FACES

The contrast between surface-level frivolity and the turmoil it masks makes this film remarkable. Redolent of La Notte, Faces has the uncanny ability to universalize domestic misery and, deliciously, teach us nothing but that we are accountable for our own suffering. I love the scene at the end when husband and wife sit on the staircase, the morning after both have explored the mixture of melancholy and liberation in adultery. It occurs literally minutes after the wife recovers from a suicide attempt. On the staircase, they smoke cigarettes which they've lit with a grudgingly shared lighter. At a certain point they both cough violently. There's a certain elegance in this tragic moment: a marriage has just ended, but the habit of idiotically seeking happiness continues.

Faces (1968) - Criterion Collection

Shoot the Piano Player!

Honestly, Shoot the Piano Player makes me think a lot about one thing: where will I be when I wash up? This concert pianist now plays in a pathetic small bar in Parisian anonymity where un-self-conscious folk go to dance among whores and sailors et cetera. It turns out he's there because he can't resist tasting something from his former life but, as we eventually learn, the whole gig is a dish of self-pity served cold. This film is fundamentally comic (the thugs are incompetent, Fido the kid apes adults with a physical comedy embrionically redolent of The 400 Blows, and the faux femme fatale perishes with comically bad splicing and poor pacing/editing). And yet there's something horribly appealing about Charlie's sober psychology, his calculated ability to desert women at the crucial juncture of intimacy, and his hilarious capacity to survive thoroughly unlikely confrontations. So it's hard not to consider how much we all resemble Charlie, our fantasies of unbounded success hindered by other people's interests and our real-world failures.

Shoot the Piano Player - Criterion Collection

Un Conte de Noël

This is a schmaltz free French Royal Tenenbaums, and this film's virtue is that it never lets a single character become completely accounted for, as if everyone is continuously evolving or unraveling and exploring themselves throughout the drama. Indeed, self knowledge is a major theme of the film and the family's problems are to a certain extent based on the frustrating paradox of kindred mis-recognition (i.e. your family's known you forever but being around them only causes you to wonder how well they actually know you, and whether you even know yourself as well as you assume). In addition, the film's own numerous self-conscious peaks--the best of which is a family production of a play called Zorro while arch rival siblings torment each other a few floors above--raise the fascinating question that all wonderful cinema does: how much in our own lives is authentic? Are we merely fools on some social stage slavishly reciting scripted lines that seem appropriate? The other great lesson here is that mirth is sometimes buried beneath catastrophe, and only the French could avoid brutalizing this lesson with too much reconciliation or a high minded conclusion. Instead there's enough alcohol abuse and tobacco in this film to give the characters credibility but the right amount of confession and debate to keep them interesting.

Synecdoche, Happiness

'We're all alone' says the worn-down husband in Todd Solondz's "Happiness". More than a decade after this wry, melancholy film showcased Philip Seymour Hoffman as a repressed onanist he returns as Caden Cotard in the brilliant Kaufman film Synecdoche, New York.

Solitude is a central theme in Happiness, and as the misery of each character becomes increasingly developed it is obvious that Solondz's point is that the standard ways of coping with solitude are futile. By systematically exposing the emptiness and inauthenticity of marriage, household, career, literary art, care-free retirement, and self-improvement, it seems Solondz argues for a universal recognition of how pathetic we all really are. Seems pretty clear that Solondz wanted us to believe that no matter where we stand on the life cycle we're actually tumbling into tragic meaninglessness. I like it.

The supposed conclusion of happiness studies is that relative wealth and well-being produces the greatest self-reported happiness. Bullshit says the live metaphor in Kaufman's recent film. Happiness is not only unattainable, but a complete illusion, the grandest fiction which, in addition to love, exists only in the hyperbolic narratives that drench our vulnerable humanity from beginning to end. Try to win by controlling others, try to win by creating a controlled environment like a play, try to win by discerning order amidst chaos, and you only end up with maps that contain smaller maps that contain smaller maps...

In other words, the real synecdoche is Cotard-for-everbody, not his magnum opus for New York. We all derive assurance from stupid projects; if we could risk abstracting ourselves slightly then there's no telling how much more difficult (and then enjoyable) it all becomes. So the real reward comes from figuring out how to relate to each other despite the inauthentic scripts running amok in our consciousness, self-descriptions, and conversations.

Synecdoche New York

I'm back, on Marathon Man

It's been nearly three years since my last post but I haven't lost my deep suspicion of cliche'. I recently saw Marathon Man and despite celebrating Obama's victory last week in earnest, I can remain terrified by formula.

I may be jaundiced by the revolting, totally scarring experience of having seen 88 Minutes. That film should never have been made, and once produced it the script should have been edited to exclude all references to personal psychology. Total garbage and a disgrace for all the actors. I can picture distribution people in a smoke-filled room rolling on the floor laughing their hearts out at this film--it's a compendium of hollywood genre cliche's and will be studied by historians developing an expertise in American cultural decay.

Back to Marathon Man and Obama. So I'm running high on hope and earnestness and I still can't get that excited by the supposed classic performance by Dustin Hoffman. There's nothing genuine about his psychology--his obsession with recovering the honor of his dead father provides incredibly thin character development beyond his decision to be a graduate student. And the endless footage of him jogging in New York? Why? To make it likely that he'll be able to outrun the bad guys at the end? To add poetry to his perseverence? I can't even talk about the ending without cracking up...Olivier swallows a diamond before drowning, makes me cackle.

The only part of the film I found touching was the Shoah survivors recognizing their torturer on 47th St. But even those scenes are mired in unfortunate stereotyping and, 30 years later, the whole concept seems crusty.

Marathon Man

A River's Edge

This film is an incredibly convincing and dark alternative to 1980's suburban films like pretty in pink or the breakfast club. It's characters all fall prey to a vicious brand of nihilism peculiar to Reagan era cold war culture, a nihilism that very well might be the logical extreme of other rebellious adolescent sentiments. The youngsters' indifference to the death of their friend, their partially developed sense of remorse comes not from the event but from an incapacity to feel bad about it. They admit that the only aspect of life which holds their attention is drug use, an unsurprising conclusion to a psychological story whose premise is the death of the Real. Unlike their playful cultural equivalents (whose commitment to shirking social expectation is never tested in quite the same extreme), these people discover that violence is the only manner in which contact with the Real can be restored. The psychoanalytic content continues with the series of obsessive pygmalionisms--the child to doll, the adult to sex doll, the teen to girlfriend. If the grand apocalyptic threat of nuclear holocaust leads to nihilism, then the nihilism in turn yields to desperate attempts at generating meaning. This is to say nothing of what seems to be a scathing social critique of loveless and mismanaged middle class households, that infamously american hotbed of repression and the unlikely birthplace of protagonistic valor.

River's Edge

Zabriskie

Slavoj Zizek said once that Zabriskie Point is Antonioni's worst film because it's sincere about love, let alone hippie love. True, the film tells where the tetralogy shows, and its blatant case against consumerism is schmaltzy. Its claim about consumer society is marvelously subtle.

The film can be seen as flexing an individual's anti-social resolve to the point of fracture. The liberty that the two had come to know in the desert (a liberty cinematically enhanced by the addition of a kaleidoscopic cadre of imitators) is only possible outside of human community. The lovebirds escape in technological vessels which, contrary to their purpose, imprison their occupants and effect the tragic reformation--even deformation--of the human back into a socially acceptable shape. In one case the deformation is fatal. So as the lovers part, they guarantee the impossibility of their love and simultaneously secure the space for freedom outside society. This is a subtle take on standard counter-culturalism and affirms, rather than destabilzes, its founding principle.

Zabriskie Point - by Michelangelo Antonioni (Import)

Matchpoint's Metaphysical Argument

A remarkable feature of Woody Allen's didactic Matchpoint is that its mild meta-theatrical elements draw amperage from the plot to make a loud and meaningful metaphysical remark. Nola professes to be an actor but is ostensibly deficient in skill while Chris does nothing but play parts, as member of high society, as keen cultural critic, as financier, and then most significantly as loyal husband. The result is a man whose belief in life's meaninglessness ensnares him in a dogged belief in fortune. When passion threatens this belief, the autonomous being rears its head for an act of savage violence. Faith in fate, it seems, can only be sustained at the dramatically high personal cost of defrauding oneself.

Chris's expressed fear in life is failing to make a contribution. This fear can be seen as the vehicle for the entire tragedy, for it prevents him from nobility in the time of his great decision. Far more profoundly, it is this fear which enables him to perform the spectrum of roles which comprise his existence. This tragic self-evasion makes the film something of a morality play, except in place of a principled constructivism we receive only the most befuddled nihilism. It's no wonder Woody Allen is so fond of the macabre creed from "Oedipus at Colonus" (he also used it in Deconstructing Harry)--where oh where has the nervous bard's optimism run off to?

Match Point

Against Psychological Plot Resolution

Since schizophrenics are unaware of their own psychological circumstance, it's high time that their pathology ceases to be exploited for convenient plot resolution in suspense/horror/thriller/mystery films. Unless such psychology is evident to the viewer from the beginning (e.g., Breaking The Waves) where the plot is about such dysfunction, a revelatory concluding twist is insulting to the type of dramatic realism which makes thrillers interesting in the first place.

In Stephen King's Secret Window, for a recent example, an otherwise compelling script is punctured and then deflated by a "surprising" yet by now altogether predictable and unsatisfying schizophrenia. What is the point of this? Is it at all suspenseful to find that cinema has been lying to us, that a character with every semblance of empiricism was the fantasy of another character? Hitchcock's Psycho, the popular genre's likely germ seed, takes severe pain not to give cinematic existence to Mrs. Bates. Contemporary audiences since the Usual Suspects have been prepared to suspect cinema's contents of dissimulation, and this is getting boring.

High Tension

In the Globe review, High Tension's psychoanalyic argument is summarily dismissed: "What happens in the final minutes is narratively dumb -- and psychosexually ridiculous". Either regretting the film's homophobia or rejecting its illogic, most reviewers are entirely unsatisfied.

I disagree. What makes the film and its final twist interesting is that the victim has a non-standard relationship to the perpetrator. In fact, it is never clear whether both Marie and Alex are victims of a third, or whether Marie is Alex's worst nightmare. This is incredibly intelligent and has a lot of traction. Like the dream narratives horror films embrace, this one enjoys a premise of narratological uncertainty and finds no resolution. In fact, the entire film is inscribed within Marie's dream while napping in the car, so any attempt to fasten realistic windows to this frame should be seen as irrelevant.

Without overstepping the bounds of plausibility, I believe Alex is the more compelling philosophical and psychoanalytic subject here--Marie is boring since she slaps film critics in the face with a sexual origin for sociopathology. That reading follows predictable lines: Marie represses her lesbian love for Alex and would sooner kill her than permit a male to come between them. Unfortunately, this facile case is aided by the distracting sexual perversion of the male killer, Marie's final tragic mantra, as well as a collection of Marie's obsessive responses to Alex. This is a misreading of the film, for I see these weak gestures at a typical forensic--sexual repression as the only possible explanation for homicidal mania--as the very object of this film's disgust.

Keeping Alex at the center does the trick. Since she would react to the insanity of her best friend in the same way as she would to that of a stranger, she is the only character for whom the film's narrative coheres (albeit in incoherence). She doesn't need to account for the time lost as Nahon thuds about and Marie tries to escape or hide or strike back. To her, the horror doesn't make sense. It is as if the film asks for her, alongside her mother, why this is happening to her. Her confusion over the role Marie plays is as much oneiric as it is a result of the trauma she experiences all night long.

The point is thus not to wonder where Marie got the truck if she's the real culprit or what exactly happened to the dude if he never existed. The point is to remember that our unconscious is a benevolent enemy, a horrible place where love of another conflicts with self love and our friends try to kill us.

High Tension

True Romance

When texts seem like parody one rarely stops to wonder if there ever was or will be an era in which they could seem sincere. When they seem sincere, the temptation to recast them as parody is often irresistible. True Romance is a film which furnishes this temptation elegantly, not merely because Tarantino's later work so explicitly plays against genre, but largely because on its own terms it showcases exaggeration. This showcase, no matter how theatrical, is quite pleasurable.

When a parodic reading feels like a misreading, it can only add to a text's case for earnestness. True Romance is admittedly a gushing romance. Its sarcastic title clues us into the entire ordeal, for while the textual romance is indeed true, the plot is un-true because romantic plots, in cinema or life, are not supposed to contain gory, mafia/cop utopian criminality. One entirely untenable reaction is that cinematic and real-life romance is un-true since both follow the narrative prescribed by cheap and sincere sentiments from Austen or soap opera. This is the only place romance can be found, the film seems to say, purged of complex psychology, cleansed of dissonant emotions, this couple marries on a whim, dreams together, escapes together, and after flirting with an amusing series of treacherous obstacles to the beachside frolic with a happy child, no problem, they make it in the end.

This reaction is illadvised because it requires that aspects of the film be realistic. My reaction is that far from supporting a renovation of genre film, this film is its arsenic. The romance it depicts is not true, it is not faithful to the genre nor to real life, and it thus provides for its own validity. You don't even have to enjoy it, but if you so much as watch it, it works. And the possibility for self-justified art is splendid.

Sure the metanarrative abounds, from the aspiring actors to the producers, to the bizarre and dogged inclusion of other cinematic texts on screen and television, to the startling denouement that takes practically between a film projector and a projection screen. But these moments aren't what justifies the film; rather it is the trademark tarantino plot trajectory inside a romance that reminds you not to take romance seriously.

Why was the infantile kid-at-xylophone score allowed? Who placed it at key dramatic instances when it was thoroughly inappropriate? When Slater cries at his father and recounts the man's sins, the pebbles drop optimistically and the sanguine score sucks all the legitimacy from the scene. Aside from the score, there should also, as always, have been more Christopher Walken. What deity confined him to the cameo?

True Romance

Walk The Line

....turns out only to cross lines of acceptable art. Instead of glorifying the accomplishments of our mythically esteemed cultural ancestors, biopics like this one exaggerate our willingness to accept and then valorize highly reduced contours of a human life. In producing this script, hollywood not only plays right into an american public satisfaction with the far-fetched birth of a star, its accelerated rise, inevitable fall, and redemptive reconciliation or death, but also tickles us as it tricks us into accepting someone's shadow in place of his spirit. This is unacceptable.

Our ineffectual collective masturbation to the cult of celebrity is alarmingly acute with this film. Johnny Cash and June Carter, co-conspirators of a real culture and a legitimate art, suffer degradation in this film. As Phoenix and Witherspoon croon in derivation, nothing of Cash rises from the ashes and all that remains of Carter withers into parody.

Walk the Line (Widescreen Edition)

Breakfast on Pluto

There's something awful about hastily drafted harsh reactions to films. There's something equally reprehensible about how lately I haven't enjoyed the movies I've had the privilege of not paying for. Blaming capitalism's distinctly efficient powers of seduction, I really never wanted to think about Breakfast on Pluto ever again.

A day later, I still find its shortcomings offensive. Briefly, the film fetishizes its protagonist's obliviousness, distorts an otherwise fascinating queer coming of age story into a flimsy decadence, and induces already thin drama to a boring genre cannibalism (history pic snacks on catholic repression while queer tragedy dines on both). At every turn the film gurgles out indescribably jagged chapters of human discomfort, and instead of calmly organizing them someone had the bad idea of splattering them about. The results are risible. People die, endure physical abuse, search for meaning in vain--and I suppressed laughter. I damn this script for conjuring up comedy in me and for promoting infelicitous scorn for a topic I care about.

It takes so much time/money/talent/vintage clothing to makes these movies, people should start reading scripts before producing them.

Breakfast on Pluto

on Snobbery

What is the nature of snobbery? Is the oft-mocked reverse snobbery more deplorable? Does taste necessarily beget snobbery? What is the difference between taste and preference, its value-neutral cousin?

Human autonomy, from infancy to senility, constantly results in preference. Whether presented with competing alternatives or given the freedom to make selections at will, people are driven to express themselves through decisions. In every economic context and in all of the various sociopolitical and culture systems, human experience evidently requires the maintenance of personal standards.

At first blush, the assignation of snobbery is merely a response to the pervasive disequilibria in human possession. Resources are scarce (or so we're told) and thus not everyone acquires the same things. This puts everyone in a position to accuse another of being a snob, for material self-similarity seldom occurs in reality.

But matters are significantly more complex than objectively measured amounts or quality of property. Snobbery is also an attitude toward property--it is a manner of acquiring and possessing goods. The snob's defining characteristic is lending superiority to consumption. But does the snob cultivate the superiority associated with his consumption? Or is such superiority imputed by the more sparsely endowed onlooker?

It is an undeniable fact of reality that there exist different kinds of film, wine, cheese, clothing, coffee, bread, cities, art, restaurants, literature, residences, and music. The snob conflates his opinion with fact. When his personally reserved taste slides into public pronouncement, the snob offends us because he lays claim to the arbitration of taste. Nobody has time for obvious elitism.

Having just dismissed of self-declared aesthetic objectivity as snobbery, we can finally turn to reverse snobbery. In a certain sense, reverse snobbery travels along the same vector as its predecessor but with far greater magnitude. Reverse snobs are obesssed with anti-taste; for snobs, taste is far more incidental. Reverse snobs occupy the reactionary space that used to contain counter-culture.

The allegation of reverse snobbery, however, leads to a distinct paralysis. Imperiled by the potential snobbishness of every cultural moment, people spurn their checking accounts and attempt to distance themselves from what they have deemed reproachable. In so doing they further refine notions of taste and unwittingly rarefy the air they permit themselves and their conspirators to breath. This pun on the etymology of conspiracy suits reverse snobbery quite well, for such types seem even more exclusive than their grandparents.

How then can anyone avoid the snobbishness of everyday life? In capitalism, they probably can't.

With mechanical efficiency, Capitalism has probably precluded the possibility of authenticity. Political life, culture, esteem of others are all contaminated by toxic droplets of currency and the exchange it facilitates.

So that's it then. Considerations of snobbery are an invitation to paradox. The inescapable variables of material necessity, combined with the free market constant of disparity, leads to an empty universal applicability of the label (or the non-label). And like all emptied signifiers, this one is probably worth getting rid of.

...the 1 train as apparatchik?

Lately the 1 train has been perceptively slow, and its tardiness directly correlates with its overcrowded and aggressive cargo.

I want to blame the Bush administration. I believe that Bush prefers a negligent MTA to an efficient one, not because he simply delights in the misery of others, but rather because he recognizes the typically unexploited opportunities of turning a population against itself in subtle ways.

Suggestions that Bush's political savvy might outpace his marketability have always seemed untenable. Occasion after countless occasion he prattles presidentially and pathetically--we shall not be fooled, most maintain. What if the dolt were reinscribed in Machiavellian manipulation? What if the idiot tank were the only viable breeding ground for an ungodly political dynamism?

Sometimes when I ride the 1 train it takes forever to arrive and then I sadly sardine myself amidst the flock. The other day steerage was so scrambled I had no need to touch a pole or wall, the herd helped me remain on my feet. And yet the feelings that arose in me were hardly camaraderie or companionship, communalism or compassion, but in fact a brand of xenophobia. Yes, Bush likes slow trains because it fosters xenophobias which then make prejudicial treatment of 'the other' far more palatable. By beginning several million people's day closer to several other million people, Bush undermines what ought to be collective endeavor--the commute--and distorts our view on philosophical alterity.

Instead of an homage to the stranger, the other, the train ride has become a session in larval hostility and egoism. Riding crowded trains makes it easier to resent and ultimately loathe the unknown, a process which in turn justifies the war on terror. Bush inconveniences us to render us pliable pieces of complicit citizenry...

Unsuspecting masses of the free world unite! For we approach one day when such thoughts might not only be illegal, but also outside the reach of everyday consciousness.

Google is Dismantling our Epistemic Reliability

Google, and the relation to knowledge it promotes, is eroding the dependability of the pursuit of knowledge the world over. Google advances a pedagogy of surfaces by distributing effortlessly accessed and seemingly useful information. A cult of Googling is mounting an attack on culture and, more astonishingly, on concepts and the way we view them. Our very approach to knowledge is shifting toward a reductive extreme, namely that of "direct access to fact". This is a radical departure from the traditional center of inquiry characterized by method and fueled by reason.

Google has replaced critical inquiry with a pacific stasis, an ugly complacence, a dis-empowering passivity.

Knowledge can admittedly be sought in different ways. Poetry, for example, hardly obsesses over knowledge, but when it does it instructs in interstice. It is thus indirect and purposefully inefficient. Poetry's adversary, Google proclaims efficiency and follows through only because it has preconditioned its users to appreciate the result. Google teaches us to unitize information and then superficially link it to an obscene amount of other units. Google indexes information which it leverages toward advertising. Crass capitalism married to nifty marketing by specious claims to life improvement.

In the methamphetamine saturated culture we've inherited, it is no surprise that a Google approach to knowledge has mass appeal. Whether speed creates the problem or solves it badly, our attention span has crumpled to a traumatized and brittle few seconds. I confess: I rarely, if ever, travel beyond the first 10 hits that google retrieves. Skipping to another search is a reflex that google cherishes because it spells the inevitability of future searches.

Furthermore, memory has not only been neutralized--which would at least be tolerable--but actually replaced by a strong tendency to self-indexing. By this I mean that where an individual memory was once the property of a uniquely assembled (albeit transient) human brain, propriety has now been transferred to anyone who should happen to steal a cell phone or view web content. Instantaneous duplication of immediacy is home to a vile circularity that threatens all sorts of endeavors.

Online chatting, for instance, has encroached upon the solitude that people used to seek for repose. Reflection isn't a lost art, it has turned into Version 1.0 in the evolution of modern selfhood. Reflection and introspection used to confirm people to themselves by themselves. We have gradually substituted virtual confirmation by others for this fiercely defined personhood. Look at my photographs, listen to my narrative, and relate to my crisis, then remind me why I still matter. Where once we individuals mattered as individuals unto ourselves, today we only matter as voracious consumers of the attention of others.

Google, it seems, might not be the culprit but rather the altar, built hastily for self-love and not sacrifice.

Elizabethtown

Grinding gears last night was the soon to be released "Elizabethtown" starring two dramatically handicapped specimens of face-driven Hollywood casting. There is hardly a need to point out that this movie is bankrupt--musically, emotionally, romantically--but I want to explore exactly why it is so weak.

With high fidelity to its genre, the movie exploits a natural tendency to confuse emotion and experience. Emotions, raw human responses to exoteric events, can simply not be trapped between two pieces of celluloid. The experiences that contain emotional life can. "Elizabethtown" seeks to shortcut (and only short circuits) the path from event to emotion. It actually depicts the emotions and tries to pass them off as authentic. In so doing, it blasphemes the genuine warmth and kindness that characterize relationships, bereavement, career failure; instead of successful parody or subtle satire we get a swizzle of pop tracks, extreme close-ups, and saccharine speech acts.

Might there remain escapist entertainment value? Impossible. Movies like this one promote evacuation, not escapism. They empty out, purging life of legitimacy, excusing individuals of accountability, and suggesting that a thickly applied melodic varnish will get us through to the end. Escapist film, aside from being entertaining, induces a departure to an ideal place and typically drags a trace of ideality back to reality. Evacuation leaves only a hollow, anti-experiential, and deceitful sense of satisfaction.

Elizabethtown

on The Pillowman

After a week now, my primary disappointment with the Pillowman still centers on its concept. An excellent set-up led to an near-hollow perspective on creativity under totalitarianism, on art's imitation of life, on the interplay of human comedy and misery, and on the sustainability of a will to life given a surfeit of inductions to nihilism. In other words, it failed to generate a meaningful or feasible response to the demands of existence--instead, the play manufactured comedy where it is, I believe, least appropriate.

After further consideration of my comparison of the work to Cinema Paradiso and Big Fish, I want set those aside in order to examine The Pillowman's own logic on the role of storytelling. It will then be possible to return to those films whose arguments about the centrality of experiencing narrative are fundamentally more sound.

Here are the brass tacks: K's agonizing biography (albeit a dubiously factual account revealed by his own hand) is supposed to have generated the misery behind his creative instinct. Predictably, the anguish of youth, the misery of his slaughterhouse job, his critical scrutiny of authoritarianism, and his difficult domestic duties, cast a dismal pallor over his fiction. Enter (inappropriately) dark comedy. There is no inherent mirth in K's misery, nor is there any cause for laughter in his incarceration. And yet that is what was intended and that's what happens. The audience is tickled alternatively by morose scandal and cheap humoristic gags. These are not intrinsically objectionable devices, except that here they accumulated into a full-blown disaster. The reason is that these comedic darts completely miss any meaningful target. A commitment to narrative doesn't rescue K or his brother, it lubricates their slide into destruction. True, narrative is slightly palliative for the brother, but then he exploits it out of ignorance. For K, writing is possibly cathartic, but when based in a justifiable matricide/patricide, it seems self-defeating for that writing to become the vehicle of a modern audience's onanism and then the eternal legacy of a self-styled artist.

To compare the play with two works I so deeply respect now feels heretical, but I ought to clarify why I did so instinctively. Cinema Paradiso and Big Fish legitimate a most human recourse to narrative because they expose narrative as a basic survival mechanism. Big Fish evokes tender feelings in me because it argues with eminent agility that narrative preserves a sacred connection between actuality and ideal existence (elevation). It then goes on to demonstrate how difficult disillusionment can be, and then, if you can see the screen through your tears, it permits death to endorse the duty that the bereaved owe to the task of living.

Cinema Paradiso is the best treatment of nostalgia in the history of the world. Truly savage. I usually weep for a full hour after watching the film as my own mind dances into the terror-filled regions of consciousness that include the irrecuperability of childhood, the power of memory, the inescapable feelings of neglect felt by the elderly, the infelicitous restlessness of the young male with self-imposed expectation from life, the panic of modernization, and the devastation that attends maturation.

Finally, The Pillowman depends upon a damning socio-political irresponsibility. Today's political topography demands accountability in the arts--this is especially true in the case of an overtly political drama. There is a desperate need for intelligent popular critique of the kind of moral absolutism and dogmatic nationalism that has already started to infringe on civil liberties. I by no means desire the universal substitution of sobriety for levity; I'm arguing that we can't afford to pass up excellent opportunities for critical citizenship in the name of entertainment. There should always be room for frivolous comedy in the arts, that fact is incontestable. There persists, however, a non-salutary neglect of just how imperiled our legitimate democracy is. Comparisons to Weimar Germany make me want to vomit ever so slightly, but there is unimpeachable evidence that once again fear and chauvinism copulate and begin to beget the insidious enemies of liberalism (e.g., the collapse of the welfare state, the patriot act, public rise of puissant moral rhetoric). Our only solace comes from the fact that the current demagogues are apparently incompetent bunglers when it comes to state action ( c.f., the big easy)....or do they only appear so?

This is to mention nothing of the play's elaborate and enjoyable set, the often delightful turns of phrase, the lively short stories, and the charm of silver screensters in real time. To be frank, these elements did little to outweigh the spiritual emptiness and philosophical bankruptcy of the production as a whole. Crudup's histrionic oscillation between grief and cynicism was just plain annoying, as was Goldblum's incapacity to avoid his typecast-characteristic nebbishness. But how the dramaturgy stumbled would be an altogether different and largely uninteresting essay...

To conclude, The Pillowman was neither funny nor written to make an intelligent point about the importance of storytelling. Dahyenu. The work is also politically reprehensible and socially deplorable.

Rather than a refund, I'd love it if McDonagh would read this blog, for by most accounts The Pillowman amounts to an egotistical defense of his own art, and that's disgusting.

the meta-blog

i hope you're kidding. just to prove it, i'm posting this thread to the blog!

On 6/20/05, Lukas wrote:> i'm afraid of placing my points of view and opinions, as well as tidbits> about my personal life, out in the open public sphere where the fruits of> this frankness and intimacy will be quashed by the steel-toed boot of> unrestrained criticism. Down w/blogs. Up with cocoons and emotional> protectionism.