I was on the plane today watching the cable news networks, which I do not do, and not just because I don't have cable.
I had a dark period of my life during which I struggled for proper employment and consumed more political TV news than is conceivably healthy. One must also consider that this dark period coincided with a terrificly shitty economy, living with my parents, and the stifling and awful political atmosphere leading up to the Iraq War. Later, I discovered blogs and began reading and getting my news from non-wingnuts. But at the time I was willingly exposing myself to the darkest, most hateful and vapid elements in our society at precisely the moment that said elements were most in vogue.
Which is all prelude to saying that all the cowards who seem so squeamish about the potential political fall-out of Russ Feingold's call for censure, and I mean the putative allies of the Democrats, the democrats, etc., are deserving of enormous scorn.
Notwithstanding the fact that, as I saw, the forces of darkness will always drag out reptilian bigots like Tony Blankley to compare Clinton's concealment of an affair to Bush's dismantling of the Constitutional freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, finding Bush's act not merely less offensive but somehow, quite obviously not a crime. Regarding this extrajudicial wiretapping, as there's no proof of it having been abused (and mind you, the project was highly classified until a leak), there's clearly there's no harm and no foul.
This pathological watercarrying for a president who is not merely unpopular, but unpopular in a way that is both rare for a modern president and staggering considering the degree to which he's become the standard-bearer for both the Republican Party and for conservative movement, reduces me to the same incoherent rage that made me so unpleasant in the run-up to the war.
It hasn't ever been Bush that has made me enraged, but the way that he has been fawned over out of all respect for proportion or reality, and the degree to which other people have accepted this bizarre mirrorworld as their own. That is, while I obviously don't like sleazy, vindictive, entitled idiots like the president, there's something genuinely maddening about the fact that the country, for several years, pretended that his sleaziness was charm, his vindictiveness was gravitas, his entitlement didn't exist, and that his manifest intellectual dullness was somehow evidence of a grounded, salt of the earth genuineness. They compared the man to Churchill, for God's sake! Tony Blankley and his crew may be dead-enders for all I know, but their brief reign as arbiters of truth in America has left an ugly scar.
The unwillingness to actually go after an obviously limping president, one whose job approval rating is in the mid 30s, displays a fear of this ghost of a president just as delusional as the myths Tony Blankley and the other Fox news goons spin about him.
It's always important to imagine what would happen if the shoe was on the other foot. Do you suppose for one second that Republicans would hesitate from censuring Clinton for tying his shoes in an unfashionable manner if he was at 33% in the Pew poll? They'd pound him into hamburger, and the press would help them. There would be stories about how Clinton had a history of missing a lacehole, and preposterous analyses of old photographs with him wearing velcro.
Bush's has been a presidency, and in a certain way this has been an era, in which perception has always trumped reality. Bush's approval was in the mid 40s and Chris Matthews was claiming the only people who didn't like him were the wackos.
We have a president who conscientiously extends his constitutional mandate and has people wiretapped without any oversight, and the only discussion is whether bringing this up, and bringing Bush to account for it, is a good strategy for the Dems. Enough!
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Everyday people
I'm writing a paper concerning the epic as it regards a certain Early Fritz Lang film called Siegfried. Siegfried is among the legendary heroes of the Germanic peoples, and examining what it is that makes the epic mode what it is, I've stumbled upon something I think rather important.
Most fiction created in contemporary Western culture that serves the purposes that the epic once did are crap. Deeply unsatisfying. In some significant way, the superhero comic stands for the epic mode. Like so many American modes of cultural production, the superhero comic has seen radical changes and inversions in the past few decades. Just as in the pictures, one can't go from a genre featuring heroes to one featuring antiheroes and back without suffering somehow.
Despite the current relative vogue for Superhero film adaptations, there is something unsettling, weird, wrong, about the Spiderman and X-Men movies, and their inferior cohort. What is most troublesome is that the rise of the antihero type and the attendant changes in US society have introduced a Realism into a genre concerned with myth and metaphor. While the two can occasionally coexist (I'm thinking at the moment of The Seventh Seal), there is something about the difference between Tobey Maguire as Spiderman and Christopher Reeve as Superman (and i don't think this is just the difference between the myths of each*) that makes Spiderman small and useless. His world and its stakes are too familiar and quotidian. Take out the superweapons and supervillians, and this is not the majority of the film, and you have a blend of adolescent confusion and realistic angst about intimacy and responsibility.
The Incredibles deals with these issues in an exceptional, perhaps even brilliant manner. But it does so in a way that invites imitation. Just as Scream presented itself as the answer to the stuck, tired horror genre, only to be sequeled and imitated until the product, the self-aware teen horror movie, becomes both ubiquitous and significantly less charming than a fourth-hand Z-grade ripoff of Halloween, so there's a danger of a crop of self-aware superhero flicks that gracelessly recycle and misinterpret this film.
The Incredibles seems to be very much about what it is to be exceptional and how the contemporary world has little use for this. What keeps the film from being stuck in a hellish continuous lecture about responsibility and the ugly consequences of being superhumanly strong in a world where builing collapses flatten children and old ladies is what pulls Mr. Incredible out of retirement- a crisis which turns the ordinary world of 9 to 5 and babysitters and laundry into a world where the stakes are exceptional and all the ugly consequences are thereby mitigated.
it is only by resorting to unreality, or at least a reality so far removed from our own as to be genuinely alien, that myth can really fit into it. It is only through some significant measure of fantasy that a fiction can talk about its culture on this kind of scale. And I can easily imagine Peter Parker with a fever blister or a hangover.
*Superman is unlike either Batman or Spiderman (probably the most beloved superheroes) in that Clark Kent is Superman's costume and not vice versa. Superman's authentic self is a superheroic alien, not a vengeful billionaire or a freakish youngster.
Most fiction created in contemporary Western culture that serves the purposes that the epic once did are crap. Deeply unsatisfying. In some significant way, the superhero comic stands for the epic mode. Like so many American modes of cultural production, the superhero comic has seen radical changes and inversions in the past few decades. Just as in the pictures, one can't go from a genre featuring heroes to one featuring antiheroes and back without suffering somehow.
Despite the current relative vogue for Superhero film adaptations, there is something unsettling, weird, wrong, about the Spiderman and X-Men movies, and their inferior cohort. What is most troublesome is that the rise of the antihero type and the attendant changes in US society have introduced a Realism into a genre concerned with myth and metaphor. While the two can occasionally coexist (I'm thinking at the moment of The Seventh Seal), there is something about the difference between Tobey Maguire as Spiderman and Christopher Reeve as Superman (and i don't think this is just the difference between the myths of each*) that makes Spiderman small and useless. His world and its stakes are too familiar and quotidian. Take out the superweapons and supervillians, and this is not the majority of the film, and you have a blend of adolescent confusion and realistic angst about intimacy and responsibility.
The Incredibles deals with these issues in an exceptional, perhaps even brilliant manner. But it does so in a way that invites imitation. Just as Scream presented itself as the answer to the stuck, tired horror genre, only to be sequeled and imitated until the product, the self-aware teen horror movie, becomes both ubiquitous and significantly less charming than a fourth-hand Z-grade ripoff of Halloween, so there's a danger of a crop of self-aware superhero flicks that gracelessly recycle and misinterpret this film.
The Incredibles seems to be very much about what it is to be exceptional and how the contemporary world has little use for this. What keeps the film from being stuck in a hellish continuous lecture about responsibility and the ugly consequences of being superhumanly strong in a world where builing collapses flatten children and old ladies is what pulls Mr. Incredible out of retirement- a crisis which turns the ordinary world of 9 to 5 and babysitters and laundry into a world where the stakes are exceptional and all the ugly consequences are thereby mitigated.
it is only by resorting to unreality, or at least a reality so far removed from our own as to be genuinely alien, that myth can really fit into it. It is only through some significant measure of fantasy that a fiction can talk about its culture on this kind of scale. And I can easily imagine Peter Parker with a fever blister or a hangover.
*Superman is unlike either Batman or Spiderman (probably the most beloved superheroes) in that Clark Kent is Superman's costume and not vice versa. Superman's authentic self is a superheroic alien, not a vengeful billionaire or a freakish youngster.
Friday, March 10, 2006
Barton Fink and the Common Man
Barton Fink is, I think, the Coen brothers' most interesting, most trying, most confounding film. It's quite ambitious, even though there are things about it that open it up to the same criticism often made of the Coens, that there work is stylish but empty, deeply unwilling or unable to mean anything.
I think people who approach it this way have a particular sort of viewing experience in mind. I think there's something to be said, as both artist and audience, for being able to walk and chew gum. The film's coolness, and its evident self consiousness (the arty mirrored images and language, particularly the ending which recapitulates the Hotel picture, the story within a story, the surrealist touches), aren't mere special effects. Without being paricularly indigestible formally, the film communicates a number of compelling ideas.
For the moment I want to speak to what is among the most obvious themes of the film, that of empathy and representation. In some significant way these are dealt with through questions simply aren't asked in the same way today. There isn't much of a question, at least posed as this film does, how one should represent the common or mass man. In part because that creature is no longer part of our vocabulary.
The Common Man of Barton Fink, and this is part of the point, is for Barton an exotic. He is today, still, but a different sort. David Brooks, for example, writing about Patio Man, might as well be writing about Peking Man. Barton doesn't listen to Charlie, is utterly irritated by him most of the time, even though he is at least superficially the perfect abstract Common Man that is Barton's subject. The film is about listening, and refusing to listen. It is a cautionary tale about using people as a means to a personal end, rather than as ends in themselves.
Every time I see the film, the line that jumps out at me is uttered by Judy Davis: 'Empathy requires understanding, Barton.' Understanding in this film appears far more elusive than Barton's ersatz understanding. The world is mad, and fickle, and unfair. That is, people are. Understanding requires pain, the pain of dealing with real, messy people. Barton's idealism is the idealism of those escaping the real world, those constructing a better world inside their heads. This is a profoundly pessimistic film, even moreso, I think, than the similarly darkhearted Miller's Crossing.
One of the reasons I like this film so much is that it genuinely confuses me. Sure, it does this with its ripe, complicated symbolism, but it also confuses with its ideas. Does this film try to prove that this life is, for all intents and purposes, hell? Is it calling the artist an arrogant, self-deluded fool? Is the artist's only choice building a levee, as Bill Mayhew has? Do people want or need a fruity story about suffering, or is a story of a big man in tights all the audience deserves?
It's wrong to confuse confusion with sloppiness. This is a fantastically well made film. Its construction shows care and thoughtfulness. Although this film can be clever in the pejorative sense, it is nonetheless, if not a plumbing of the depths of the human condition, then one of the most compelling and provocative explorations of the artist's role and responsibility I know of.
I think people who approach it this way have a particular sort of viewing experience in mind. I think there's something to be said, as both artist and audience, for being able to walk and chew gum. The film's coolness, and its evident self consiousness (the arty mirrored images and language, particularly the ending which recapitulates the Hotel picture, the story within a story, the surrealist touches), aren't mere special effects. Without being paricularly indigestible formally, the film communicates a number of compelling ideas.
For the moment I want to speak to what is among the most obvious themes of the film, that of empathy and representation. In some significant way these are dealt with through questions simply aren't asked in the same way today. There isn't much of a question, at least posed as this film does, how one should represent the common or mass man. In part because that creature is no longer part of our vocabulary.
The Common Man of Barton Fink, and this is part of the point, is for Barton an exotic. He is today, still, but a different sort. David Brooks, for example, writing about Patio Man, might as well be writing about Peking Man. Barton doesn't listen to Charlie, is utterly irritated by him most of the time, even though he is at least superficially the perfect abstract Common Man that is Barton's subject. The film is about listening, and refusing to listen. It is a cautionary tale about using people as a means to a personal end, rather than as ends in themselves.
Every time I see the film, the line that jumps out at me is uttered by Judy Davis: 'Empathy requires understanding, Barton.' Understanding in this film appears far more elusive than Barton's ersatz understanding. The world is mad, and fickle, and unfair. That is, people are. Understanding requires pain, the pain of dealing with real, messy people. Barton's idealism is the idealism of those escaping the real world, those constructing a better world inside their heads. This is a profoundly pessimistic film, even moreso, I think, than the similarly darkhearted Miller's Crossing.
One of the reasons I like this film so much is that it genuinely confuses me. Sure, it does this with its ripe, complicated symbolism, but it also confuses with its ideas. Does this film try to prove that this life is, for all intents and purposes, hell? Is it calling the artist an arrogant, self-deluded fool? Is the artist's only choice building a levee, as Bill Mayhew has? Do people want or need a fruity story about suffering, or is a story of a big man in tights all the audience deserves?
It's wrong to confuse confusion with sloppiness. This is a fantastically well made film. Its construction shows care and thoughtfulness. Although this film can be clever in the pejorative sense, it is nonetheless, if not a plumbing of the depths of the human condition, then one of the most compelling and provocative explorations of the artist's role and responsibility I know of.
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