make sense of it. It's a process of deliberation and reconsideration that goes on and on. Being smart only gets you to the door, as it were. You have to be willing to unlearn a whole lot of what you think makes you smart in order to begin to understand great art.

This conversation begins with my friend's comment on a video of Michael Moore's recent appearance on CNN that I forwarded to him. It quickly moves into some fundamental questions about the function of art. My responses are in italics:

Interesting video. Like Moore, I'm amazed they let him on live TV. The problem is that because the time is so short and Moore has a lot of things to say, he comes across like a nut. My guess is that the average CNN watcher are not about to go to Moore's website to see the "facts". Most people agree with Giuliani that profits and the bottom line are the only way to fix any system; anything else is socialism. I admire Moore for what he does but I feel sorry for him because he's pissing in the wind. Americans as a whole are sheep. They do whatever they're told and anything outside the realm of their experience is by definition bad. If George Bush got on CNN tomorrow and said, " In the interest of protecting the United States and freedom, blah blah, blah,.... I've decided to implement that all of you must blow a goat every morning before work and if you don't blow a goat then the terrorists will win and the evil axis empire will take over the planet and that means no more cheap bananas and gas and hummers blah, blah blah," PEOPLE WOULD OBEY!

Also, does the following diatribe make any sense to you:

The important point that I'm trying to make is that storytelling has nothing, whatsoever, to do with logic. Logic is a limping stepchild of the true processes of the spirit. It's an illusion. It's a defective little parlor trick. Associations are the way that we perceive. Electrical connections caused by the juxtapositions of experience. That's the way we are really built, and storytelling takes into account that truth."

Well, my attitude about Moore sounding crazy is pretty much the same attitude I have about myself sounding crazy every time I teach: Lots of people will tune you out, or judge you to be an idiot based on the fact that they already have everything figured out, but if you get to one person and change them a little... well you know the rest of the cliche. Progress? I don't know. We've been supposedly working on the same problems for over two thousand years of Western civilization and we haven't solved any of them. So probably not. You work on yourself and you reach out to others and hope that they are interested in your help. That's about it for life. Not so glamorous but I'll take it.

I'll also say that I understand what your quote is about, and I hope I'm not too tired to explain it. It's like hearing Chomsky or Moore on TV. What this guy is saying is so fucking out of step with the past forty years of your training, there's no way it would sound credible at first. I happen to disagree with his position at least in part because it is so extreme. The answer is always, as far as I can tell at age almost 33, in the middle. So in this case the God of No-Logic is just as bad as the God of Logic. But it is necessary first to understand that when he talks about logic and its shortcomings, he is talking about, at least I hope he is talking about, blind faith in pure reason. Total undaunted commitment to anything is dangerous.

But what's wrong with reason and logic? Well I'll give this example: Dick Cheney. To me he's a cold, calculating, shrewd utterly reasonable man. I don't think he believes anything he says. I don't think he believes IN anything beyond his own self-interest. And there's nothing illogical there. I guess I would say you can't have ethics if logic is the only standard. You certainly can't have creativity, which is the point the guy who you quoted seems to be making. I suppose it depends on where you rank creativity in your personal hierarchy of values and what you think creativity serves humanity for. Obviously, your guy thinks it’s very important, and he thinks that logic tries to neutralize its power or its function. I think this is true. I disagree with him because you need both. You have to have a brain and a soul, not one or the other.

I don't understand your explanation very well. I got that quote from some guy I never heard of who's the writer for the new HBO show John from Cincinnati. I've been watching the show since the pilot and in last Sunday's episode one for the characters gives a soliloquy that lasts about five minutes, most of which, makes no sense. So I read the blog of the writer on HBO's website where he said the quote I emailed to you. Oh well. Maybe I'll go watch one of the new Star Wars movies and dig on that dialogue- God knows its world class.

So where did I lose you?

I don't know. I guess its fun for the writers of the show to have a bunch of dialogue that doesn't really make sense. Here's another quote by the same guy:

The tactics of fictive persuasion have nothing to do with reasoned discourse. OK- What is that supposed to mean?

Well, for starters, I wouldn't put a whole lot of intellectual effort into a TV show. I mean, even the shows I like only stay at an entertainment level. I would be really suspicious of a TV show that purported to directly address aesthetic questions like the ones you've been throwing at me. Nonetheless, your new quote is pretty similar to the last one. Art is for emotions and science is for the brain. Like I said, that's a gross oversimplification. And I certainly don't like the phrase "fictive persuasion." Literature, narrative, poetry, art - whatever; it ain't a fucking argument. You aren't making it to prove something. You aren't looking at it or reading it or listening to it to be convinced of something.

For fun, let me try this quote out on you:

"The birth and development of thought are subject to laws of their own, and sometimes demand forms of expression which are quite different from the patterns of logical speculation. In my view poetic reasoning is closer to thelaws by which thought develops, and thus to life itself, than is the logic of traditional drama."

This is from Tarkovsky. Enjoy!

As a sort of hint to what I think it means, I will say this: Logic is not how you think. It is how you think about how you think. You have an experience, you think during that experience (because you are always thinking). Later, you sit down with reason and you try to figure out what the experience means. But the everyday stream of thought is not bound in by the orderliness of reason.

I understand, I think, what the quote is talking about. It’s why Curt Cobain blew his head off and why Axl Rose stopped making records. Axl said in an interview I read once that people just don't "get" his art. For the millions of people who bought his records it’s about rocking out. For him I guess, it’s about "his development being subject to laws of its own." Artists are interesting to me because they create something that they say comes from inside them and then complain that no one "gets it". How the fuck am I supposed to "get" something when you create rules that say art is not subject to any normal interpretations? I think art is all a game of who's scamming who. I go to the Getty with a bunch of fifth graders and all I hear all day is "this stuff is weird. I could make that. My little sister made something similar in second grade with crayons." Bottom line: If I stick a whip up my ass and email the photo of it to my friends- I'm some sort of freak, weirdo, etc. But if my last name is Mapplethorpe- I'm a brave, genius. If I take an old doll and pound nails into its head in my garage- I'll probably be recommended for therapy. If I do the same thing after WWI, I'm a dadaist who's expressing my outrage at the carnage, destruction, blah blah blah.

Why can't the writers of a TV show just say, "I wrote that script when I was high and frankly I'm not sure what it means. But the next day when I was straight, I read it again and thought- hey this shit is pretty cool. Hope you like it!" It seems like art and honesty are diametrically opposed when artists try to tell you that art and honesty are synonymous and possible that art is the ONLY thing left that is honest.

You have to remember that art has the same problems that the rest of the world has. Mapplethorpe may or may not be a douche, but even if he is, it doesn’t mean that you can piss in a cup and call it art. Just because there's alot of dumb shit at museums, that doesn't make everything at the museum a waste of time. There's art that you think is stupid that is worth your time to figure out, and there's art you think is stupid that isn't worth your time. And whether or not Axl is right about the spiritual profundity of Use Your Illusion One and Two, his point is perfectly valid. It's what burns out so many musicians, sends them to rehab and occasionally drives them to put shotguns in their mouths. You don't think these people want to fucking kill themselves when their record company sells their song for a fucking car commercial?

You can throw my name in camp with honesty and art. That's what it is fundamentally. But you can be an artist and not know that just as much as you can be a politician and not know that it’s your job to take care of the citizens you represent. The point here is that a great artist is rare, because it is easier to scam than to be honest. You say you agree with Bill Hicks on this issue? - well, he's an artist. If you’re pissed at painting or something, just think about stand-up as a microcosm. You've got Bill Hicks, Richard Prior, Lenny Bruce and I think David Cross and Margaret Cho are as good as we have these days, and to a lesser extent Carlin. Then there are a million Dane Cook's and Jerry Seinfeld's. That's how every art is, and the longer the history of the art the more the bad art outnumbers the good.

Anyway, stop listening to artists. They should be most articulate in their art. If they could tell you what it means they wouldn't have to paint or sing or write poetry or whatever. And really stop listening to whoever is telling you that all art is equal. There's good art and bad art. And there's argument about which is which. And there are idiots who will tell you it doesn't matter which is which. Man, just find something you like. If you don't like Mapplethorpe or Dada, fine; you'll live. There's much better stuff out there anyway. I'm not sure any of it is at the Getty, but it’s out there.

I don't have any feelings one way or the other about Mapplethorpe, or the Dadaists, or Picasso, etc. I was just making the point that to me, art is all a matter of perception and that sometimes that perception is skewed on purpose. I disagree with you. You could definitely piss in a cup and call it art. All you'd need to do is get some influential people to agree with you. For example, I read in the LA Times that ad companies actually pay attractive people i.e. hot chicks, to go to bars and order certain drinks or wear certain clothes etc. and then loudly talk about the booze or the clothes or whatever. And it works. Sales skyrocket. The more people hear that something is cool, the more it is. And artwork is no different.

I swear to Allah this is true: At the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC last year, I was standing in front of a framed canvas that in my estimation measured about 10 feet by 15 feet. And the canvas was simply painted white. That's it. Some people next to me were admiring it and saying how this piece of work really captured the essence of blah, blah, blah. See? Perception. Not good art, not bad art. Just human perception. To me the painting seemed like a joke, a put on, or like I was on Candid Camera. To other people, it was fucking brilliant.

For me, art is just something to look at. I keep looking at things that I find appealing and move on from things I don't. I just hate the pretense that goes on when people (like the writer of the quotes I sent you) try to use incomprehensible speech to sound like they're so gifted and that their work is so far above the common man. Whatever. Maybe Axl was upset that his "art" was being misused. Then don't sell it. Keep it to yourself and maintain your sense of integrity, Axl. But if you want to sell your "art" so you can keep up your smack habit don't get pissed off when the rest of us "don't get it".

I know what you are saying about perception. But let's save the "beauty-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder" thing for another day.

Instead let me address public perception and it relation to quality of the art work. There is no relation. People are monkeys who will do what everyone else does. If you are a marketing person you figure out ways to appeal to the largest number of people in a given group. If you have 50 people and you convince, say, 15 of them that something is cool, all you have to do is watch as the 15 convert the other 35. And this has nothing to do with the actual quality of the thing in question which may or may not be cool! And if looking cool doesn't matter to you, then why not just pick up the thing and decide if its worth your while? Just look at U2. They are popular, then they are unpopular, they make good albums, they make bad albums, Bono tries to save the earth from AIDS, Bono makes fucking i-pod commercials, people think they're lame, people think they're the best band ever. Through it all, does the number of records sold have anything to do with how good the album is? Does the number of awards earned have anything to do with how much you like the album? No and no, because none of that shit is what the art is about.

And why would you care what someone tells you is art? Why would that play a factor in how you think about what a work means or what effect it has on you. I agree that all you need are influential people to say something is art to get people to believe that its art. But I also have to ask: why would you care what those influential people say. Who are they to you? Fuck them. They don't understand art, they only understand commerce. Those influential people you are talking about, the ones who get the public (by which I mean the college-educated public and only a tiny little minority even of them) to give a shit about art; they are the folks Bill Hicks advises to kill themselves and to stop putting a dollar sign on everything on this fucking planet. Absolute proof positive is that they can only market extremes. I notice you aren't complaining about Rembrandt self-portraits, the Sistine Chapel ceiling or even Picasso's cubist stuff. The examples you're giving me constitute a very small minority, but it’s the kind of thing people are familiar with because polarizing shit is the easiest stuff to market. Alot of people wouldn't even know they had any strong feelings about art until they overheard somebody talking about how he thought a canvas painted white was deep.

Art is like everything else in the world, in that people who are able and willing to tell the truth about it are rare. Most people who are critics, teachers, dealers and mediocre artists do what they do for the same reasons that anyone else does the job they do: they can stomach it, it makes them feel important, it makes them feel smart, it gives them a nice career, blah, blah, blah. 99 out of 100 people telling you some work of art is important give as much a fuck about you understanding that work as the guy who sold you your car cares about how that car works out for you. And all I'm saying is that the value of the art exists independently of what they tell you about it.

OK. If public perception does not relate to the quality of artwork- what does exactly? I can't fathom how anyone can be an art critic. What criteria can be used to judge a piece of artwork?

That's really the question? That’s pretty nebulous. Lets try this: for the sake of argument, don't think about the music or books that you like in terms of "I just like it for whatever reason." Instead, think about as: "I think it is good. I have placed a value on it. On U2 for instance. Why do I think U2 is good?" There are reasons beyond, "it sounds good to me." So let's start with your criteria. You have them, you just have to figure out what they are.

I'm not sure I can think of any reasons beyond "it sounds good to me". I used to like them in high school because no one else had ever heard of them so it was cool to actually listen to a group that wasn't Def Lepard. Then they got so popular and preachy and some of their music sucked so I don't know.

Anyway, I'm not talking about my criteria. I was just interested to know what a guy or gal writes about when they write an art critic book. Do they judge the works on their use of negative space? Or do they just make up a bunch of bullshit to make what they write sound intelligent? Like the guy I quoted you who writes for HBO.

Most of them do what you call “making up bullshit.” I would call it “repeating what they have been taught.” In university nowadays criticism is taught like an assembly line skill. You learn formulas and then you apply them with more or less proficiency to works of art you come across. Of course if you are a film reviewer, you don't even do that. You say whatever cartoon you watched that week was "sparkling" or a "tour de force" or "the most important movie of the year." Film is a good way into these questions, because the bullshit is so transparent. Film reviewers are obviously part of the promotion campaign for dumb shit and not at all critics of art.

Yes, they talk about negative space. A good critic should be able to explain why that's important, but since they are writing for each other they are usually content to demonstrate that they know jargon. Most of them do it for the reasons I mentioned in the previous e-mail. I do it, because I feel a sense of responsibility. Great art needs to be championed to those who don't care and explained to those who are interested. I see a movie and it confuses me. It makes me question things I took for granted. It says things i agree with and then it says they're all wrong. It keeps asking questions and it keeps giving me new things to think about, constantly re-orienting me to what is happening. I try to make sense of it. I go home and write about it. I go see the movie again. I try to make sense of it again. I read what other people say about it. All of them are wrong, but at least their wrong-ness helps me to eliminate certain trains of thought from my own study. I think about other art that seems to do similar things, say similar things, effect in similar ways. I compare them: maybe what I know about one can shed light on the other. I write an essay. I revise it. I watch the movie again and throw out half of what I said. I am trying to figure out what the artist is trying to communicate. I'm trying to communicate to my reader why the experience of watching the film and wrestling with it is valuable.

To return to my experiment with U2, if you can't think of a reason other than they sound good, perhaps you can define "sounding good"?

I like what you're saying about why you watch certain movies. I do the same thing sort of with books. I go to Barnes and Noble two or three times a month and find myself reading Ann Coulter or someone similar just so I can digest so to speak what they're saying. It turns out she's actually a complete lunatic. There's this new book out that's actually a rebuttal to a People's History of the United States. It’s written exactly the same way but its premise is that Zinn is full of shit.

I can't really define why U2 (or any other group/song) sounds good to me. I've noticed that I'm partial to the key of E but I don't know how that matters. My musician friend told me that we like certain kinds of music because its what we've been exposed to our entire lives so to truly expand your listening horizons you have to try to retrain your ear. Every song on the radio is three chords and away we go. I don't think I can explain why I like U2 anymore than I can explain why I like A1 steak sauce.

I read Klosterman's book called Fargo Rock City which is essentially a treatise designed to defend hair bands and heavy metal. The book is funny and in some places he gives info about some 80s bands that I didn't know so the book was enjoyable. But when I finished I thought, why? Either people like that kind of music or they don't. Why did Klosterman write a 250+ page book defending metal? Probably because that's what he does for a living, who knows. Regardless of what any critic or anybody else says, AC/DC kicks ass. I didn't need 250+ pages of Klosterman to convince me of that any more that I need 500+ pages of some art critic to convince me that the Mona Lisa is great. Regardless, I think the Mona Lisa is shit and possibly the most overrated piece of artwork of all time. But that's just my opinion.

So here's my question. How does an art critic get anybody to listen to them? Follow the assembly line method you described? What if they don't? Are they doomed to a life of obscurity?

Okay. Let me clarify. The movies that I watch repeatedly are the good ones. They are good because they shake up things I take for granted or they make me think about stuff I didn't thought I was done thinking about. That ain't the same thing as reading Anne Coulter. She's a bad movie. She's the movie I watch and I know it is dumb, and it has nothing to offer me, and I can dismiss it and move on to something else. Fuck her.

I'm not talking about being challenged by an ideology deliberate opposed to my own. I'm talking about style. You mention that part of what you like about U2 is that it was interesting to listen to something that didn't sound like Def Lepard. Well, I'm interested in movies that don't look like movies should look: Movies that hold shots longer than they need to require requisite information; Movies in which characters have conversations that don't move the plot along; Movies that point the camera at the back of somebody's head instead of their face; Movies that don't have any fucking musical score; Movies where you have to figure out what is going on with a character by studying their behavior instead of waiting for them to emote their pleasure or displeasure. These are all examples of possibility. They are not the requirements.

Your music friend is 155% correct about retraining your ear. That's how every art works. Maybe you already like Bach, maybe you already like van Gogh, maybe you already like Shakespeare. I promise you that whatever you like about them now is not what is really going on. You will not understand them, you will not have a sense of what they have to offer, until you retrain. Now, if you listen, study and read them all with regularity, and you do it attentively and dutifully then you are already in the re-training process. As far as I can tell, this process does not end, at least not with the greatest works. I can't ever comfortably listen to Bach. I cannot pass casually by a van Gogh, and I'll never understand every word of a Shakespeare play. Now I know there are people who believe that food is art. I myself have yet to develop my tongue to begin comparing truffles to Mozart, so for the time being, I would say that your relationship to the music of U2 is quite qualitatively different than your taste for A-1.

As to Klosterman's love of Metal: yeah, you are right. Klosterman is not an art critic. He's a quirky and clever cultural reporter - I hesitate to call him a critic. His flashes of genuine insight are few and far between. Mostly he's just trying to sound clever. And I doubt that he would disagree with my assessment. You don't say KISS is your favorite band if you have intellectual pretension of any kind, at least you shouldn't. As to the Mona Lisa, you have to retrain; you have to ignore the hype; you probably have to actually see it in the flesh and not pictures of it in books.

Notes on the Career I Have Chosen

2008-12-20T14:44:00.000-08:00

A couple days ago I turned in my dissertation. My advisor happened to be in his office when I dropped it by, so we planned a date for my defense, and we talked about Tarkovsky, the subject of my work, Tarkovsky scholarship and the state of things in academia. I’m still a bit shaken by the way our conversation ended, because it was one of those moments you may have had with a teacher/mentor figure of your own, where everything is moving along pleasantly, and then he starts to give you advice that makes you want to scream, because you find it offensive, and you feel sick that someone you respect so much, someone that has been your teacher and helped you open our eyes to so many important things, is now advising you to do something you find morally reprehensible.

Basically he was advising me to engage in dialogue with mainstream film criticism in respectful terms, and this is something I find myself completely unable to do. Because I think it is irresponsible. I am supposed to be writing a review for an on-line journal for a book entitled: Frames of Evil: the Holocaust as Horror in American Film. 100% academic bullshit. I sent a letter to Ray Carney about it, and he posted it in his mailbag. Go read it: http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/aboutrc/letters79.shtml. When your done with that, read some more stuff at his site. Particularly in the mailbag, Dr. Carney has been writing about something that he has only touched on from time to time in his books and essays, namely, the notion that art is a form of resistance. Real art is a form of reistance, not just the agit-prop that quasi-activist academics like to praise. Go read, The Difference between Fake and Real Emotions in Life and Art: http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/carncult/emotions.shtml. It’s short but maybe the best primer for thinking about art I can think of.

If you read these two sections you have a good sense of the problem. Part of it is that academics are playing games with each other. They write crazy things about bad art and leave good art alone, because writing about good art is no way to build a career. The other ingredient is that the so-called liberals in academia have turned the revolutionary aspect of art into a single note populist maxim. They have dumbed it down and reduced it to its shallowest manifestation without no regard for how this action plays into the hands of power brokers. The hegemony wants academia to be about esoteric minutia that no one would understand but an academic. That way they get to call us elitist. All the cultural studies brand deconstruction in the world will not so much as make a dent in the façade of hegemony. If you are a film scholar and you write wacky things about how Spielberg uses horror frames more familiar in Hitchcock as a code for evil so that the audience can make some unconscious connection between real horror and their experience of horror in film, and you think that this is an act of resistance, you are fooling yourself in a most profound way.

This brings me back to my advisor’s suggestion that I give these people the benefit of the doubt. There is only so much doubt I can allow before I become morally irresponsible. My critique of their ideology already grants their purity of heart. I have been in college since 1992, and I know for a fact that it is widely considered professionally acceptable (and what’s worse, economically viable, when a scholar should never in a million years have to think about how much money he can make from his writing) to be the first to make a case for something. That is just insane. You don’t say something because no one else ever said it before; you say something because you believe in it. That this attitude is fostered and perpetuated tells us a lot about what is wrong with academia. We are more concerned about building careers than coming up with good ideas.

In short that’s why I have to disregard his advice. The people who want to talk about representations of gender or representations of blackness or representations of “the other” in movies and me – we aren’t writing about the same thing. Even if we both write about Tarkovsky, we aren’t writing about the same thing. I’m writing aesthetics, they are writing sociology. Why would I read them? Why would I engage in dialog with them? Besides there are plenty of folks writing about film as art that I can argue with. I’ll save my debate for the formalists, the amateur sociologists aren’t worth the time.

The Worst Scene from a Bad Movie I Just Watched

2008-12-20T14:41:00.000-08:00

Perhaps this will become a regular segment. The worst scene this week comes from Bertolucci's The Dreamers, an amazingly pretentious film even by his standards that tries to weave together, and thereby equate somehow, film buffery, revolutionary politics, and taboo sexuality. Now there are numerous bad scenes from which to choose, but the clear-cut winner of worst scene is the one in which the American boy has sex with the French girl on the kitchen floor while her brother alternately watches them and makes breakfast. After they finish the brother comes over, kneels next to his sister and stick his hand in her crotch. He brings his hand up to see that it is covered in blood. Apparently the free-spirited French girl was a virgin! Heavens! I never saw it coming! Then the American boy does the same thing, sticking his hand between her legs then bringing it up to his face where he can see the blood. He holds his hand between their two faces as the both sort of marvel at the wonder of it all, then they kiss passionately as he carelessly smears the girl's blood all over her cheek.

Deep.

This movie is very obnoxious. Does anyone think this is good? It's really little different from Brando's "I-want-you-to-suck-the-dying-fart-from-the-pig" speech in Last Tango. I mean it is no different in terms of why it's supposed to be interesting. At some point Bertolucci decided that transgression, audacity and sensationalism where somehow related to sincerity, courage and truth. Of course they are not, but it is amazing how people will continue to fall for it. Take Michael Haneke as another example. Cache is the most intellectually offensive film I have seen in years (and mind you I watched Children of Men a few weeks ago), and all the accolades showered upon the film basically amount to praise for it's outrageousness. Even Jonathan Rosenbaum accepts the conceit of its preposterous allegory because the message delivered is ultimately so important. Again, this is mistaking audacity for courage. Haneke and Bertolucci seem to think you have to touch on taboo to be interesting. To me it just seems like another form of dishonesty.

Stop the Fuss

2008-12-20T14:40:00.000-08:00

Remember when IFC, Sundance, Bravo, AMC and TCM used to show good movies? I moved to Boston in 1997 and all of these channels were included in my basic cable. Since I had moved there to go to film school, it was pretty exciting. IFC would show movies that didn’t exist on video like Cassavetes' Husbands. AMC always had Capra, Wilder, Chaplin or Keaton any given night. Bravo used to run Fellini, Bergman, Godard and the like. The first month I lived in Boston TCM ran a Bergman retrospective. I must have taped two dozen movies out of that. It’s a little different story these days. AMC will show anything. “Classic” is apparently used to indicate that the movies they show are older than the ones in theaters. Today I have two chances to watch Guarding Tess, Scent of a Woman and Girl Interrupted. Later this week I can watch Moulin Rouge! Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando and the timeless tale of Russians dropping out of the sky to occupy a small Midwestern town only to be thwarted by a scrappy pack of teens with bows and arrows, Red Dawn. Bravo!, which inexplicably still calls itself, “the film and arts network” has little time for movies these days, what with Top Chef, Shear Genius, Work Out, Project Runway, Top Design, Real Housewives, Queer Eye and edited versions of Six Feet Under and Queer as Folk. I just checked their schedule for the week. There are three movies on this week: Days of Thunder, Cold Mountain, and The Brady Bunch Movie. As for the arts, I guess that would be the marathon of Work Out.
As for IFC; they have become a haven of mediocre, faux-art for the pseudo-serious film buff. As if all that needed another safe haven. One of the best things about IFC is the way they inflate the value of the movies they show, by advertising them like sports announcers. For instance, last night I watched bits and pieces of what the folks at IFC believe to be one of the greatest American movies of the last 25 years by one of the country’s great living filmmakers, Boogie Nights by Paul Thomas Anderson. I am not as excited about this film as IFC and indeed many other knowledgeable film viewers. In my view it isn’t so much a masterpiece as an extremely superficial character study, cliché-ridden story telling, oppressive style and terrible dialogue that is often saved to some degree by the quality of acting.
In fact the best thing about Anderson’s movies, at least this one and Magnolia, is that he allows his actors to act. Anderson is smart enough, or perhaps gracious enough, to trust his actors. He uses long takes which allow the performers to create beats. Instead of using shot-reverse-shot, Anderson uses a lot of mediums that show two or more characters on screen at once, so that the audience can experience real interaction. Both of these techniques make his films far more dynamic than the bulk of mainstream drivel with which they compete at the box office. The problem is that everything else about the movie is antithetical to this achievement. It is indeed a wonder that the actors can act at so well when they are given such one dimensional characters and such obvious dialogue. Every line Mark Wahlberg utters might as well be, “I’m a dumb guy with ridiculously high aspirations;” all of John C. Reilly’s lines amount to, “I’m a dumb guy who likes to be around other dumb guys;” Phillip Seymour Hoffman might as well say, “I’m the gay guy in this movie,” every time he opens his mouth, and so on with every character. Each of them is wrought so thin as to be mere caricature. And this is exactly what one would think the writer/director should try to avoid when dealing with “everyday,” “common” or “simple-minded” people. Why does Anderson have to show how dumb these guys are at every turn? Wahlberg, Reilly, Hoffman, Don Cheadle, Julianne Moore, Heather Graham and Luis Guzmán play seven excruciatingly dumb people. Why do they have to be so dumb? Does Anderson think that regular people are dumb? The water works guys in Woman Under the Influence are not remotely this dumb. The fishermen in Short Cuts are not this dumb. The guy in Bell Diamond is not this dumb! Or rather, the characters I have mentioned in all three of these movies are as dumb as the ones in Boogie Nights, but their dumbness is not spoken in every line of dialogue.
This problem is indicative of the fundamental flaw in the movie: everything points in the same direction. In Cassavetes films, to lesser extent in Altman and certainly in Jost the character’s personalities are not determined by their profession. More than that, their concerns, their hope and their dreams are not dictated by the ostensible subject of the film. Nothing about Boogie Nights ever lets us forget that we are watching a movie about people who work in the porn industry in the 70’s and 80’s. The costumes, the sets, the music all add up to an idealized nostalgia – recreation of something that never existed so perfect and glossy. The movie isn’t what the 70’s porn industry looked like; it’s what someone who thinks that it was a cool time wants it to look like. The utter falseness of it is of course what makes it so irresistible. Actually, it ends up being very much like a Spielberg film because the authenticity it claims to posses is just a calculated and crafted edifice.
It is interesting that the gambit seems to be: if we can construct this edifice, and present it whole-heartedly as a monument to nostalgia, then no one will notice all the cliché. I do not want to dwell on this movie too much, but the last quarter is downright corny. Everything bad happens to every character at the same time. Then each one of them comes through his or her personal struggle wiser and/or happier i.e. better off financially. Just consider how ludicrous that is for a moment. When was the last time you said to your friend, “Just the other day I was involved in a coke-deal that went horribly wrong. Two people got killed and I barely made it out alive.” Then your friend responds, “That’s funny, because last night I was in a convenience store, and everyone in it somehow managed to shoot one another dead, but I made it out unscathed.” Preposterous – every bit of it.
In terms of narrative complexity, Boogie Nights is about on the level of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, though mercifully shorter. I was helped to this conclusion by catching the last half hour of Return of the King after I stopped watching Boogie Nights about halfway through. Do you realize that there are people in the world who take this film seriously? There are people who tell me to look past the conventions and cull out the ideas which are supposedly interesting. I find that to be an awful lot to look past. Is the suggestion that I should look past the battle scenes, the insufferably melodramatic performances, the silly mood music, the ridiculous characterization and all the rest of blustery blockbuster qualities of this movie to find… what?... the great mythos of Western culture? I’m not buying. That movie is fun, because the battle scenes are entertaining. I’ve played numerous video games based on this trilogy. They are just as entertaining, and without the pretension to seriousness or the bloated morality.
Let me remind you what happens in the final battle. It’s the last stand against Sauron, the only evil in the world. The forces of good are outnumbered exponentially. Yet they fight on. Why? “For Frodo” – he actually says it, and then everyone yells and charges into the melee. It starts off well, but they are outnumbered. If only Frodo could get to the fires of Mordor in time! He’s getting there, slowly but surely. Meanwhile back at the battle the forces of good are starting to give way. The King is down for the first time in the entire series. Will Frodo make it in time? Yes; yes he will, but just barely, and he will end up hanging by one hand from a ledge, and being pulled to safety by his trustworthy companion. While I catch my breath, you can count the clichés in that fifteen-minute sequence. That, in a nutshell, is why I will not take these films seriously. People get really mad – fighting mad with me about this crap, and I have to back off to avoid violence. That’s insane. It’s the ethic that the film teaches, but it’s insane. This stuff was not made for adults. Hell the books weren’t made for adults! The movies are even dumber than the books, and I have had colleagues with PhD’s screaming at me that these are important movies.
Here’s the thing. There are no clichés in Ozu, Tarkovsky, Bresson, Kiarostami or Akerman. None is Cassavetes, Fassbinder, Sokurov, Tsai, Angelopoulos or Dreyer. Why are we so willing to forgive clichés? We should hate them. We should mistrust the people who foist them upon us. We should point them out when we see them and warn everyone else where they lurk.