Mediation and midlife-crisis movies (14 April 2011)

Perhaps in anticipation of an incipient midlife crisis, I recently watched John Sayles's 1980 film Return of the Secaucus 7 and then The Big Chill (1983), one of the "what happened to us, we used to be so cool!" movies that came in its wake. Though the films are similarly structured -- they both focus on a weekend-long reunion of baby-boomer friends during which they drink a lot, play sports, hookup illicitly and indulge in nostalgic reveries -- they are entirely different in tone.

Sayles's film is loose and subtle, populated with nonactors and aiming for a kind of organic naturalism, whereas The Big Chill is full of histrionic Hollywood stars and ham-fisted thematic exposition. (Early on, Jeff Goldblum has a phone conversation in which he basically explains what the movie is supposed to be about. Very meta.) The acting in Secaucus 7 is not particularly convincing in a conventional sense, but the stiltedness starts to connote authenticity and becomes a kind of transparency. In The Big Chill the acting is anything but transparent, and its badness can't be ignored, especially since they seem to be trying so hard. (What is with Kevin Kline's Southern accent? And when Jobeth Williams makes a pass at Tom Berenger, is she supposed to come across as campy? And is there anything more contrived than the "dance" sequence in the kitchen?)

Secaucus 7 has a timeless indie-ness about it, but it also comes very distinctly from a pre-mediated age. (One telling scene has characters stuck on the highway, wrangling with an actual paper roadmap -- hard to conceive in the iPhone era.) It's shot on location in a nondescript town in New Hampshire. The characters (who have come together in what seems to be an annual ritual) play board games, listen to live music at a town bar, hang out by the river, play basketball at the neighborhood playground, and that sort of thing. The film is saturated in small-town pleasures and pursuits; the only hint of any "glamour industries" is in the characters who work for a senator in D.C., whom they disparage. No one seems to have much money. The emotional significance of everything is muted: One of the visiting couples has just split up and their pain is palpable without being overwrought, sending out ripples through the relations of everyone else. The looming possibility of love's entropic decay serves as a background for the other implicit tensions: a character played by Sayles drunkenly runs through the pros and cons of parenting, a woman in med school sleeps with a local Lothario (played by a young and goofy David Strathairn), a drifter wannabe musician bums money off his friends and considers really trying to "make it." You have a sense that it has just dawned on all of them that life might possibly having turning points and that adulthood inevitably involves a reckoning with the adolescent dreams that may or may not have propelled you to where you are and which may still be malingering in the back of one's mind. It's all meant to ultimately disconcert viewers; the surface mellowness can no longer defer having to deal with life. For people who love one another and have become embedded in one another's lives to continue to get along, they have to embrace conflict. Social being takes inescapable effort.

In The Big Chill, everything has been Reaganized. The film is set at a mansion on the South Carolina coast, and there are Porsches, power suits, cocaine, branded running shoes, VCRs, home video cameras, hideously furnished family rooms with home entertainment centers, and so on. The small town we see briefly appears to already be a gutted relic rather than a living place with its own palpable rhythms. Several of the characters work in media: a TV star, a writer for People magazine, a radio call-in psychologist, and their melodramatic posturing sometimes seems as though it is a consequence of their proximity to the media. It's not clear if this is by design or of it was simply an expression of the zeitgeist, but all the characters exude a smug self-awareness that makes their emotional difficulties seem maudlin and extra contrived. (I think the moral center of the film is Jobeth Williams' square husband, who views all the other characters with contempt, seeing them as the childish narcissists that they are, and simply leaves the scene after basically telling them to get over themselves.) The occasion for their reunion is the suicide of one of their friends, which prompts lots of overwrought and glib soul searching. William Hurt narrates his pain to a video camera, setting the template for Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and while there is no live music in the diegesis, all the characters experience poignant moments scored to 1960s hits, proto-Wes Anderson style. And eventually the rightness of nesting and checking out politically is affirmed, as Kevin Kline praises the cops for protecting his property, Mary Kay Place gets impregnated, and William Hurt hooks up with Meg Tilly to fix up an old house. Conflicts have been discharged for viewers, who can flatter themselves that they have been living right all along. The question of social being becomes irrelevant; there is only private life.

My point is that Secaucus 7 dramatizes how friends help one another get through life, positing a bond that transcends life's phases and stages. The friends as group transcends the ebb and flow in the individuals' lives and gives those individuals a point of orientation, a reason to resist moral drift. The Big Chill shows us the opposite: the evaporation of the concept of collectivity or collective identity and the self-dramatization for friends-as-audience that replaces it. The friend group in The Big Chill has degraded into a social network: the bonds connecting them are wholly nostalgic. They get together to serially justify themselves to one anther but mainly to themselves. They give each other no resources on which to draw to resist rationalizing their lives into hollowness. That's why Jeff Goldblum's blunt and repellant reporter character, who tries too hard to sleep with the deceased's girlfriend and who eagerly exploits the details of his friends' lives for work product, is covertly normative in The Big Chill; though he is tepidly demonized, his character's true function is to authorize the sort of calculating behavior he pursues, represent it as honesty, against which the other characters' hypocrisies can appear. His tactless self-promotion seems like the truth about how people really are. I wonder if the mediatization that becomes so palpable in The Big Chill has something to do with this shift in values. Media form audiences but dissolve communities.

ADDENDUM:
I came across a passage from Hakim Bey's The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) that lays out the contrast I see in the two films.

The nuclear family is the base unit of consensus society, but not of the TAZ. ("Families! -- how I hate them! the misers of love!" -- Gide) The nuclear family, with its attendant "oedipal miseries," appears to have been a Neolithic invention, a response to the "agricultural revolution" with its imposed scarcity and its imposed hierarchy. The Paleolithic model is at once more primal and more radical: the band. The typical hunter/gatherer nomadic or semi-nomadic band consists of about 50 people. Within larger tribal societies the band-structure is fulfilled by clans within the tribe, or by sodalities such as initiatic or secret societies, hunt or war societies, gender societies, "children's republics," and so on. If the nuclear family is produced by scarcity (and results in miserliness), the band is produced by abundance--and results in prodigality. The family is closed, by genetics, by the male's possession of women and children, by the hierarchic totality of agricultural/industrial society. The band is open--not to everyone, of course, but to the affinity group, the initiates sworn to a bond of love. The band is not part of a larger hierarchy, but rather part of a horizontal pattern of custom, extended kinship, contract and alliance, spiritual affinities, etc. (American Indian society preserves certain aspects of this structure even now.)

Obviously the Secaucus 7 doesn't constitute a full-on nomadic "band," but I think the film is gesturing toward a collective identity, something open to a kind of intersubjectivity that assimilation to adult life in capitalist society certainly suppresses. The film is about preserving something like tribal loyalty to one's friends in the absence of concrete external enemies -- or rather when the enemies turn out to be ourselves. Whereas The Big Chill is all about the restitution of the nuclear family, augmented by a certain selfish individualist myopia that epitomized the moral outlook of the Reagan years, and likewise epitomizes neoliberalism in general.

Re-reading Bret Easton Ellis's 'Less Than Zero' As an Adult (1 Dec 2010)

Prompted by editing this essay about the Less Than Zero film and by fortuitously coming across a copy of the novel in a thrift store, I decided to re-read Bret Easton Ellis's debut book, Less Than Zero, which was published in 1985. I first read it as a teenager in high school, and it sort of blew my mind. I was working at Waldenbooks in the mall then, and the novel seemed to come out of nowhere; it just appeared on the shelving cart one shift as if it were my destiny to read it. It played to all of my aesthetic proclivities then, all the bad ideas I ever had as an aspiring fiction writer: Write about apathetic teens doing lots of drugs and having sex indiscriminately; dump in a lot of inscrutably allusive pop-culture references; strip the prose of all lyricism and substitute a brutalist stream of consciousness, with the trick that the consciousness you're streaming is so devoid of reflexive insight that it comes across as aleatory and affectless. This would best capture the existential reality of youth boredom, which of course, as all teenagers knew, was the most significant problem confronting society in the Reagan years.

Even as a 15-year-old, though, I had a hard time imagining any adults reading the book or taking it seriously. It seems very much a young-adult novel, dependent on the reader's fascination with and general lack of perspective on the world of haute dissipation it depicts. Lots of vicarious thrills and chills for a teen: it depicts a world in which parents are always absent, money is never an issue, drugs are always plentiful, and everyone is down for sex with everyone else. People o.d. and parents have abdicated all responsibility, but that just sets an appropriate backdrop of extremity; they don't constitute real problems. The only real problems revolve around whether or not you can really open up to a friend. For adults, it's all a bit silly. You don't envy the characters, certainly, and you don't even pity them. At best, it has the junk appeal of MTV's nano-soap-opera Undressed, which was clearly inspired by Ellis's vision.

The plot of Less Than Zero follows Clay, the narrator, a college freshman who has come home to Los Angeles for his winter break from college back east. Though it isn't spelled out, he seems to be the son of wealthy entertainment-industry figures, and his friends are drawn from the same milieu. Though cognizant of no agency of his own, Clay finds himself involved in scenes of what the author apparently regards as steadily increasing shockingness, starting with a casual homosexual tryst, moving on to heroin shooting-gallery parties, a snuff-film viewing session, some gay prostitution, and finally a kidnapping and rape of a prepubescent girl. In between these meant-to-titillate scenes are some maudlin accounts of childhood memories (including the obligatory undergrad-workshop dead grandmother) and some slice-of-ennui observational passages of teens hanging out at pool parties, snorting fat rails and club hopping, hoping to spot members of X or the Go-Go's. (My favorite is a scene in which Clay, hanging out with several of his interchangeable friends at a sushi restaurant, is told that rockabilly will be the next big thing -- "and not those limp-wristed Stray Cats either" -- and that anyone who's anyone has to read The Face. As a teenager, I took that last injunction literally and struggled to track down copies of it -- Waldenbooks did not carry it, alas.)

Though it certainly succeeds in conveying a paradoxical mood of angsty apathy, the book's writing at the sentence level is fairly uneven -- not all that surprising considering Ellis's age when he wrote it, and the eagerness to rush the novel out as some sort of unexpurgated view on youth decadence. Its frequent badness was likely regarded as a badge of its authenticity. Less Than Zero's shocking incidents are generally unconvincing, and melodramatic despite the faux detachment. They read like exploitation-fiction cliches, only told in an approximation of the style of Raymond Carver or, more obviously, Joan Didion circa Play It as It Lays. And even though all sorts of unconscionably horrible events take place, the main conflicts structuring the novel are surprisingly mundane: the narrator's mixed feelings about losing touch with his best friend and breaking up with his high school girlfriend. These are expected to carry significant emotional freight for readers even in the midst of snuff films and raped 12-year-olds. It seems extremely bizarre to say the least for Clay to walk out of a room in which his high school buddies are raping someone, snort a quarter-gram of cocaine, and then pout earnestly about his girlfriend dumping him. It makes it seem as though the depravity might be all in his head or something, weird scenes inside the gold mine that serve as projections of Clay's alienation. But such a reading seems extremely speculative, counter to the explicit intent that we take all the action literally and lament the moral turpitude.

The incongruous tonal juxtapositions foretell the way in which Ellis's later novel American Psycho shifts from gory murder scenes to dementedly positive reviews of Genesis records, but they also betoken a lack of control, or perhaps an editorial hedging against making the novel's characters repellent to the core as they were probably intended to be. I suspect Ellis's ploy was not at all different from American Psycho, whose narrator, I think, is supposed to be Clay's brother: choose a monstrous, contemptible personality type (the spoiled film brat, the Wall Street banker) and have them narrate their own vapidity while having them participate in cartoonishly evil scenarios with no sense of their own moral culpability. But it seems like he was told to leaven Less Than Zero with mawkish passages (often set entirely in italics) that imply Clay has feelings we are supposed to empathize with. It would have been a much more successful book, I think, if Clay had no redeeming interiority, if there really was no there there, especially after all of Ellis's hamfisted repetitions of slogans from billboards and snatches of conversation: "Disappear here", "People are afraid to merge", etc. In a better book, he would endorse these slogans unthinkingly rather than be unnerved by them. Or better still, he would register them without noting how appropriate they were to his condition, and then the reader would have something to do. As it stands, Ellis explicates too much, and much too implausibly.

Social capital and the Facebook movie (12 Oct 2010)

I still haven't seen The Social Network: Does this enhance or harm my credibility to be avoiding it at this point? Am I on the vanguard of the backlash? Am I above the fray?

Regardless, I believe my ignorance of the actual film has allowed me to enjoy reading reviews and responses to it much more. Via @rortybomb, this essay by Joseph Kugelmass uses the movie to make some excellent points about Facebook and how it codifies social capital, pushing the protocols of networking (in several senses of the word) deeper into our everyday lives and friendships.

Kugelmass notices how the film elides the fact that the girl who dumped Zuckerberg in the beginning of the film has herself signed up for Facebook by the end:

This is the most outrageous action undertaken by any character in the film, and frankly I’m surprised that a caption didn’t appear to the effect of “Erica Albright also reached a settlement agreement with Zuckerberg whereby she would join his Facebook site when 63% of her friends had created profiles.” After all, Facebook represents everything, as a social technology, that Erica criticizes Zuckerberg for in person. Whether or not she accepts his friend request is irrelevant — even by not accepting his friend request, she is making an established move within the system that Facebook uses for ascribing social value to persons.
This is the real message of The Social Network. What matters is not whether you are an asshole, but how much symbolic social value you are capable of creating.

Facebook is a kind of social scoreboard, and none of the gestures it captures can remain innocent, for their own sake. It's a manifestation of Marcusean "one-dimensionality" or of what Baudrillard called "the code" with regard to consumerism, in which everything is homogenized into a signification of identity. The alienation from self is made total, as identity is detached from consciousness and becomes a brand to be managed. Our social network is literalized as the brand power of our collected friends, of the value of their power to signify, to make useful, redistributable meaning, to be "like"-able.

Friends are investments, then -- inescapably instrumentalized in Facebookland. Kugelmass points out that status updates are "your way of knowing how your stocks are doing. The precedent for the 'Facebook feed' is the old chattering spool of ticker tape, and most of the updates there will be attempts by Facebook users to assure you that your investment is doing well." He offers this example:

In other words, the subtext of an update like “Made sixteen cubes of mint-infused butter brickle today. Yum! Excited to serve at the party tonight” is usually something like this: “Fun little informal gatherings are always going on around here. I have enough leisure for demanding cooking projects, and I’m a bit of a homebody, in a delightful and comforting way. I also am not immune to pleasure, and can appreciate the orgasms implicit in a well-made dessert.”

Such considerations as these paralyze me and keep me from sharing anything on Facebook for the most part. But I think that my fatal strategy of silence will not hold up for much longer and will soon be a signifer of its own -- like not seeing the movie.

Upon noticing that someone has defriended him, Kugelmass writes that "the only way to think about his move is as a cancellation, by him, of his investment in me, and a surrender of whatever dividends that investment might ultimately pay. This enables him to put more of his attention elsewhere." I like the way that sews things up -- Facebook makes us all brands; we strategize ways for maximizing value in the form of attention -- which can be known and measured especially in the traces that Facebook (and the internet generally) enables, i.e. the liking and the sharing and the links and page views and so forth. Facebook makes attention into currency at the same time as it furthers our transformation into brands; the attention economy runs on internet metrics, not actual attention, which is ephemeral and eludes quantification.

I also love how Kugelmass concludes with a snippet of "Baby You're a Rich Man" -- the flip side of Lennon's "All You Need Is Love," which I argue is a sort of global anthem of one-dimensionality. His point seems to be that Facebook militates against interiority because it makes it clear how little it pays. We have incentive to externalize our internal weirdnesses and watch them evaporate into little niches of like-mindedness. This may seem like the cure for loneliness, but it's also the end of our lived-in sense of our uniqueness. Would anybody bother to say of their Facebook page what Dickens has David Copperfield declare in that novel's first line: "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show"? We have already decided the question for the latter merely by participating.

Sympathy for Zuckerberg (13 Sept 2010)

I am having a hard time figuring out who the target audience is for the forthcoming Facebook film The Social Network: Who needs to see a movie that "reveals" that Mark Zuckerberg is a douche bag? Who cares anyway? Ambitious people are not nice, neither are elitists at institutions like Harvard, which are designed to make their clients feel set off from the little people.

The excruciating, portentous trailer for the film is having something of the opposite effect on me -- now when I think of Zuckerberg, I conflate him with Jesse Eisenberg, who was in that 80s-nostalgia movie about working at an amusement park, and it makes Zuckerberg seem more sympathetic. So does this New Yorker profile of Zuckerberg by Jose Antonio Vargas, which partially pushes the idea that he is just a humble coder with a passionate desire to change the world for the better through sharing. He certainly seems to have an obsession with putting a happy face on surveillance and busybodyism: "It’s like hardwired into us in a deeper way: you really want to know what’s going on with the people around you," he tells Vargas. Sure, people are nosy, but Facebook and its corporate partners want us to share all the details about our whereabouts and doings a lot more than our friends on Facebook probably do -- all that data allows them to make advertising seem like its a friendly conversation, something stemming from people we know, not the companies who want to shill to us.

Nonetheless, Vargas's profile cleverly questions the impulse to elevate Zuckerberg to some kind of Steve Jobs-like capitalist wizard -- especially in its conclusion, which I won't spoil here. Something like Facebook was going to become the dominant social network -- a fact that was obvious the moment Friendster exploded. It took no special genius to see that. It's probably worth investigating why Facebook was able to succeed when the others faded away -- probably some combination of better programming, better access to money and talent, and a marketing angle geared toward making the site seem exclusive and more stolidly middle-class relative to its competitors. But there doesn't seem to be much reason yet to give Zuckerberg all that much credit for it -- he's just another sufficiently ruthless entrepreneur.

Family suffering (20 Aug 2010)

Last weekend I saw The Kids Are All Right. That is not to be confused with The Kids Are Alright, which has awesome footage of the Who playing "A Quick One" on the Rock and Roll Circus and parts of Tommy at Woodstock. The Kids Are All Right was considerably less awesome, though it featured a lot of solid acting and had the virtue of not being totally confusing, like the only other recent film I've seen, Inception. I admit I had a hard time getting past the fact that one of the characters was named "Laser" (why not "Radio" or "Computer"? Maybe Flux Capacitor?), one of those decisions that makes you question the entire judgment of everyone involved in the whole project -- kind of like when a rock band has a stupid name that precludes you from taking any of their music seriously. But the bigger problem was that the film had a very dismal lesson to teach, namely that one has to earn family feeling through a long slog of suffering.

Obviously that ties in with gay marriage -- the subtext of the film that makes it so suitable for the current zeitgeist and assures it a bountiful Oscar season. The film has an apparent agenda of proving that gay families are real and normal because they suffer ordinary marital problems like everyone else. That cheerless pessimism at least makes the film something other than a way to acclimate sympathetic straight people to the sight of gay parenting, but it makes one wonder why anyone would be so urgently desiring to start their own families at all. "Marriage is really hard," one of the mothers announces at the film's climactic scene, where the lesson is imparted. But must it be so? And if it must, do we need to have entertainment that dwells on the fact? I suppose it's meant to dignify the difficult road many have chosen to stick it out in not entirely fulfilling relationships in pursuit of a more "meaningful" commitment/duty and make parents feel like heroes to themselves.

Still I was rooting for Mark Ruffalo, who seemed like he had a pretty good life and was not "interloping" in the lives of the heroic family so much as making it less tedious. If being in a family means shutting such influences out, it seems like a pretty bad bargain, though the film wants us to believe apparently that Ruffalo is some sort of a creep for showing an interest (albeit a boundary-challenged messy one) in a group of relatively boring people instead of having hipster sex with his organic-localvore-restaurant co-workers, et al. When the moms slam the door in his face at the end, it seems as though we're supposed to think, Ha-ha, you don't deserve familial comforts, you just haven't earned it yet baby. I think I wanted it to be a movie about him and not the rest of them, and the fact that his humiliation at the hands of the screenplay allows the healing to begin in the family did not console me.

Ultimately The Kids Are All Right is about the tenaciousness of the nuclear-family construct in the face of social forces that might otherwise liberate us from it for something that's less of a hothouse of shame, resentment, spite and claustrophobia.

Sowing Ideological Seeds (5 Aug 2010)

This dialogue between Ben Walters and J.M. Tyree at the Owls site (via 3qd) raises lots of good points about the film Inception, which I saw over the weekend and promptly forgot. They note that for a film about dreaming, it is very undreamlike and unfolds more like a video game. It wants to make us think about identity but does so in the most mundane and circumscribed way.

I too had hoped it would be an evocative exploration of identity in the era of social networks and invasive advertising and so forth. Instead, like all Christopher Nolan movies, it was an incoherent mess, with lots of unnecessary and incompetently staged chase and fight scenes shoehorned in, basically defying you to care about any of its cardboard characters or the outcome of its shambolically constructed plot.

It is probably my own incompetency, but as I watched Inception I spent the entire time asking myself, What is going on? Who are these people? What are they trying to do? Why? Which guys in the white snow suits shooting at the other guys in white snow suits should I want to get killed? Do they even die? Is it all a dream? Who the hell cares then?

So while I was engaged with those annoying questions, I wasn't mulling over the interesting possibilities suggested by the movie's premise of dream invasion. Is dream invasion a good metaphor for how ideology works, planting a seed in your mind and making you believe it is your own idea? How do manage to blend with your dreams and make you accept the alien idea as natural, desirable? How do the invaders find out what will move you? What sort of dreams can they get you to build with them? What sorts of resistance are really possible?

The apparatus for developing those ideas is all there in Inception, but they are never taken up. Instead, the character who is getting "incepted" and having ideas planted in his mind is manipulated through a hackneyed and scantily developed father-son conflict, and the nature of the internal ego defenses are presented confusingly, to say the least. We never are truly disturbed by what should be terrifying, the idea that our dreams could be driven by someone else's agenda, and we have been blithely content to call that our unconscious. I wanted to walk out of this film paranoid and stoked to think about identity construction and ontological security and all that, but instead left apathetically confused. To make meaning out of Inception one has to do it against the grain of its own shallowness, reading in things the film's producers did not consider and have worked into the film almost accidentally, symptomatically, as a result of the milieu that has shaped their vision of what is entertaining.

What Hollywood deems entertaining seems a less pressing question to me than these philosophical questions about identity construction, but maybe that exemplifies my own ideological mire -- I'm screening out the dismal social truths to be gleaned from Hollywood films with my preoccupation with these more abstract concerns about manipulation. But what if the specter of invasive identity manipulation is an excuse to avoid confronting the more insidious problem of our own collusion with the culture industry in shaping an acutely limited self, programmed to receive pleasure from films structured around visual spectacle rather than narrative coherence. This then perhaps carries over to our own self-constructed narratives of identity, which end up filled with chases and explosions but not much in way of ethical consistency.

Revisiting the Coens' 'Burn After Reading' (30 June 2010)

This almost seems timely in light of the breaking Russian spy story, but recently I rewatched Joel and Ethan Coen's Burn After Reading, hoping that I would find that it had risen in stature, Big Lebowski-like, with the passing of time. But it was still the same half-baked, intermittently amusing and corrosively cynical movie it had been when I saw it before; repeat viewing doesn't fill in the many blanks or reveal any ingenious connections as can be found in Lebowski, which also seemed a complete mess to me when I first saw it but on second viewing a few years later, removed from the halo of expectations generated by Fargo (an inferior movie, it turns out), seemed like an entirely different film. There will be spoilers, probably, in what follows, though Burn After Reading seems designed to mock the very idea of worrying about having the plot spoiled.

It seems like the film is meant to be a comment on the Iraq war run-up and the closed loops of national-security intelligence bureaucracy that spawn institutional corruption, self-satisfaction, and paradoxical ignorance. It dramatizes certain aspects of the Dunning-Kruger effect (explored by Errol Morris in this series of essays for the NYT), which describes the phenomenon of being too stupid to know you are stupid. The satiric portrayal of the CIA in the movie takes to heart not only Donald Rumsfeld's famous concern with "unknown unknowns" but also Daniel Ellsburg's point about secrecy, which is that in intelligence communities, access trumps accuracy and breeds contempt for the opinions of anyone without privileged access. In this 2006 interview Ellsburg elaborated the idea:

Top secret is almost like toilet paper in the Pentagon. I literally just did not have time in my 12-hour days to read very much that was less than top secret. I was reading, reading, reading, and it was all top secret. That means if you live on that stuff, you really look down on the New York Times readers, along with the rest of the country. If you look at the New York Times, you look at it very rarely for information, just to see what the rubes and the yokels are thinking about and what they think is going on and what they think the policy is, which has very little to do with what's going on to an insider.

Imagine losing that access and just having to rely on the New York Times again, knowing for the rest of your life that you're just reading fantasies basically, something that isn't really related to what the insider knows. It's a very great loss.

The film's title, Burn After Reading, seems meant to capture this idea, as does the over-the-top arrogance of John Malkovich's character and the flustered cynicism of the CIA chief played by J.K. Simmons. Of course, the film turns the notion inside out, as no one in the intelligence community can figure out what's going on in the caper the characters played by Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand initiate (it seems telling that their names in the film don't really stick), or what it means. Simmons's character is only concerned about controlling access to whatever it is, even if it turns out meaningless. The access to the information has become the meaning for the intelligence community, for all intents and purposes.

That theme of the film comes together only once Simmons's character appears a little more than midway through. Before then, we watch a slate of unpleasant, one-dimensional characters played with surprising and frustrating hamminess by actors capable of much better. (Tilda Swinton in particular is forced to harp on one shrill note.) We are never meant to sympathize with anyone, and we aren't given much reason to care what happens to the characters -- an attitude borne out by Simmons's final assessment (he basically says the whole thing was meaningless and wishes various characters dead or in Venezuela). It's as though the film wants us to be as exasperated as he is -- as if we are supposed to finish watching and wish to forget about the characters and the plot as soon as possible.

The film's tone is also muddled, with the Coens pursuing seemingly incompatible ideas. Part of what's going on is a parody of the devices of paranoid espionage movies like Enemy of the State: thundering, pulse-racing drums on the soundtrack, surveillance-camera angles, mouse-eye shots of gray-suited men pacing down echoey corridors. But that mode doesn't at all coalesce with the satire of can-do optimism and workout culture embodied by McDormand and Pitt. Those people don't fit in a spy movie, and it's not amusing that they are in one -- just confusing and difficult to accept. In the allegory the film vaguely develops, those characters reflect the eagerness of Bush administration officials to "make their own reality" in Iraq and believe the intelligence that they've acquired, which they don't understand, means what will benefit them personally. Instead of remaking reality through foreign policy, McDormand's ardent desire is to get cosmetic surgeries to reshape her body. This wish apparently overrides any possible ethical concerns, voiced in the film by her lovestruck boss at the Hardbodies gym where she works with Pitt. Instead she is willing to steal, break into houses and sell state secrets to the enemy, all so that she can keep up appearances. She is the only character who gets what she wants in the end, though she has gotten two of her friends killed in the process.

The cult of exercise is an obvious motif in the film (George Clooney's character likes to go for a run after his adulterous sex), seeming to betoken an insouciant narcissism, a smugness akin to the insulated intelligence community, presumably, but it's not really clear. Exercise is socially useless effort, much like what the CIA is shown to accomplish in the movie's storyline. But the gym scenes seem out of sync with the Georgetown settings of the rest of the film, whereas Lebowski's various locales always feel of a piece. The gym scenes feel contrived, and what's gained thematically doesn't make up for the strain they put on our willingness to suspend disbelief.

But Burn After Reading's biggest enigma is the Clooney character, around whom the plot pivots. He's a can-do type as well, which I think we are supposed to infer from his implausibly building an elaborate sex toy on the cheap in his basement out of supplies from Home Depot -- a device that automatically shafts whoever sits in it. (That non-hilarious sight gag is typical of the movie's oddly poor comedic timing.) He is supposed to be a decommissioned former secret service agent, I think, but that seems to be a detail supplied only so that he can be carrying a gun. He seems like he should be the film's hapless hero, but he's a little off to the side and the audience isn't given much of a sense of what is driving him. His character is used to suggest some sort of a metaphoric relation between espionage and marital strife -- he mistakes the private eye hired by his wife's divorce lawyers for a secret agent after killing the blundering Pitt by accident in his lover's bedroom closet. His affair with Tilda Swinton, however, is never made psychologically comprehensible; his relationship with his wife, a children's book author, is also ambiguous. With no way of gauging the stakes, the audience has little choice but to be indifferent to what happens to him. We don't know what a positive outcome would be for him.

The Coens' A Serious Man is a more successful attempt at putting across some of the same ideas that Burn After Reading gestures toward -- exploring whether stories have inherent meanings, or whether these are imposed institutionally or individually after the fact -- and is much funnier too. I keep wanting to see more in Burn After Reading though -- no doubt I will give it another try in a few years and be disappointed all over again.

Avatar and Invisible Republic (29 Dec 2009)

I had no particular interest in seeing Avatar, but ended up seeing it the day after Christmas with my family. It seemed futile to resist. I even saw it in gimmicky 3-D, which added nothing to my enjoyment but did cause me to fidget ceaselessly with the glasses that I had to wear over my regular glasses. The film seemed primarily an exercise in glow-in-the-dark crypto-zoology, with little in the way of plausible plotting or character development. (We know Sigorney Weaver's character is cantankerous and outside-the-lines because they have her smoke a cigarette when she gets out of her cryo-travel pod.) It has a half-baked, programmatic but effective sentimentality that elicits emotional responses to the rite-of-passage cues. It kept me engaged by and large, though much of it reminded me of watching my roommate play Final Fantasy 9 (an oxymoronic title if ever there was one) on PlayStation while I was in college.

Only later did its trite politics annoy me. At first, I found it a little bothersome that I had to watch a bunch of humans get slaughtered by cartoons. Humans as a species haven't looked this bad in a sci-fi film since Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (which I strongly endorse). We are given no explanation why the resource the greedy humans are after is so important other than the tautology that it's worth a lot of money. Weaver's character tries to counter the already confusing insistence on resource extraction with a non sequitur about how the "real value" of the planet the humans are pillaging lies in the fact that the trees are networked together to form a giant bio-Internet. (Great. The last thing we need is metaphors that glorify and naturalize digital, mediatized interconnectedness.) What is valuable about that? It's regarded as unimportant by the film's producers.

What is important to them is the quasi-spiritual mumbo jumbo about the native race on the planet, which seems modeled mainly on American Indian tribes and is represented in an extremely patronizing fashion as a bunch of simple primitives who understand their environment only in supernatural terms. It takes a human outsider, naturally, to teach them the significance of their ways and rally them to defend themselves, since they are helpless against aggression and superior military technology.

The Sociological Images blog sums up the racial politics this way:

Avatar is a fantasy in which the history of colonization is rewritten, but it a fantasy specifically for white people living with a heavy dose of liberal guilt. And it is one that, ultimately, marginalizes indigenous peoples and affirms white supremacy.

I don't see how anybody can contest that analysis. I feel a bit ashamed, actually, that I was sitting in suburban Bucks County with all my white, middle-class compadres, complacently consuming the spectacle without becoming disgusted as it unfolded. At the time it seemed curmudgeonly and cliched for me to reject the high-imperialist homilies the film was lazily built on and the blithe righteousness I was expected to share with the "good" humans. I didn't resist being constructed as viewer in that way because it felt good and flattering. It reaffirmed my sense of belonging to a group of wise and morally pure Westerners who would have done colonizing right -- that is, it played to the ingrained sense of superiority that being white and middle class in America provides. I should have been nauseated; instead I was verklempt as the hero claimed his squaw.

By coincidence, I began reading Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic, which in part is about the demise of the 1960s folk movement and Bob Dylan's role in destroying it after having come to exemplify it. The folkies, in Marcus's depiction, had the same patronizing attitude toward Appalachian poverty and civil-rights injustices (the Other America, as Michael Harrington dubbed it) that the makers of Avatar seem to evince about colonization. Capitalism sullied and exploited the pure rural people, as clear-headed bourgeois liberals can best recognize. To adherents, folk music (and Avatar) offers us glimpses of pre-capitalist America, a "democratic oasis unsullied by commerce or greed" in which art seems "the product of no ego but of the inherent genius of a people." The Avatar planet is such a product, for the race occupying it and the film-industry execs who made it.

The substance of this fantasy about indigenous people at harmony with their appropriate environment is the denial of individual subjectivity (the overriding value of the folk revival, according to Marcus), which is rendered unnecessary and impossible. Everyone is at one and merged with one another. Just look at the blue people in the movie sway to the unsounded rhythm as they worship their special tree. Marcus: "As they live in an organic community ... any song belongs to all and none belongs to anyone in particular." This is an attractive fantasy to have about other people, as it leaves oneself as the last unique individual standing -- like the hero of Avatar. Folk music tends to make a virtue out of a subject people's lack of autonomy because its adherents can't see a way to ameliorate those people's powerlessness without surrendering some of their own comfort. Avatar offers a fantasy solution, in which one vicariously becomes one of the subject people without losing one's distinctive identity, and then helps that group achieve autonomy. The story conveniently ends there, before the logic of communal unity eradicates the hero's sense of self.

But the faceless masses are most likely not so keen on being turned into a contemplative object for someone else, not psyched to have their identity and destiny predetermined by historical circumstances. We generally want someone else to be living by that pure code of acceptance of "authentic identity"; we are always tempted to try to reserve for ourselves the power to shape our own destiny and be anything we want. No one seems to volunteer to become the folk if the condition of that is disappearing into holistic anonymity. Instead we impose our notion of authenticity on others, and let their being trapped in it serve to limn the terms of our own private freedom.

'Twilight' and True Love-ism (18 Nov 2009)

Until I started writing this, my knowledge of the Twilight series isn't extensive: it's limited mainly to having noticed the covers of the books on the subway since they had chess pieces on them (for a brief moment of insanity I wondered whether they might be chess-related books -- maybe I had missed the birth of the hyper-hypermodern) and a brief discussion I had with a friend after seeing a giant poster of the goofy lead actor in a Target. (It seemed as though the photographer had him say "duh" to capture that perfect look of cuddly harmlessness.) I also know that it is about vampires and the author is a Mormon.

But the series' popularity can clearly reveal something significant -- does it herald something different, or is it a new bottle for old ideology?

Using this WaPo story as a point of departure, Tyler Cowen offers nine hypotheses, including this: "You know from the beginning that the plot twists will have to be extreme. Few movie makers offer up vampires who think pensively, talk inordinately, and live out ambiguous endings, sitting around in coffee shops." I actually would want to see that show, about the quotidian everyday life of vampires. Pace it like an Antonioni film. Explore the question of whether anything has meaning without death.

Cowen also makes the often overlooked point that "some of the popularity is arbitrary with respect to the vampire theme itself. There is a clustering of production in any successful cultural meme, once that meme gets underway. You might as well ask why there is so much heavy metal music today." Culture is subject to momentum, to booms and busts, cycles of overproduction. Once a particular solution for an ideological social need is devised, it can perhaps crowd out other solutions. Then "Harry Potter" or "Twilight" becomes the all-purpose answer to a shared wish for fantasy that might have drawn a variety of nuanced responses. That is to say, network effects and the rewards for individuals that come from them begin to preclude the pleasure that might derive from choosing our own fulfillment from a more diverse field of cultural products. Slate had a piece arguing that since 1960 we have always been in the midst of some sort of vampire craze or other.

But what, then, is the underlying issue that we as a culture have settled on vampires to solve? A month ago, Esquire ran this story arguing that vampires are metaphors for gay men -- fundamentally inaccessible to teen girls:

Edward, the romantic hero of the Twilight series, is a sweet, screwed-up high school kid, and at the beginning of his relationship with Bella, she is attracted to him because he is strange, beautiful, and seemingly repulsed by her. This exact scenario happened several times in my high school between straight girls and gay guys who either hadn't figured out they were gay or were still in the closet.

Girls not yet ready to enter fully into mature sexuality find in vampires/gay friends something both threatening and harmless at the same time.

Karl Smith draws a related conclusion: "A vampire wants you, in the absolute worst possible way. And, once he has you, at best you are transformed forever, at worst you are dead. This is a clear metaphor for the most pressing issue in young teenage minds." Basically vampires are about ambivalence toward sex, and a way of processing in coded form all the mixed messages girls receive about sex.

This Salon article about adult Twilight devotees views the Twilight books as essentially romance novels with enough genre stylization to not seem as such to those who get into them. Janice Radway's Reading the Romance might be useful, then, in figuring out the appeal -- Radway argues that romance novels ameliorate the conditions of patriarchy by dignifying female roles within it. In the Salon article, this is related to the myth of true love:

"This is what I call 'true love-ism,'" Laura Miller told me. "True love-ism is the secular religion of America, one that all of us can believe in. What's appealing about Edward is his certainty. He craves Bella monogamously. The book feeds the delusion that an erotic god could love you, and that he'd also be faithful."

In Miller's review of the books, she argues that

Even to a reader not especially susceptible to its particular scenario, Twilight succeeds at communicating the obsessive, narcotic interiority of all intense fantasy lives. Some imaginary worlds multiply, spinning themselves out into ever more elaborate constructs. Twilight retracts; it finds its voluptuousness in the hypnotic reduction of its attention to a single point: the experience of being loved by Edward Cullen.

Miller quotes an adult reader, who describes the books' appeal like this:

Twilight makes me feel like there may be a world where a perfect man does exist, where love can overcome anything, where men will fight for the women they love no matter what, where the underdog strange girl in high school with an amazing heart can snag the best guy in the school, and where we can live forever with the person we love

(Coincidentally, this is how I interpret Just One of the Guys.) Miller's gloss on this -- "The 'underdog strange girl' who gets plucked from obscurity by 'the best guy in school' is the 21st century's version of the humble governess who captures the heart of the lord of the manor. The chief point of this story is that the couple aren't equals, that his love rescues her from herself by elevating her to a class she could not otherwise join" -- relates it straight back to the first novel in English to become a popular sensation, Samuel Richardson's Pamela. So perhaps this is proof that we haven't progressed very far ideologically; conservatives would perhaps see this as proof that certain roles and fantasies are hard-wired into humanity's circuitry. (I don't endorse those conclusions.)

The Urban Haute Bourgeousie (11 Nov 2009)

At Generation Bubble, Anton Steinpilz brings up Whit Stillman's 1990 film Metropolitan, which played as a sort of fond lament for the1980s. The film is extremely enjoyable despite being borderline reactionary -- it's open to an interpretation (not a likely one, but one useful for the suspension of ideological disbelief) in which the implicit politics are meant to be foibles of the characters rather than Stillman's own, which makes it pleasantly watchable. (I'm especially fond of its weird, stilted Hal Hartley-esque quality, it's closet-drama dialogue.)

The beaus and debutantes of Stillman's hyperstylized New York were meant to be old, old money -- so old that social-capital preservation was never supposed to be a concern for them. But as Steinpilz notes, the film is shot through with melancholy at the possibility that the whole social-capital system (which the film, with its coming-out balls and stilted drawing-room conversations and Victorian concerns about moral turpitude, lovingly depicts/invents) is becoming supplanted by a raw-money culture in which manners don't matter. The unleashing of the financial sector brought about a whole new class of "vulgar rich," the sort of people that Tom Wolfe (in many ways Stillman's artistic grandfather) scorns in his work. Stillman's characters -- even the crypto-Marxist among them -- all subscribe to the primacy of social capital; they are all entranced by the same chimeras of tradition, which they take to be lineaments of an eternal and proper social order -- the inverse of the Fourierist fantasy one of them espouses. Rather than an explicit program that must be imposed, entailing all sorts of overt dislocation, the traditional order Stillman idealizes works hegemonically, which means that it has an effortless grace, the sprezzatura of the privileged. Though the character Charlie appropriates the term "bourgeoisie" for his neologism "urban haute bourgeoisie" to describe the characters in the film, they are really anachronistic petit aristocrats (which makes sense, since they are styled after the gentry from Jane Austen's novels.) The bourgeoisie, in actuality, were the ones who routed Charlie's kind in the 19th century. The bourgeois ideals -- opportunity, mobility, enlightened self-interest, economic transparency, etc. -- are what Charlie rejects; he implicitly endorses a rentier system where social betters are ensconced in a divinely ordained hierarchy.

Arnold Kling recently cited a quote from Gordon Wood that I think is relevant here:

After all, wealth, compared to birth, breeding, ethnicity, family heritage, gentility, even education, is the least humiliating means by which one person can claim superiority over another; and it is the one most easily matched or overcome by exertion.

That's a justification for wealth betokening meritocracy, an order to supplant the unjust aristocratic one based on inherited social capital. The virtue of hard work supposedly replaces the genetic lottery, though humanity is basically consigned to eternally squabbling over status as part of its inherent nature.

Nowadays, the term "urban haute bourgeoisie" most likely does not conjure up debutante balls and Upper East Siders. For me, it evokes the scene on the Lower East Side, the cultural entrepreneurs and their hangers-on. It turns on cultural capital rather than old-style social capital, which has perhaps receded to an inaccessible demimonde, far away from hipsters and reality TV cameras.

Dumb movies (19 June 2009)

I don't know if it takes any special kind of refined irony to appreciate dumb movies, like the ones compiled on this "50 Films You Can Wait to See After You're Dead" list from Kottke. I've seen many on the list with relish -- Basic Instinct 2, From Justin to Kelly, Glitter, Catwoman to name a few -- and Freddy Got Fingered is one of my favorite films ever, if only for the disturbing dinner-date sequence, which seems as though it was shot while the director was on PCP. In fact, I think this kind of film is far more dependably entertaining than middlebrow "quality" films along the lines of The Reader or biopic tripe like A Beautiful Mind or Ray. That could just be because I like "campy" movies -- but it seems insufficient and maybe inaccurate to dismiss these as mere camp. The standard definition of camp is an earnestly made work that's terrible; in laughing at such a work we are showing our appreciation for that quintessentially human ability to persevere without talent. Camp, theoretically, is for those who especially relish the frisson of being in that no man's land between laughing at and laughing with someone. The Room fits that bill -- director Tommy Wiseau is ambitious and incompetent in equal measures, and his film leaves you with a weird respect for his stubbornness, for his evident refusal to listen to anyone who knows better. Few of us have that strength of character.

But the films on Kottke's list are different. These are not films made by incompetents, but schlock made with a measure of cynicism at least at some level -- whether the producers, the director, the studios, or the cast (if not all of the above). There, the overt and inevitable failure tends to be humanizing for all parties involved, reminding us that the hegemony of the culture industry is not quite complete and that its ability to manipulate us in the ways it seeks to is not infallible, not even close. The workaday actors in such films secure our sympathy, palpably muddling through, working on something they must know is garbage but doing what they can to remain professional. And in the best of these dumb movies, the stars themselves are the only people who are entirely clueless, lost in a hubristic haze that makes them think the project is dignified and destined for greatness merely through their sheer presence. And despite everything, the delusion of these stars seems to remain undimmed throughout the otherwise incoherent finished product. All that holds such films together in the end is the stars' unearned self-confidence -- probably we get that quality in a much more concentrated form in dumb movies than in good ones. The earnestness of the marquee names in dumb movies, however, brings them down to our level; the audience can revel in their superiority, fully aware, for once, how dependent the stars are on them, how the fans' indulgence in fact constitutes the stars' talent. So in a sense, we celebrate and appreciate ourselves when we sit through an ego-fest movie like Striptease or Blade 2.

The Yes Man and financial hubris (9 April 2009)

This is obvious and probably has been commented on many times, but the Jim Carrey movie The Yes Man is a pretty good encapsulation of the pre-economic-depression mentality in America. In the film -- which, admittedly, I saw in a semi-delusional state on a flight yesterday -- Carrey plays a low-level loan officer in a California bank. The opening scenes set up the idea that his character is too guarded, too careful, too risk-averse and is therefore missing out on the opportunities life presents us with. One of his friends -- played I think by the actor who played the cop at the car pound in The Big Lebowski ("Leads? Yeah I'll just check with the boys down at the crime lab.") -- takes him to see a motivational speaker who persuades him to say yes to everything. As part of that program, we see Carrey dutifully okaying all sorts of absurd small-business loans without so much as an inspection of the paperwork. Now, obviously, that sounds a bit like what they were doing at Countrywide and Washington Mutual, not to mention the fly-by-night brokers who brought us Ninja and liar loans -- extend credit to anybody and everybody and let the chips fall where they may. The difference, though, is that most would-be borrowers are not entrepreneurs; they are somewhat instinctively risk-averse, and it required massive targeted marketing efforts to encourage ordinary people to borrow more, to ignore the common-sense skepticism of free money and say yes to the opportunity that perpetually rising home equity was said to provide.

So the opportunity is there for the film to play as a satire to the easy credit of the bubble years, but viewers must read it against the grain. The film itself isn't satirical at all and has nothing to say in favor of prudent risk management. Its big message is that when we say yes to everything, it's hard to know when we really mean it, or rather, it's hard for others to judge our sincerity and know which of our desires are "real". It verges initially on the somewhat subversive message that we have no real desires at all, only circumstances and opportunities. During the film's build-up, when the rate at which Carrey is agreeing to do things is building momentum, his character becomes pointedly schizophrenic, and other characters comment on how unpredictable he is. He starts to have no fixed identity at all and slips toward the post-structural ideal of moving beyond subjectivity to some existence of unbounded free play. But then, of course, the film's main lesson kicks in: that this identity-free state is utterly unacceptable. His love interest -- a sort of phony free spirit played by Zooey Deschanel; she is in a Flight of the Conchords-type band, rides a scooter, and isn't hung up, as she says at one point, with being "mainstream" -- shuns him because she can't know if his love is real. Love, of course, is always the primary bait for the identity trap, but in films like these, it always seems like a punishment, defined by upholding dreary, rote responsibilities defined by social expectations that often reflect the consumer-society prerogatives of buying the right gifts or experiences to prove love. This is the quintessential set-up for comedies -- it's fun to vacation from responsibility, but ultimately we should crave the return to stability, typically figured and symbolized as heterosexual love, with the strong implication that raising a family will be next. We have to reproduce the status quo, after all.

That traditional theme of reaffirming the reality principle is now overshadowed by the light the financial crisis now sheds on the film's historicity. The peculiar delusions of the decade -- that no one ever really defaults, that all loans can be made good, that a lack of optimism is a kind of character defect -- now show up in sharp relief, because paradoxically enough, the films' producers seem to have taken them so much for granted. In the movie, the idea of "Getting to yes" gets supplanted by a much more convenient negotiation strategy (just say yes) that is blithely presented as sound. No one has to compromise or put forth any effort, and everybody wins! Carrey's character is even praised by one of his bank's higher-ups, who interprets the lack of risk management as the introduction of a profitable microlending program. These touches are now local color from a tour through the zeitgeist of 2006.

Middlebrow Oscar (24 Feb 2009)

The Oscars are ancient history by now in the blogosphere, but I came across this post by Matt Feeney at The American Scene that makes an apt point about "Ocarness" that was absolutely borne out by the by and large predictable outcome.

For a long time, the Oscars have lived within a self-aggrandizing self-contradiction, in which “best” is unofficially hedged up and down with considerations of commercial success and a kind of Oscar-approved moral grandiosity, to the point that nobody thinks the “best” films and performances are actually the best and the whole conversation deteriorates into horse-picking that is implicitly cynical and also besotted with both the celeb-spectacle and the presumption of the awards’ cultural importance. I.e. the awards wouldn’t be so worthy of the emphasis placed upon them if it wasn’t pretended that they award true merit, but if they really did award true merit, they wouldn’t take up the cultural space that they do.... the Oscars routinely reward films that openly game the Oscar logic, and this is now coming back to haunt them. It gives us the prospect of an Oscar show that is fatuous and boring precisely because it is so thoroughly self-referential.

This is why you can generally pick the winners of each award if you haven't seen the films or even read about them. You just have to put yourself into the Oscarness mind-set and think about what ideological duty the film industry imagines itself as being commissioned to perform. This year, it hoped to send a message about gay marriage and about the significance of India as a country, a 5,000-year-old culture that may as well have begun when Danny Boyle's plane touched down in Mumbai, for all Hollywood is concerned.

The Oscars is nothing if not self-referential -- just witness all the pointless and near incomprehensible montages of past nominees from last night's show, and the soporific spectacle of previous winners delivering encomiums to the current nominees. The point is not to honor the year's best films but to celebrate Oscars themselves as a cultural force. Feeney's description of the contradiction at the heart of the show is right on as well; it has just enough credibility to not be entirely creditable -- it defines the unstable middlebrow culture that has recently vanished from publisher's lists with the demise of popular literary fiction.

It makes you wonder if the Oscars' days are numbered. The show felt pretty irrelevant last night, and the employment of a throwback song-and-dance man like Hugh Jackman smacked of a desperate reach for old-time Hollywood glamour from the days when it was still hegemonic. But films seem behind the curve of TV and online media these days; it seems that it arrives late to the zeitgeist, putting out movies, say, about identity theft after the threat already feels stale.

I still make a point of watching the Oscars though, in part because I love the red carpet shows, when extemporizing sycophants collide with often painfully shy nullities and they talk past each other in painful, raw encounters. The celebrities seem so diminished, surrounded by their peers and dwarved by the insane media hoopla, chaotic and annihilating -- it's an almost abject spectacle as the stars re-enter the womb of hype that has made them. I find this weirdly fascinating; all the participants seem on the knife-edge of madness, one banality away from going schizo.

The Oscars also provide a glimpse at a purified secular piety that no one subscribes to personally, but which we all end up willing to entertain as being someone's belief system. By virtue of it being a par ethos calculated to be a common denominator for the vast audience the film industry hopes to reach, it takes on a kind of credibility. It's akin to the cynicism Feeney describes, which leads to our not being at all surprised when inferior, barely watchable films like Crash and A Beautiful Mind are called the "best." Few think these films are the best films, but we accept somehow that society needs to call them as such, for obscure ideological reasons that we'd prefer not to investigate all that deeply. Instead it's just vaguely reassuring to know that the highest echelon of the film industry is so fatuous, and takes its mediocrity so seriously, that it can't ever really endanger the public psyche with anything truly upsetting or challenging in its entertainments. We aren't missing anything epoch-making there; the revolution will not be showing in your local cineplex.

Sex and travel (13 Feb 2009)

I went to see Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her last night and left fairly perplexed. His films are frustratingly discursive that they seem haphazard (and half-assed) to me while I'm watching, but then afterward, I usually find that there was something to it after all if I can force myself to think it through.

In 2 or 3 Things, as in many other of his 1960s films, Godard starts with the idea that being an attractive woman in the city is a very mysterious proposition. He can't bring himself to then demystify femininity; instead he intensifies the mystery, revels in it, seems to honor it, which makes his films seem sexist. A specific type of young Parisian woman becomes the generalized Other that is longed for but impossible to apprehend. If I were a woman, this would probably irritate the hell out of me. But Godard, to his credit, seems interested in further questions the derive from this ideal he can't quite relinquish: What if you are that Other? What is the other for the Other? Are women their own other, doomed to spiral into narcissism? Or do they withdraw into some deeply inaccessible inner space within urban modernity that can only be caught in oblique, accidental glimpses, in the interstices of everyday life.

That idea warrants Godard's strategy of just sort of following women around town rather than fashioning a plot. Of course, he's adopting Brechtian techniques, eschewing tried-and-true methods for drawing viewers in (making us like characters and care about a suspenseful story) and instead making efforts to heighten our discomfort and our awareness of conventions. So 2 or 3 Things begins with the actress Marina Vlady introducing herself to the camera as herself, quoting Brecht on how to read dialogue as if it were being quoted, and then introducing herself again as the character she is supposed to be in the film. But she is never wholly one or the other; she is both playing herself and a role at all times, both the subject specified in the script (assuming there was one) and her objective self. So it is for women in cities generally. They are intensely objectified by the attention they attract in quotidian urban life and serve as fantasy objects, occasions for dreams of escape, akin ultimately to consumer goods, with which Godard juxtaposes them, especially in 2 or 3 Things. (The film closes with lights dimming on an array of branded products laid out in a kind of graveyard.) Living with that burden, women must at the same time fashion their own means of escape, in part to preserve their own subjectivity. So in the film, Vlady is often speaking out existential riddles and philosophical speculations in the midst of pursuing stereotypical female activities -- washing dishes, shopping for a dress, putting on cosmetics, getting a haircut at the hairdresser's, taking care of children, and so on. Frequently these question the role of language in framing desire and limiting our ability to know ourselves, as Godard cuts to advertisements, and other signs with words printed on them, cropped to be meaningless and without context. The language through which we know ourselves is being denatured, afflicted with unsettling meanings by its commercial use. And women, the implication seems to be, are acutely aware of being both signifier and signified, of being the subject and object of discourse, with their essential being strewn between these dichotomies, impossible to resolve.

Godard ups the ante considerably on this female subject/object problem by making the women in the film prostitutes (more sexism), seeming to suggest that all women are confronted with the issue of whether to exploit their objectified femininity. Through their scrutinizing gaze, men have turned women they see in the city, on the street or in the cafes (where someone is inevitably playing pinball), into consumer goods. To make the connections explicit Godard has the women sell sex, which seems to stand in for feminine mystery, and escape generally, for the men who purchase it. Godard memorably illustrates this in a ham-fisted (yet awesome) scene in 2 or 3 Things when a john (wearing an American flag T-shirt) has the women he's hired wear airline-issued carry-on bags on their heads. In an earlier scene, the rooms of a brothel hotel all have cheery travel posters on the walls. Sex and travel are brought together in the commercial exchange for a woman's time and attention, and thereby made into manifestations of the same male desire for novelty and mystery. (In one telling non sequitur, a man in a cafe -- named Bouvard, one of the clownish autodidacts in Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet -- calls out an order for mystery-flavored ice cream.)

If sex is the degree zero of desire in Godard films -- the essence or representation of all the other forms desire takes -- then prostitution is emblematic of the general corruption and exploitation of desire in general by social institutions, by capitalism as a system. It's a somewhat hackneyed metaphor for what consumerism does to desire, how consumerism "solves" the problem of desire. It sells us inadequate substitutes for that fulfillment while convincing us we don't want the entanglements that go along with pursuing true desire. Desire requires our full vitality and presence; consumerism tells us we can't live up to that standard and it's easier and just as well to have prostitutes, tourism, brand-name goods, etc., instead. It's fun to visit jouissance, but you wouldn't want to live there.

So the real subject of the film is how to preserve true desire and find it within the quotidian in modern city life. Women, he seems to suggest, have an inside track on this. But alongside that theme is some inchoate material about Vietnam and something about suburbanization -- the film charts Vlady's journey from the banlieu on the outskirts to Paris and back, and frequently the camera lingers on highway construction sites and brutalist apartment towers. The city as a technology for facilitating social exchange, a whispered voice-over tells us, is being replaced by new media -- television, telephones. We would now add, the internet. But in these films, is the city the last hope for nurturing real desire -- a place where spontaneous social interaction can be fruitful; where we are not stuck permanently in predetermined ruts that make desire beside the point -- or is it one of the earliest first technologies for replacing desire with alienation and convenience, one that is now being supplanted and perfected in new media? Maybe I need to watch Weekend to get to the bottom of that.

Ereway inway ethay oneymay (7 Jan 2009)

What impact will the recession have on our cultural preferences? Social psychologist Terry Pettijohn, who has done a great deal of research into the subject, offers "the environmental security hypothesis":

Our perceptions of environmental security influence our social preferences and what we find most desirable during different social and economic conditions. Uncertain and threatening times cause people to consider their safety and security, leading them to adjust their preferences and make decisions that are more adaptive. More meaningful, mature themes and items should be preferred during these difficult situations to help mitigate the threat and uncertainty. When times are more certain and less threatening, themes and items related to meaning and maturity should be less necessary; therefore themes and items related to fun, celebration and expression of carefree attitudes should be preferred. This general pattern of preferences may help explain the popularity of music and artists across changing social and economic conditions.

Seems plausible enough. But I am having a hard time assimilating that finding to my own tentative exploration of Depression culture, which consisted of watching Gold Diggers of 1933, easily one of the strangest films I've ever seen and not merely because of the extravagantly surreal Busby Berkeley production numbers. One movie is hardly a representative sample, I know, but when thinking of this film, "maturity" is not the word that comes to my mind. The film tracks how out-of-work showgirls manage to get back to Broadway and land wealthy husbands, and certainly it seems to shoot for "fun, celebration and expression of carefree attitudes." All the characters are virtually one-dimensional typecasts ("the ingenue," "the flapper," etc.) There's barely any conflict to speak of, and the problems the women face tend to solve themselves almost immediately upon being recognized. They are out of work for all of five minutes after the opening showstopper -- Ginger Rogers singing "We're in the Money," including one verse in Pig Latin (this is highly upsetting in a way that's hard to describe; as it transpires, it feels like you're going aphasic) -- and that problem is resolved in one scene by what's basically a deus ex machina. There is some mention of hard times, but the plight of the "forgotten man," struck by the Depression and struggling without a social safety net, is represented in the film almost as an afterthought in a somber dance number sung by Joan Blondell. Instead, the bulk of the film is taken up with the free-spending courtships conducted by the rich suitors who buy $75 hats and such, and nights out on the town at Stork Club-like speakeasies. And then there's "Pettin' in the Park," a number featuring midget actor Billy Barty in a diaper, cracking open a showgirl's tin bustier with a giant can opener.

In other words, the movie is pure escapist fantasia rather than an effort to signal that mature leaders are in charge to guide the country through troubled times. (I can't even begin to imagine a country run on the same logic as this film.) The meaning of the movie, if there was one for Depression-era moviegoers, must have been a kind of reassurance that at least one industry still existed that would spare no expense and would not stop short even of nonsensical excess in its efforts to blow its audiences away. For the duration of the film, viewers could forget about restraint of any kind, before returning to deal with the inescapable economic constraints that afflicted most of them.

But Gold Diggers of 1933 now seems determined most not by its socioeconomic context but by its being made in the medium's infancy. It seems like a filmed variety show, more like Donnie and Marie than a movie proper, and the shows within the show only multiply that effect. The indifferent pacing seems completely arbitrary, and the idea that a plot needs a conflict is foreign to its dramaturgical approach. It's all about immediate gratification; rather than delaying the pleasure to enhance it, the film just keeps trying to out do itself with elaborate stage numbers. It was probably much easier to go over the top when their wasn't much history behind that kind of spectacle, and the "top" wasn't that far to go.

Collecting people (29 August 2006)

I found this passage from Steven Metcalf's Slate review of the new Rohmer DVD boxed set interesting:

The most pleasant surprise of the set is La Collectionneuse, which Rohmer filmed on the cheap in the Côte d'Azure while waiting for Jean-Louis Trintignant to free up his schedule. The film is Rohmer's sun-kissed flip-off to all the Roger Vadim clichés: a young unattainable goddess pursued by a tormented man, and all the Which is worse, capturing her or not capturing her? blah blah that accompanies the genre. Instead, Rohmer gives us Haydée, a terrifically sexy gamine who is rather too easily had. What irritates her would-be pursuers, two art-world poseurs, to the point of outright contempt is that she hasn't cultivated herself as a mysterious object of enchantment. Having deprived them of this story line, they turn on her and call her a "collector"—that is, they project onto her their own worst qualities as dandies.

The passage suggests something of the difference between a woman whose sexuality is active, for itself, and a woman for whom the project of becoming sexy is a means to another end, a useful distinction to remember when considering controversies about pro-sex feminism and the nature of sex work. The power to be had in exploiting one's own sexuality is different than the power that comes from becoming a sexual subject (from desire enriching one's subjectivity and impelling one to act rather than wait).

Also, it hints at a pervasive anomaly of male sexuality: I think many men have a collecting attitude toward women, which is one of the reasons they appreciate their overt objectification -- why they will collect and save every issue of Playboy, for instance, which pins down a carefully selected specimen like a butterfly each month for the reader's bemused inspection. I wonder about the direction of causation though -- whether the collecting fever comes from being accustomed to a culture in which women are objectified, or whether women are objectified to suit an inherent male passion for mastery over objects. Is it even a fair assumption to make that women are less likely to be collectors? Is the woman in Rohmer's film actually a collectionneuse or is that merely a male misunderstanding of female jouissance? (Where are my Lacan books when I need them?)

Perhaps it is this: Collecting allows men to exempt themselves from the objectification that sex seems automatically to enact -- the regression into the anonymity of physical pleasure. Integral to the passion for collecting women, I would argue, is the man's certainty of a monetary exchange mediating the collecting. If the women in the magazine were volunteers -- if they were freely pursuing their own sexual aims -- the attraction of collecting them would diminish, possession of them (or their image, a proxy) would lose its value. By transforming sex from an activity into an acquisitive hobby, from a matter of doing to a matter of owning, men protect themselves from dissolving their identity in passion and instead ground it more concretely in an array of women-turned-positional goods.