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David Thomson see Kill Bill and meditates on violence in the cinema.

To Marguerite by Matthew Arnold

Yes: in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown.
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.

But when the moon their hollow lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour;

O then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent!
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent.
Now round us spreads the watery plain--
O might our marges meet again!

Who order'd that their longing's fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool'd?
Who renders vain their deep desire?--
A God, a God their severence ruled;
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.

The Marriage Trap:

Modern marriage doesn't work for the majority of people. The rate of divorce has roughly doubled since the 1960s. Half of all marriages end in divorce. And as sketchy as poll data can be, a recent Rutgers University poll found that only 38 percent of married couples describe themselves as happy. What's curious, though, is that even though marriage doesn't seem to make Americans very happy, they keep getting married (and remarried). Kipnis' essential question is: Why? Why, in what seems like an age of great social freedom, would anyone willingly consent to a life of constricting monogamy? Why has marriage (which she defines broadly as any long-term monogamous relationship) remained a polestar even as ingrained ideas about race, gender, and sexuality have been overturned?

While I agree that in general, and for most people, marriage is a bad idea, the argument that marriage is specifically the cause of so much unhappiness is simply mistaking the symptom for the disease. In other words, "I wish I wasn't married" = "I wish I wasn't alone."

Why aphorisms? Perhaps because truth is not contingent. Because all we can really say is "this is so, and I see it."

Boogie Nights

I caught this on tv last night (how is that possible? lots of beeps and black boxes), and it holds up surprisingly well. Out of all the movies I loved in high school, this is probably the one I wanted to see again the least. It felt exhausted the last time I saw it, with nothing more to give.

But the film gains some odd poignancy if you take it as a love letter to the cinema of the 1970s, and as regret for the forgotten promise that the movies seemed to hold for many back then. The film itself even hints at this when two characters discuss their love for the new Star Wars films. Those films, along with perhaps Jaws, are often accused of ending the period of creative freedom that the 70s represented. When you examine the conflict of the characters in Boogie Nights, a desire to make real art vs. the demands of the pornography business, it's hard not to see a reflection of what many may feel in Hollywood today. When the curtain falls on 1979 and the movie takes a dark turn in the 1980s, one feels that perhaps this fall from grace represents the end of the last best chance the movies had.

"Contemplation is not the willed stillness of the mystics but a willing surrender to never-returning moments. When we turn away from our all-too-human yearnings we turn back to mortal things. Not moral hopes or mystical dreams but groundless facts are the true objects of contemplation."
- John Gray, Straw Dogs

Life is only unbearable if it is unchangeable. This is the key to Hamlet's insight that life is unbearable.

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

8 1/2

I think for most film geeks the transformation from passive film watching to whatever it is I do now occurs almost instantly. A single movie does it, and for me that movie was Apocalypse Now. I rented it because I had decided to see every movie I could about Vietnam, and the final act moved me so strongly, in a way I had never been moved before, that I was forever hooked on that experience. It was like encountering something deeper than my own life, something grander than my own experience.

So that's how it began with me and the movies. Like an addict, I would search out the "Apocalypse Now" experience, and I found it with an astonishing amount of regularity in the beginning. Pretty soon the classics section at Blockbuster grew thin, and with much trepidation I decided to start watching foreign films. 8 1/2 was the first one I rented, on a terrible VHS copy that managed to make such an astonishingly detailed film seem like a Monet painting.

I'm not sure why I chose it, but surely it had something to do with the cover; plain black with the title in white and the word "Fellini." It's an immensely confusing movie on first viewing. Fellini makes almost no effort to accomodate the audience, but the justly famous first scene represents, for me at least, the very height of artistic filmmaking. It communicates conflicts and emotions through purely cinematic means, and warns us that the movie we are about to see will respect no artificial boundaries such as "realism" or even "plot" and "intelligibility."

Despite it's reputation as a highly personal and artistic film (in fact a revolution in style at the time), 8 1/2 isn't difficult to understand once you get past that first disorienting viewing. If you can give yourself up to the moment (the best you can do when watching movies) it becomes richer than almost any other film I can think of. And giving in to the moment, I think, is Fellini's major point with 8 1/2.

It's a movie about making a movie that happens to be the movie we are watching. We have a director who seems to be making an autobiographical film, but can't seem to find the connecting thread. We see his parents, his first sexual awakening, his catholic upbringing, and an astonishing and incredibly beautiful evocation of the magic of childhood. These episodes and others are intercut with the director at present, exhausted and depressed, failing to make sense out of his memories. His mistress arrives, and soon after, his wife. As his life seems to get more and more confusing, he seems to sink deeper and deeper into his fantasies and memories, always failing to make sense.

Claudia is his dream girl, a beautiful actress with a part in his movie. She represents salvation, as we are told. Late in the film he asks her "Could you devote yourself to one thing, and one thing only?" As if to say, "What's the truth? What am I supposed to do? Why can't I find that one thing that will give meaning to my life?" She tells him he doesn't know how to love. She is just a girl.

He ponders suicide, and the memory of his mother scolds him for running away. We hear a gun shot, and it's unclear whether this is fantasy or not, but in any case this leads us into a scene of such transcendence it might just as well be taking place in heaven.

A philosopher who seems to hang around in the film begins a long speech. The best we can learn, he concludes, is silence.

The director sits dejected in his car, the film abandoned, over (making the suicide both a figurative and literal leap into nihilism). But they're all there, all the people in his life. His parents, his lovers, his long suffering wife. He feels so full, he says. Not empty anymore, but full. The transition is important, because in abandoning the One he finds the Many, and finally learns to love in a way.

Fellini represents this moment with a parade. All the people in his life, who we have met and come to know like old friends in the course of the film, come back and join hands and dance around the circus ring until the lights go out. A small boy, our protagonist in younger days, is left alone in the spotlight, and marches out into the darkness alone.

Partly, perhaps mostly, a justification for Fellini's flamboyant personal lifestlye, 8 1/2 is also a bittersweet embrace of all the pain, confusion, and joy there is in life. Maybe learning to love as Fellini sees it leads us back to Nietzsche. To love one thing in this life is to love everything.

Sasha Frere-Jones on Justin Timberlake

Now, since I owned and celebrated Justified what seems like almost a year ago (and hindsight tells me it was my favorite record of last year, just barely ahead of Lambchop and Neko Case), I am tempted to say this article's argument is a bit late. Nevertheless, since it does such a nice job of laying out that particular argument, and since it uses the exact same record that helped me to come to the same (shamefully obvious) conclusions, I figured it was worth a link. I still think the album as a whole is underrated though! Where's the side two love?

Irreversible

Always moving up. Since the story moves backwards, the straightforward revenge plot of the chronological narrative is transformed into something entirely different; quite simply it lifts us up back to innocence. This movie is the Fall in reverse.

It begins in a night club (though far more seedy than that!) where a brutal murder takes place right before our eyes. And, as it does at the end of every scene, the camera looks up, taking us back up a level. Eventually we witness the rape, which takes place below ground, and the camera seems to wistfully look up as she enters the tunnel to travel below the street. The reverse narrative creates a sense of horriblie futility, the suspense isn't in what will happen, just when. The corruption is preordained; it has already happened.

The final scenes go for broke and risk absurdity to create poetry by taking us back and up into purity. Much like in other films I have written about here, it is a sheer act of will on the part of the artist. But I think the title tells us he knows what it's good for. Here's to a film that's a great big sigh. Here's to a great unknown imagined beauty.

Who is responsible for Christ's death?

Of the five discrepant biblical accounts of Jesus' trial, composed decades after his execution by men absent from his trial, none are very helpful, nor are the disciples very trustworthy sources. We know that early Christians put great emphasis on staying on the Romans' good side lest they lose potential converts or, worse, be massacred or driven out of Rome and Jerusalem like their Jewish brethren. It is not surprising then that early Christians would blame "The Jews" (who were even then the universal scapegoats) for Jesus' death, and that Matthew would make sure that 2,000 years hence "The Jews" would still be on the hook, by attributing to the Jewish multitude the fantastic quote: "His blood be on us and on our children." A peculiar thing for a Jewish mob to shout, it must be said. The Gospel writers are exceedingly clumsy in dealing with the trial of Jesus. Again and again the Roman prefect Pilate comes off not as the iron-fisted autocrat we know from history but as a lame, ineffectual pamby who is prevented from setting Jesus free by the bloodthirsty Jewish mob. The scene stretches credulity. Likewise, many scholars dispute the accuracy of the Jews' claim that Roman law forbids them to execute Jesus. In fact, the Jews of Jerusalem executed each other all the time. They stoned Jesus' brother James, and only a year or two after Jesus' death they stoned Stephen, the traditional first Christian martyr. A well-known sign (in Greek) in the Jerusalem temple promised death to any non-Jew who invaded the inner sanctum.

Is it just me or is Seinfeld getting better with age? I used to think that the later seasons were getting progressively weaker. But watching them now, 5 years after the show ended, they seem perfect. I hope it is never released on dvd, since the show belongs in that wonderful slot right after the news forever.

It's almost staggering to see the number of gags and plot elements in every episode. Tonight's two episodes contained reverse peepholes, close talker, being assigned chores at a party, fur coats for men, purses for men, fight between Jerry's parents and George's, the "Executive" raincoats, George pretending to go to France, Elaine's boyfriend's inexplicable friendship with Jerry's parents, Jerry's father's ridiculous statements about Monet, Jerry refering to dancing as "stupid", George failing to deliver an "apartment warming" gift (tied in with his digust about too many gift giving occasions), too fat wallets (tied into back pain tied into the chair George doesn't deliver).

Astonishing, and that's nowhere near all of it.

"It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life. But what else is there to say?"
- E.M. Cioran

Solaris (2002)

On the commentary track on the dvd the director Steven Soderbergh talks about what he calls "pure cinema." I get what he means, but it's more difficult to explain than it would seem. It's not simply image driven narrative, nor is it a movie where people don't talk as much. The best term I can come up with is "visual poetry." I consider it a form of rythmic moviemaking, where tone, time, and space search for some sort of harmony. It's a cumulative effect, more than the sum of its parts.

This is considerably different from, say, Tarkovsky (who made the original Solaris, who attempted to hold shots as long as possible in a search for eternity in a transient art form). This is post-MTV cinema.

This style, also seen in In the Mood for Love, Beau Travail, and Molhalland Drive, is particulary suited to a story like Solaris, where characters are caught in their own emotional traps, outside space and time. It's appropriate then that when Clooney rejects the clone of his dead lover, it happens before he rejects her in the past, in real life. The mistakes he makes are curiously predestined, a type of orginal sin, if you will.

The final moments, then, make perfect sense for a movie so completely confined to the psyches of its characters. What is imagination for, if not for dreams of redemption? What then are the movies for?

Wow

If I was an evil warlock that is what my house would look like. I find it disconcerting that this type of architecture is, according to the article, on the way out. Either way, it's always nice to see peope respecting public spaces for something more than utility.

UPDATE: oh my god I just noticed the spider!!

Charles Taylor on Houellebecq's new book Platform. It's worth reading whether or not you care about or plan to read the novel. Here's a few excerpts:

There's no denying that part of the excitement of "Platform" is the force with which Houellebecq says the unsayable, his determination to cut through moral equivocation and, in Kael's words, to not deny the evidence of his own senses. It's no surprise that a writer who spends so much time equating what it means to be human with the ability to feel pleasure would be repulsed by the asceticism of Islam, would see the religion's prohibitions as life denying, would see its misogyny as particularly noxious. Far from feeling defensive about his position, Houellebecq aims here to put those who don't share his loathing on the defensive. Is he extreme? Unquestionably. But it's sometimes just this impolite extremity that can shake up complacent notions. And the challenge he is putting out is one that calls for an answer -- namely, what is it that keeps liberals from condemning a culture that embodies everything they rightly hate? The persecution of women and gays, the refusal to recognize a separation between church and state, state (and thus theocratically) controlled press, the impossibility of scientific inquiry.

"Platform" was written before Sept. 11, before the murder of tourists in Bali, before the attack last October on the Moscow theater, before the kidnapping of Western tourists in Algeria. Because it includes an attack on Western sex tourists by Islamic terrorists, "Platform" has been called prophetic. That is to deny the power and clarity of Houellebecq's vision, to indulge in what Berman has identified as the Eurocentrism that, following the fall of Communism, led the West to conclude that all those exotic, funny countries posed no threat to us. It's ironic that a writer who has been accused of racism has written a novel in which, though his narrator proclaims he has no knowledge of the modern world, the fates of the West and East are inextricably linked. If there's anything prophetic in "Platform," it's the section that must have seemed satirical to Houellebecq when he wrote it: editorials in French newspapers condemning the attack but saying that the Westerners had it coming. "Faced," one of Houellebecq's fictional editorialists writes, "with the hundreds of thousands of women who have been sullied, humiliated, and reduced to slavery throughout the world -- it is regrettable to have to say this -- what do the deaths of a few of the well-heeled matter?" You can hear echoes of that in Noam Chomsky's lie that as many people were killed in the American bombing raid in Sudan as in the Sept. 11 attacks, or in Michael Moore's contention that this is what happens when Americans want their Nikes.

My top ten movies as of right now (as in this instant!):

1. 8 1/2
2. Vertigo
3. The Lady Eve
4. The Shop Around the Corner
5. Umberto D
6. The Thin Red Line
7. Stalker
8. 2001
9. Hiroshima, Mon Amour
10. Throne of Blood

I tried to do that with as little thinking as possible, and I'm pleased with the number of comedies (2) that managed to show up. I'm not sure why I decided 8 1/2 was MY movie now, after thinking it was Vertigo for several years now. Maybe because I'm older I feel the need for ways of coping instead of exquisite tragedy (see also in this category Umberto D).

The object of this exercise is of course highly personal: to see what movies "stick" and what are simply passing moments. A total of four of these movies I have seen recently: Shop, Umberto, Hiroshima, and Throne of Blood. The rest seem to be fairly stable reference points for me and the movies, films that stand as singular experiences and points of comparison.

Hmm:

After considering quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre, Agatha Christie and Bob Dylan, among others, the team concluded that the most popular reason for existing was to enjoy life. At least 17% of famous thinkers supported the theory, including Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the US, and the singer Janis Joplin, who after advising "get it while you can", died of a heroin overdose in 1970.

Published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology this week, the research found the second most popular meaning of life was to "love, help or serve others" - supported by Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein and Jean Jacques Rousseau. But 13% of thinkers, including Napoleon and the physicist Stephen Hawking, concluded that life was "a mystery". A further 11%, including Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Conrad, decided it was "meaningless".

Even the great ones can't give a decent answer to this question. Freud, Kafka, and Conrad excepted, but we knew that already. This little survey also confirms my distate for everything Einstein said that didn't have to do with science.

"Error is the most expensive luxury that man can permit himself; and if the error happens to be a physiological error, then it is perilous to life. What, consequently, has man hitherto paid for most dearly? For his "truths": for they have all been errors in physiologicis--."
- Nietzsche, The Will to Power

From an Amazon.com customer review:

"When you abandon all need for aesthetics and meaning and just let yourself have some fun, Sylvie Vartan actually becomes a real treat."

The Cremaster Cycle by Matthew Barney

Cremaster 1

Seeing one is just a frustrating curiosity. Seeing two deepens the mystery. By the third, if you're anything like me, you are hooked, and the entire series becomes one long mesmerizing dream, with the compelling and uneasy logic that entails. At times grotesque, silly, stupid, and profound, all in all it manages to be deeply moving for me by the end. It's all deeply flawed I think (too much simplistic and uninteresting cross-cutting, sometimes insipid symbolism); but the flaws actually make it easier to get a foot in the door, so to speak, and to crack the easy codes first. Perfect art would be impenetrable, and therefore inhuman. (Barney's comment on a vaseline sculpture: "It failed even more than I thought it would.")

This series of art films started in 1994 with Cremaster 4 and then continued out of order with 1, 5, 2, and finally 3 this year. This actually makes sense, since, in the overall scheme, part 3 represents the height of will, or creation, and is therefore the logical stopping point for such a large undertaking. The numerical end, part 5, represents either transcendence or failed transcendence, something that occurs in 2 as well, which in both cases is represented by willful death (Gary Gilmore or his ancestor Houdini). Part 4 is the appropriate starting point, since it represents striving but not yet attained perfection. The calamity of hubris represented in part 3 concludes the series, and perhaps makes for a sardonic self commentary on the whole series, if not art itself.

I hope to do individual posts for each film, but for now I just wanted to post two of my favorite images from the films. 2 and 5 were my favorites, but I couldn't find my favorite image from 5, an overhead shot of pearls floating in water.

Cremaster 2

I hate to do another Stereolab post but I discovered a rather lovely song from them called "The Black Arts." Normally, Stereolab specialize in quasi-marxist propaganda, which has exactly the same affect on me as their ever-present "ba ba ba's" and "la la la's"--that is, I accept that they are an important part of their aesthetic, but I tend to ignore the actual meaning of the words. On "The Black Arts," Laetitia Sadier sings with rare emotion the following lyrics:

I need somebody, I feel so lonely,
Somebody to share, my scarcity
All cut from the world, unrelated
This time I need somebody, to be family

Coming from this band, always so cold and emotionless, these words have a compelling power. Perhaps its no surprise that by the end of the song Laetitia is overwhelmed by the pulsating rhythms of the song and it's Stereolab back to normal. It's a powerful and painfully transient expression of vulnerability.

I know you doubt it in your dark lonely moments. But how can one doubt for one instant that this isn't proof once and for all that we live in the best of all possible worlds? Random, inexplicable ailments are the spice of life as far as I'm concerned.

Stereolab - Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage In the Milky Night

Growing up along with a band must strongly affect how one enjoys the music. Waiting for each new album, feeling the excitement and inevitable dissapointment of new music from old friends, maybe even feeling surprise when musicians you thought you knew still manage to do something you didn't think they could. I think these relationships are important and complex, and unfortunately I have only a few of them. And many of those relationships ended badly. Maybe one day I can reevaluate the music I loved when I was younger and my tastes were different.

Coming to a band after it's all over produces something totally different. Each sucessive album isn't percieved as a move in this or that direction. Instead it's taken as part of a homogenous whole. Progress, growth, evolution - the hallmarks of any relationship - are removed and replaced by a monolith: the "collected works" syndrome I suppose.

This is Stereolab's worst album. So says almost every source I can find. I think it's beautiful, and it's by far my favorite album by them. This album, coming when it did, after Dots and Loops, another obscure and difficult album of jazzy lounge pop, must have seemed like a slap in the face. Or just laziness perhaps. Stereolab up to their old tricks, spinning their wheels in the mud.

I'm lucky to have missed all that. I can love the album free of expectation, free of investment of heart and mind in music I haven't heard yet. I can take it for what it is; and see its (very) subtle beauty. This makes up a little for the feeling I have that I am a musical archeologist, finding the remains of dead things and breathing life into them after the fact.

Question: Can music be both funny and good?

Cremaster 3 by Matthew Barney

I can't really talk about this movie since I barely understood any of it. But thinking about it, and about my reactions and the reactions of the other people in the audience at a screening yesterday, has brought up a few interesting issues.

I suppose it's almost a biologically determined drive that causes us to make meaning out of the chaos of our perceptions. In some complex and tortuous way it probable helps us to reproduce. Sanity (a prerequisite for membership to any group) can be defined as a sufficient overlap in the meanings that individuals make of their surroundings. (I could be more rigorous and claim that it's only shared action that defines groups, but that is too obvious a point to labor over here. In any case, we can't know for sure that shared thoughts produce identical actions but we will take that on faith for now. It's a far greater crime to act crazy than think crazy.)

Imagine we find some people in front of an strange and provocative work of art devoid of all context (that is, any apparatus for determining its "meaning"). A painting perhaps, like this one:

I can imagine several reactions. Perhaps someone with an art degree will place it in a historical context, the history of abstract painting. "It looks like so-and-so's paintings." Some meaning is thereby generated, but it's clearly fraudulent in a sense, something created by the viewer through his or her personal history and knowledge. There can be no way to connect the work to the meaning that viewer creates outside that viewer's mind except through duplication of said viewer's experiences. Simply put, we can't understand the painting the way he does without his knowledge.

But suppose another viewer takes one look and proclaims the painting to be meaningless trash, and simply walks away and never considers the painting again. "Ah," might say the art degree holder, "it's simply meaningless to you. If you knew about such-and-such it would make much more sense to you." So suppose he listens to the other man, and comes to some terms with the painting by learning about abstract art.

Fair enough, and it's probably true. But what's the point of this exercise? It's something we do on a fairly regular basis I think, and art simply makes the process explicit and hyper-conscious.

Those who like to connect everything to the political might suggest that doing these things helps us to reframe our perceptions of the world, make us self-conscious about the meanings we make. I think this is probably true as well, but it reduces the enjoyment of art to a civic duty, a petty liberal mind-opener. What a bore.

I don't mean to suggest that the above isn't a valid position, but I do want to deny it as the primary function of art.

Why can't we see our tendency to make meaning from chaos as the pointless exercise it is? Why must we make connections and causal inferences in art when it is clearly superfluous to survival? "But what's the point of that painting?" The question offends me. Of course it's pointless. What's the point of making up points when they aren't needed?

Sitting in front of a painting like this, and watching the people gather round and hearing the cogs in their heads turn and turn, making meaning from nothing, like God on the first day of creation, would make clear to one how foolish and sad we are sometimes. How predictable. How silly.

Could we just look at it? Can it just be? Without meaning.

"You know you can get tired of anything. You can even get tired of being afraid."
-Miles Davis

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

A rare horror classic that still holds up, and stil manages to be scary. One shot in particular makes the film a masterpiece, as it encapsulates everything that is great about the movie into one image. As the doctor looks out of his window he sees a perfectly normal looking town, but he knows that it is false, evil. Simply through context (and absolutely no manipulation of the image itself) the film is able to make the familiar and comforting into something alien and disturbing; something that has the form of virtue but not the substance.

Rock 101

A wonderful article about an academic music conference. Nicely straddles the line between "this is bullshit" and "what can we learn from this?" Plus, it includes a fine appreciation of Justin Timberlake's "Cry Me a River" towards the end.

Night and Fog

You can't tell from that picture, but that's Auschwitz as it stood in 1955, when Alain Resnais made Night and Fog, a short documentary about the Holocaust. Resnais' film is perhaps the most powerful document of that catastrophe I have ever seen, mainly because it declines to provoke our emotions too much. Resnais lets the facts speak for themselves. The film almost plays like a tour of the camps, with tracking shots slowly passing by bunks, toilets, or ovens, all with the same semi-detached air about itself. We learn how long it took to build a camp, how far the train journey was to get there, how many officers were present. We learn that there were jails(!) with cells that allowed neither standing up-right nor lying down. We learn that going to the toilet was a life and death experience; to pass blood meant it was over for you. We learn that German soldiers kept prisoners as sex slaves. We find that each camp was like a self sustaing city, with all the business and day to day life that entails. We find out that the wives of officers were bored, and that they wished the war would end soon. We see what's left of the camps. We look and fail to understand. We see German officers denying responsibility. "I was not responsible," say the men. "Then who is responsible?" replies the narrator. Taking his cues from Adorno ("there can be no poetry after Auschwitz"), Resnais declines any metaphysical comfort. He leaves us with only inexplicable facts.

The lyrics to ABBA's "Knowing Me, Knowing You":

No more carefree laughter
Silence ever after
Walking through an empty house, tears in my eyes
Here is where the story ends, this is goodbye

Knowing me, knowing you (ah-haa)
There is nothing we can do
Knowing me, knowing you (ah-haa)
We just have to face it, this time we're through
(This time we're through, this time we're through
This time we're through, we're really through)
Breaking up is never easy, I know but I have to go
(I have to go this time
I have to go, this time I know)
Knowing me, knowing you
It's the best I can do

Mem'ries (mem'ries), good days (good days), bad days (bad days)
They'll be (they'll be), with me (with me) always (always)
In these old familiar rooms children would play
Now there's only emptiness, nothing to say

Knowing me, knowing you (ah-haa)
There is nothing we can do
Knowing me, knowing you (ah-haa)
We just have to face it, this time we're through
(This time we're through, this time we're through
This time we're through, we're really through)
Breaking up is never easy, I know but I have to go
(I have to go this time
I have to go, this time I know)
Knowing me, knowing you
It's the best I can do

Odd material for a pop song. Not just the subject of breaking up (since the song explicitly alludes to the most famous break up song of all), but the resignation in the lyrics, a sort of giving up on happiness. What I like best is the echo in the refrain, where a male voice repeats the chorus behind the female lead, as if he is realizing the same thing as her at the same time. Rarely does pop music tackle such subjects with so much maturity and wisdom, and, ultimately, with as much complexity as life.

Still more proof that we live in the best of all possible worlds.

Miles Davis - On The Corner

It starts right in the middle of something, attacking the listener with what seems like chaos. I know nothing about jazz, but this album, recorded in 1972, seems almost like contemporary music to me. I don't think the advances it represents have been completely exhausted yet, and if they have I haven't heard them. Besides being the great grandfather of Jungle and Trance, what impresses me most about this music is the lack of empty spaces. One thing I always associated with Davis prior to hearing this was the pauses and silences in his music. Everything is filled up here, there are no more cracks in the tableaux.

At the ages of 13 and 20 Marcel Proust answered the same series of questions. You can find the questions and the answers he gave here.

The Hulk

A few disjointed thoughts:

The Hulk's appeal lies in our own impotent rage. While we may pound our fists against immovable objects, he can tear through them. The thrill in watching him is the vicarious feeling of power, of a total surrender to it.

Jennifer Connelly needs to gain about 20 pounds. What has she done to herself? How do you go from this to this?

I'm gonna stay away from the sexual subtext in this movie. But I want you to know that it's there. (See "impotence" vs. "potency" - so THATS why she dumped him.)

Yes, it's slow. Maybe even too slow. But those expecting a regular "comic book movie" have never probably thought through the needs of a project like this. Spider-Man could be funny and sweet because it's about adolescence. Batman could be weird and gothic because that is what it represents. And so on. The Hulk, on the other hand, deals with profoundly adult issues. To treat these themes with anything less that the utmost seriousness would be to fatally misunderstand the subject matter. I like even more that the film doesn't go for an easy reconciliation, and it shows true courage in making the father the ultimate villian, rather than the misunderstood misfit.

Some beautiful transitions, and some great editing as well. I need to see it again to gauges whether the comic book style multi-angle approach works for the story or is simply a pretention. It's neat though, and not something I've seen in this type of film before. Lee manages to achieve some genuine visual poetry in the desert and especially the space scene.

The action is far more successful than I expected. It's genuinely exhilirating at times, and it shows great imagination. I just wish there was more of it. Interesting that the film goes to great pains to show the price of these outbursts. The fight with the dogs has a tenacity to it, a kind of horrific violence, that is unsettling.

The father's Nietzchean outburst towards the end shows the allure of what the Hulk represents: the impulse to nihilistic destruction. What the Hulk doesn't do is rebuild, and I almost wish there were greater consequences for Danner in the film, since as it is he somehow manages to kill not a single person on screen. The final scene is nice because it shows that Danner has harnessed this power within all of us, the dark pit of rage and nihilism, to a useful purpose. It's no accident that he is delivering medicine to needy third-worlders, and that the desctruction of some local thugs is immanent. It's a nice way to end the film.

Stuff I've been listening to lately:


Can - Future Days
I love this so much. The slow building percussion of of the first track is mesmerizing and it hardly lets up from there. The 20 minute closer, Bel Air, is some kind of pot smoking sci-fi jam, and it's beautiful.

The Sugarcubes - Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week
Wasn't sure about this but decided to take a chance, and I'm glad I did. The first 30 seconds of Tidal Wave were enough to render the recieved wisdom on this album dead wrong. A spazzy and misunderstood classic, but obviously an acquired taste.

Kraftwerk - Autobahn
Very good, if not the revelation it's promised to be. But then how could an album from 1974 be a revelation? I suppose it's supposed to conjur up images of driving, but I just feel as if I'm in an Atari video game, and that's better anyway.

Boredoms - Rebore Vol. 0
A remix of tracks from Vision Creation Newsun that often manages to be the equal of that album. Whatever vestiges of rock/pop structures that remained in VCN (and there were very few) are now completely gone.

The War Zone

I had a visceral reaction to this film. My stomach hurts after watching it. Interesting that the film doesn't ask any questions. Why does this happen? How could it be prevented? These are not really questions that can be answered. Instead the film merely presents its story, like a punch in the gut.

I make it sound quite extreme, but with a few notable exceptions, it shys away from showing too much. Most of the violence occurs off screen, the horror is always out of sight, creeping up behind the characters. The story most obviously belongs to Tom, who quite literally flys with innocence at the beginning of the film, but by the end is as devastated as anyone, as hollow as his sister was when it began. At what cost do we keep up the lies that sustain us? For how long can we look away?

Will Ferrel's Harvard Commencement Speech is one of the funniest things I have ever read.

The first sentence of Leszek Kolakowski's Metaphysical Horror:

A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.

I agree with that statement, and sometimes I think the above sentiment is perhaps the wizard behind the curtain of modern philosophy, or even perhaps its dominant motivation.

Woman in the Dunes

Film as texture. Three elements: Sand, skin, and water. The long, lingering shots of their bodies, moist with perspiration, beaded with sand, are some of the most extraordinary things I have seen in a film. Rarely in a movie do you get such a sense of the tangible, which made this sand-phobic person squirm. The plot is interesting but too complicated to explain here. In any case the movie is best described as a contest between sand and water, with skin caught in between. Borrowing from Sisyphus, a new element is born at the conclusion: spirit.

Those old foundations keep crumbling:

according to the latest estimates, we share 98.8 per cent of our DNA with the chimpanzees. What distinguishes us from our closest living relative is due to a 1.2 per cent genetic distance.

Question: is radical subjectivity simply another form of (attempted) objectivity?

Bjork - Royal Opera House DVD

Probably the best possible version of a concert based around Vespertine, an album almost claustrophobic in its intimacy. Bjork has always been a somewhat erratic live performer (ranging from "good" to "amazing"), but, predictably, she seems to be becoming a bit more of a professional with age. Her solution to the obvious difficulty of staging something like Vespertine live in a venue as large as the Royal Opera House is to simply punch it up a bit. Consequently, some of what makes the album so special is lost (though some of the discomfort that often coincides with the album is also gone). But that doesn't mean it isn't made up for in other areas.

Vespertine does have a "big" side, but it's slightly tongue in cheek, a reflection of and counterpoint to the tiny revelations contained in the music. This angle is played up in the concert to great affect, making the whole affair rather impressive but not for the cynical. The harpist Zeena Parkis is a wonder to behold (I've never seen someone do to a harp what she does) and Matmos is absolutely perplexing, but it's fun to watch them selectively recreate sounds by stepping on ice or clapping or rubbing a microphone on clothing. The Inuit choir gets the job done, but I was hoping she might bring in the giant childrens choir used on the album. I mean, if you are gonna go over the top, you might as well go all the way, right? I'm still waiting for an updated version of "Birthday," however...

The always great Charles Taylor on female oriented erotica. The subject is a book of erotic photographs of women, shot by women photographers. This is actually a very interesting idea, and, if Taylor is right in his observations, then the failures of the project are quite meaningful. As Taylor writes,

Were the photos in "Women by Women" presented without crediting the photographers, it would be hard to tell whether they were shot by a man or a woman. Still, the photos here feel different. It's not a case of their being "softer." That's only a politically correct use of the canard that when it comes to sex women are interested in the gauzy and prettified. Some of the work here, like Marie Accomiato's soft-focus sepia print of a pregnant woman, do fall into that category. Maybe the best we can come up with is to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography: I don't know what female erotica is, but I know it when I see it. But, like those Goedde photos of Aria Giovanni, the photos in "Women by Women" seem more interested in the totality of the model, in a low-flame sort of a turn-on rather than an immediate one.

Do women "see" each other differently than men do? It would be interesting to see photos of men taken by straight women and compare to them to traditional pornography (that is, pictures of women taken by men).

If, as Taylor suggests, it is impossible to tell the difference (and looking at the gallery, I certainly can't), then is it all a matter of context? In other words, just because I know the photograph isn't meant to be exploitative, then does it cease to be so? And why deny heterosexual men the ability to make these claims as well? Obviously, this is highly po-mo territory, but I think the real work here is done by the viewer, in the terms of how they decide to contextualize the image, and the use they put it to.

Nostalghia

I like to say of Tarkovsky that his films are so slow that you go past boredom into something else entirely. I only mean this half jokingly. Tarkovsky himself said that he tried to find "time within time," or, as I read that statement, eternity. Searching for eternity in an art form as temporal as film is setting a near impossible task for a director, but if Tarkovsky fails (which I suppose he does, but then do we ever find eternity in any form?) his films are artifacts of such sustained beauty that it hardly matters. That this beauty, so often presented in takes so long they resemble still photographs or paintings, is ultimately fleeting makes it that much more precious because it represents a heroic striving.

The final scene of Nostalghia depicts a man attempting to carry a lit candle across an empty pool. Twice he fails, and the candle goes out. When he finally reaches the other end of the pool with the flame still alive, he collapses with exhaustion. As in almost every single Tarkovksy film, he leaves us with an image (always an image! He is the consumate filmmaker) of eternity. And like every other Tarkovsky film, it is devastating.

Stanley Fish shows the power of calm and reasonable argument while writing on those who abuse the threat of censorship whenever they get a little heat for what they do or say. This article reminds me of those who, when told to shut up, or that their comments are inappropriate, shout about their first amendment rights. When a Colombia professor publically wished for a "million Mogadishus," and he was (rightfully) attacked, some people rushed to his defense as a matter of the first amendment, when that was never the issue.

Ran

The work of an old man. Kurosawa, in his seventies when he made his version of King Lear, was always a pessimist. One need only witness the curious intensity he brought to his other Shakespeare project (and masterpiece), Throne of Blood, to know that.

Ran isn't quite as successful. It is an epic, color coded, and beautifully scored descent into hell, but Kurosawa seems more intent on pointing out that you can't escape your past than Shakespeare's meditation on the pain of love and family (among many other things of course, but that always seemed the heart of the play to me).

The major difference between the play and the movie (even more than changing the daughters to sons) is the inclusion of a vengeful wife, out to get the family for past transgressions against her. Essentially the movie becomes a revenge tale, draining away the cosmic dimensions of the original. So what is put in its place?

"Man loves sorrow and war," a character says near the end. The most powerful scene in the movie portrays an intense and bloody battle, with the sound turned off, and looming violin strings play on the soundtrack, heightening the curious beauty of the scene. Perhaps this leads to the point of the film, making it a depiction of beautiful horror.

CMT picks the 100 Greatest Country Songs

I didn't realize that "Stand By Your Man" was so highly thought of. I don't particularly care for it (killer chorus of course, but the verse is very weak and boring). I would (in my total ignorance of country music) have chosen something by Patsy Cline surely. She is possibily my favorite female singer ever, so it's a no brainer for me. It's interesting that the top ten are all incredibly poetic for pop songs, many of them dealing with pain and loss in a very mature, un-pop culture like way. The exception, of course, being the Garth Brooks tune "I've Got Friends in Low Places," a stupid but very fun song. And come to think of it, Brooks doesn't really shy away from loss either.

And all of this makes me wonder: is country music the painful antidote to the happy love songs of mainstream pop music? What dark perpectives and truths are buried in this music so often derided as being for "poor white trash?" Maybe it simply reflects the wounded pride and harsh realities of the post-war american south. And if that is so, is the current pop-oriented sound coming out of Nashville evidence of the fact that the South has finally recovered? Or (a darker possibility) is it being ignored in favor of the coporatized sound now popular in Nashville, sold to white middle class suburbanites?

The Boredoms - Vision Creation Newsun

This is the perfect band for anyone disenchanted with music. I can't promise they will do for you what they do for me, but at the very least you will have heard something different, and that's no small thing. Tribal rhythms vie with rock guitars and synthesizers for prominence, and it all gives way to straight out noise at times, but it is never noise intended to annoy as the "conceptual violence" of their earlier records was, but instead the noise of spiritual striving. Always striving, but never quite reaching consummation, making each repeat listen open to new possibilities.

The Village Voice sets the record straight on Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny. See Movie City News for more if you are interested. Also Roger Ebert.

I must say the film seems very interesting! I will probably be willing to see it, though I am more interested in Gallo as an actor than as a director. Ever since Buffalo 66 (where I also first saw the grown up version of Christina Ricci--the movie is essentially driven by the considerable personality of two great actors) I have wanted to see him in more movies, but he has only appeared in small parts and foreign films (and a music video). He has a great presence on screen. The scandal at Cannes makes my ever paranoid mind think he is up to some Lars Von Trier style media-manipulation-as-performance-art, even enlisting the great french director Claire Denis in his little conspiracy! (Check out the part about him being a conservative republican and match that up with the picture below to get an idea of what I mean.)

The General

An art form is generally at its best in infancy. Think the Iliad, Gregorian chant, or the Venus of Willendorf; these are works of art free from metaphor, allegory (the greatest sin in art), and cliche. They exude the sheer joy of creation, even in their tragic dimensions. All art since refers back to these foundations, creating a hall of diminishing reflections.

Silent film is perhaps the last true art we will ever experience (unless video games count). Of course, cliches abound, but they are so old that Jung renamed them the "collective unconscious," thinking we are born with them, and perhaps we are, but I doubt it. A better explanation may be that pure art requires what will eventually become cliche.

The General (and another silent I saw recently, Sunrise) seems to derive from a place deep in my own memory. I felt like I had seen it before, though I knew I had not. The film doesn't really mean anything, and the plot itself is irrelevent. The General, and movies like it, derives its power from somewhere deeper than something as superficial as meaning.

Remember those Coors Light commercials with the stupid song proclaiming what guys love? "Football on tv, etc." It was a dumb commercial, but one part in particular caught my attentions. Near the end, we are presented two nubile young blondes, and are informed that they are twins, obviously implying a three way with sisters. Isn't that a bit, well, incestuous? Finally, Salon notices too. Since Salon has decided to become annoying as hell with ads, here are some parts I liked in the article:

Besides being just plain hot, the aesthetically gifted 26-year-old blondes featured in the campaign are twin sisters. Twin sisters whose four blue eyes seem always to be saying, "Hey boys, anyone up for a three-way?" Sisters in a three-way? Gross.

Diane and Elaine are knockouts, no question, relatively not super skanky, and entrepreneurially spirited. But is their combined T&A factor that much greater than that of two equally hot but unrelated models? And, if so, why?

This part made me laugh out loud:

Greg, a 30-year-old business school student, went dumb when I asked him how he felt about the incestuous connotations in the "Here's to Twins" Coors ads. The look of incredulous annoyance on his face -- it read, "What the hell is your problem?" -- was one I would come to know well. I would also come to know that explaining I have no problem, but am simply wondering why it is that the implicit sexual relationship between twin sisters sits just fine with him, and in fact strikes him as fucking awesome, was not only futile but cruel. I had no idea that asking men to analyze the biological relationship between Diane and Elaine Klimaszewski would be like asking a 7-year-old to analyze the time frame for Santa's worldwide toy delivery schedule.

Ok, this is the conclusion, which is startling because I think she gets it exactly right. Who would have thought to find insight in Salon!

From my research I learned that men find real-life relationships are hard enough. All those post-coital responsibilities -- holding, talking, breakfast, phone calls, talking, commitments, talking, anniversaries and valentines, plus all that talking -- can really stress a guy out. So the less they have to act like decent human beings in their fantasies, the better. Even the most universal of male fantasies -- having two women at once -- turns nightmarish when interrupted by thoughts of emotional obligations. (Does this mean I have to call both of them the next day?) Their fantasies are about what could happen in a world free from the rules of wives and girlfriends (and, obviously, the rules of attraction) and from the reality that two identical women are biological twins. Even if they are really, really hot.

This is why Diane and Elaine are such a bargain. At least for fantasy purposes, men seem to perceive the pair as essentially one woman, with the bonus of two bodies. Two bodies servicing his body. Four boobs for the price of two.

Weekend

The famous shot of the traffic jam: for almost ten minutes, the camera tracks alongside the road, showing all sorts of odd activities, dead bodies, and diversions. While concieved as a political tract, Godard's artistic skill makes the movie much more. The extensive digressions on Marxist philosophy (which, along with many other aspects in the film, acts as an assault on a primarily bourgeois audience) need not be taken seriously to understand the film. Indeed, Godard practically makes it impossible to pay attention to it anyway. Even the characters involved seem distracted.

So how do we, in a post-Marxist era, deal with a work like this? Hilarious, rueful tragedy is presented with a very cold eye, as the entire human race seems to descend into barbarism and incoherence. Every man for himself. They distract themselves with petty sexual amusements and other pointless diversions while conflict and death is all around. Even the tropes of classic cinema have broken down. The road film goes nowhere, and a pointless shootout is taken to tedious lengths. The audience must wonder, "what is the point of this movie?" as indeed the characters themselves do. At the conclusion, when "the End" pops up, and then it is momentarily followed by "of cinema," Godard's plan becomes, well, not clear, but easier to guess at. Much like his masterpiece Contempt, Weekend is perhaps a farewell to Western civilization, and to the movies themselves.

Christopher Hitchens on the new Sidney Blumenthal book. Even if you're not interested, check out the first few paragraphs, which are very interesting in a general sort of way.

Lancelot of the Lake

I am always surprised at how much I enjoy Robert Bresson's films. He is usually lumped in with the grand old masters of slow narrative (Tarkovsky, Mizoguchi, Antonioni), but his visual composition isn't even as flashy as that. His is the point and shoot style of directing, and his actors could just as well be puppets that talk. On the surface, there is really nothing to draw my attention or admiration.

Yet I find every second of his films compelling. This one, probably my least favorite of the few I have seen by him, is an utter masterpiece nonetheless. Never before (with the possible exception of Bergman) have I experience such a foreboding atmosphere of despair in a film. The actions of the characters seem perfunctory as the film grinds them down with their fate in the story, as there is nothing they can do. It takes place at the end of King Arthur's reign (itself a beautiful portrait of despair in all its forms). Lancelot and Guinivere's transgressions have brought ruin on the kingdom, and it is clear that God has abandoned them. Arthur himself is pointedly absent from the film. The final scenes are of an intense and haunting beauty, as the horses ridden into battle against Mordred return, one by one, riderless. The last shot shows Lancelot alone and dying. He carries himself to the pile of bodies not too far away, so that he may die near his brothers of the Round Table.

An amusing article in the WSJ.

In post-modern fashion we should ask ourselves who benefits from peddling theory? What power is being served? Why, it's obviously the professors who peddle it. In my po-mo book, the author argues towards the end that Postmodernism is a seizing of power by academics over the authors they study. The professor (critic) retains power through "deconstructing" the art he encounters, and thereby controlling it. But to what extent is "deconstruction" a construction? And more specifically, to what extent is it a construction designed to justify the existence of an English department?

To sit through a pedagogy class (as I have) is to experience what I call the "eternal justification." The justification of reading literature, that is. The truth is that art no more needs a justification than life does, and I can assure you that no justification exists for life or art in any case. I often think of writing a book someday, and calling it "The Non-uses of Literature."

Chungking Express

I'm usually at a loss to write about romantic comedies, but not because I don't find them worthwhile. This one, in particular, is immensely charming. The director, Wong Kar Wai, is a master of style (see In The Mood For Love for an example) and this film is no exception. While it lacks some of the more ostentatious moves of other films (running the film upside down in Happy Together, for example) it's still beautiful to look at.

When a waitress falls in love with a police officer, and obtains a key to his apartment, she takes it upon herself to redecorate in secret. He takes these changes in stride, simply assuming that his apartment is moving on from his ex-girlfriend, something he has been unable to do. Eventually, she gives him a boarding pass, but the destination has been smudged. He's willing to go wherever it takes him.

What is the use of philosophy?

In the introduction to Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, Edward Craig answers that question with the following:

There is far too much philosophy, composed under far too wide a range of conditions, for there to be a general answer to that question. But it can certainly be said that a great deal of philosophy has been intended as (understanding the words very broadly) a means to salvation.

Nietzsche noted that Hamlet's problem wasn't that he "thinks too much" but that he thinks too well. This would seem to suggest that Hamlet is too smart to strive for salvation, yet this seems an incomplete picture of the play, for why does he suffer so much prior to Act 5? Has he not attained complete nihilism yet? Maybe it's not as black and white as Nietzsche suggests, and Hamlet's problem prior to Act 5 is the classic problem of philosophy. That is, he wants to know if we can think ourselves out of the problem that life poses.

In Straw Dogs, John Gray argues for a view of the world where man is not central, where "man is the measure" of nothing. He denies free will, the self, progress, the consolation of action, morality, and any other illusion we have devised as a species to make life bearable. Nietzsche wrote that life is based on an (Kantian) error, and makes it possible, and Camus asked whether it was possible to live with what he knew and nothing more. Can we live without illusions? Gray writes,

Contemplation is not the willed stillnesss of the mystics but a willing surrender to never-returning moments...Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?

Of course he leaves it as a question, and I get the sense that he knows no more than anyone how to achieve this elusive goal. To embrace the transience of our lives, of the pain and joy, requires a faculty that perhaps we do not have.

The Piano Teacher

Another movie that is tough to figure out. It's not really difficult to understand what it's about, sexual deviance is never really that complicated, but I wonder what our stance is supposed to be towards the main character. Is she a monster? Probably not, and though one might be tempted to find the main fault with the domineering mother, I think perhaps that would be missing the larger point.

"I really loved you," says one character to another. Much of the dialogue is conducted in monologue, with one character sitting in stony silence, non-responsive. And so the question becomes how does one define love when it comes from another, unknowable person? Where is the evidence? In control? Jealousy? Obsessiveness? When we need it so badly, are we willing to mistake the evidence for the real thing? "I'll do what you tell me," she says, and it seems clear that this is enough for her. The tragedy is that the real thing destroys the illusion, and he asks her, during the disturbing climax, "Is this what you imagined?"

Warning: this movie is NOT for the squeamish.

Adaptation

What can you say about a movie that does nothing but talk about itself? After seeing it a second time, I began to notice just how careful it is, how every moment ties into another. What someone says in one scene finds dramatic fulfillment in another. Echoes travel back and forth across the narrative. One character speaks of the poor final act of a movie he admires, and the protagonist is told that a good ending will solve everything. But the ending we are left with is impossible to interpret with the tools the movie gives us. Should we take it seriously (at least emotionally seriously)? Or would that just make us suckers? Is that the joke? I don't think the movie itself contains the answers to these questions, and it is ultimately up to each viewer. This is either a stroke of genius or a complete cop-out, and I think the movie wants us to remain in that uncertain position.

Finally, someone gets the point. These words capture my feelings almost exactly:

As a movie, "The Matrix Reloaded" has some serious flaws: Many sequences drag, the pacing is jangled and there are far too many dreadlocks. But I have no problems with the pretentious, concept-heavy dialogue. Some reviewers imply that this metaphysical kitsch detracts from the fun; for some of us, it is the fun.

After I see it a second time I will try to write a proper review.

More on Postmodernism

Still reading my book, but I have a few thoughts. Butler states that one of the primary beliefs of postmodernists is that "everything is political." This is to say that all forms of discourse (language or otherwise) inherently contain concepts that reflect the dominant power that shapes the discourse. Look, for example, at "scientific" beliefs in the 19th century that knew for an empirical fact that blacks were inferior to whites. This is only the most obvious example.

I have always had a problem with the idea that "everything is political," but not because I believe in some sort of higher rationalism or ultimate truth, but because I think it presupposes some erroneous things about the way we think. If I could amend that concept, I would change it to "everything has political implications."

For example, if I believe that "Asians tend to be shorter than Whites" then a postmodernist would immediately claim that this "truth" (but there are no disinterested "truths" in po-mo) simply reinforces the dominant discourse (whites are better). Fair enough, but I want to argue that this "truth" only becomes political if I act on it. If I simply believe that Asians are shorter, but never do anything as a result of that belief, then how can it be political? Perhaps the flaw in po-mo is that it supposes that language is political when in reality only actions are. But here is the million dollar question: can I believe something without acting on it?

Ok, here is another point of view from Salon:

I've lost all sympathy for the flocks of chicken-robots who will gather around this franchise trying to peck holes in it, complaining about this or that problematic stunt scene or red-herring character. They are the agents of the Matrix; ignore them. Finally I understand that the Matrix movies are striving for a massively contradictory epic about love and hope, a grand and maybe impossible vision of living in a world of technology and escaping it at the same time, of being truly alive in a dead or dying society. They kick major ass, and they show us a future worth fighting for.

Alright, now I want to see the movie.

The Matrix: Reloaded

David Edelstein pans it, but also confirms my suspicions that he is a great critic. He also manages to state what was so compelling about the first one, and why repeat viewings seem to lessen the impact:

The original was, above all, an ontological mystery: How could Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) hang suspended in midair? Why did Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) know what Neo, then Thomas Anderson, was up to every second? Why did Anderson's life feel like a dream? The answers came gradually, mind-bendingly, mind-blowingly: an astute mix of everything trendy in postmodern sci-fi (Philip K. Dick and his paranoid visions of the world-as-simulation) and philosophy (Jean Baudrillard's view of the real obscured by materialism and technology), and everything up-to-the-minute in special effects and action. Most important, once Neo took the red pill, unplugged himself, and entered the virtual dojo, each fight developed his sense of who he was and what, within the Matrix, he was capable of doing; each action scene marked an ontological/metaphysical leap forward.

The suspense is gone once Neo finds his powers. I haven't seen Reloaded yet, but it appears from reviews I have read that it suffers from middle movie syndrome. The Two Towers, for example, is even less of a movie then the first Lord of the Rings, but that story isn't as dependent on special effects and pseudo-philosophy. Unlike The Matrix, it didn't have to surprise us, it just needed to move us (which it did-at least it moved me). It seems clear that Reloaded has failed to do the surprise thing in part 2, but it's still possible that part 3 has something else in store.

About 1/3 of the way through my postmodernism book, and I find it pretty fascinating. I am not having much difficulty with it at all, and I am wondering if the relative simplicity of the central arguments are a factor in the high popularity of this stance among idiots. Nevertheless, I agree so far with my intrepid guide, Christopher Butler, that while it certainly fails as a totalizing philosophy, it offers important correctives for how we sometimes see the world.

Po-mo gets the most flack for its attacks on science. Here, as an example, is Butler's account of a post-modern critique of science textbooks:

For example, there is a much referred to article by the anthropologist Emily Martin on "The Egg and the Sperm", which argues that "the picture of egg and sperm draw in popular as well as scientific accounts of reproductive biology relies on stereotypes central to our cultural definitions of male and female". "The stereotypes imply not only that female biological processes are less worthy than their male counterparts but also that women are less worthy than men". In such literature, it is asserted, we have a "passive", "coy damsel" female egg, versus the "active","macho" male sperm . . . Patriarchal scientists are supposed by their postmodernist critics to have inevitably, given their subjective and politically contaminated presuppositions, got the science of the relationship wrong.

Butler actually goes on to state that the science was indeed wrong, that the egg in effect "grabs" the sperm. But that isn't the point. The real question is whether the science was actually hampered by the political motivations of the scientists. This seems a tough argument to make since the patriarchal scientists changed their mind.

I think, in the end, where po-mo falls apart is specifically in its criticisms of science, as opposed to literature or history. Of course science is often seen through political or social lenses. But science, when done right, should only be the systematic examination of experience. This method suggests that all humans see causation in the same way. But that is obviously not true: If a tribe in Africa (po-mo alert: white superiority) believed that their rain dance caused the rain, who are we to argue?

But I want to argue that science is different because it applies rigorous examination to causation. Correlation is often not enough for scientists, and in any case I doubt correlation exists between the rain dances and actual rain. The tribe simply believes that there is causation. Are scientists any different? Hume would say no (all causation is actually habit and custom), Kant would probably say yes. The question here is obvious: how do we prove that our method (science) of finding causation is superior to the natives' method? I don't think it would be difficult to prove that the scientists would have more success at predicting rain than the natives (though not perfect), and by that standard, it can proven that science is superior to rain dances, though it's important to recognize that this superiority is tenuous at best. Science is better because it works better. Is there a way out of this better than simple pragmatism?

It is also worth noting, by observing the content of the quote up there, that postmodernists are incredibly blind to their own political stances. (Butler routinely notes the irony of their Freudian and Marxist worldview in contrast to their extreme relativism.) Po-mo itself is a political position. I would love for someone to do a postmodern critique of post-modernism!

Buffy The Vampire Slayer - Season 3

Every episode contains essentially two plots: the "real life" plot, dealing with, more often than not, the trials and tribulations of being a teenager in America, and the vampire plot, dealing with, obviously, monsters and demons and such. What makes the show great is not that it simply shows that teenage problems = monsters (though that aspect is undeniably part of what makes it great.) The greatness derives from the show's refusal to simply allow the monster plots to "stand in" or symbolize the "real life" plot. By allowing both aspects of the show to have equal emphasis, and by not ever allowing one to stand in for the other (the best episodes achieve a perfect fusion - to the extent that there is only one plot) both aspects are allowed to feed into one another, which ultimately enriches both (the silly monster plot is given meaning and emotion, while the "real life" plot achieves a kind of sublime mundanity through the fantastical extremes of the situation). In one episode about recrimination (and digging up the past to throw in someone's face) zombies attack Buffy's house, which, in this below average episode, is the only moment where the two plots converge.

Update: This is interesting, to say the least. (pdf file)

I know I have said that Paul Wolfowitz is the man behind the plan with regard to this administration. But who is behind Wolfowitz? Why, it's a lowly philosopher! Leo Strauss.

Is Christopher Logue a genius or a madman?

After Tim first brought my attention to this article, I went out and bought the book. It is really quite amazing. Rewriting the Iliad in this form merely emphasizes the incredible importance of that text as the best pre-Socratic artifact we have. The glimpses it gives into a world devoid of modern malaise suggests the possibility of "no salvation as salvation" that is written about below. Perhaps more importantly, it's a damn good story.

John Gray on Nihilism

In this short chapter, entitled "Homer's Vultures", John Gray manages to say the first new thing I have heard in a while. I am going to reprint it here in full, and hopefully once I finish the entire book, I will do a post on what I think about it.

Nietzsche's Superman sees mankind falling into an abyss in which nothing has meaning. By a supreme act of will, he delivers man from nihilism. Zarathustra succeeds Jesus as the redeemer of the world.

Nihilism is the idea that human life must be redeemed from meaninglessness. Until Christianity came on the scene, there were no nihilists. In The Iliad, Homer sang of the gods provoking men to war so they could enjoy the spectacle of ruin:

...Athene and the lord of the silver bow, Apollo
assuming the likeness of birds, of vultures, settled
aloft the great oak tree of their father, Zeus of the aegis,
taking their ease and watching these men whoe ranks, dense-settled,
shuddering into a bristle of spears, of shields and of helmets.
As when the shudder of the west wind suddenly rising
scatters across the water, and the water darkens beneath it,
so darkening were settled the ranks of Achaians and Trojans
in the plain.

Where is nihilism here? Homer's vultures do not redeem human life. There is nothing in it that needs redemption.

Earlier in the chapter, Gray quotes Cioran:

The certitude that there is no salvation is a form of salvation, in fact it is salvation. Starting from here, one might organise our own life as well as construct a philosophy of history: the insoluble as solution, as the only way out.

These are difficult sentiments to really get your mind around, but I really think they are on to something.

Since I have been twice accused of being a postmodernist in unrelated circumstances, I have took it upon myself to understand what that means. I picked up both Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction and Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction.

I shall soon be able to out-Derrida and out-Foucault anyone, and my dazzling wit will amaze at many a cocktail party.

The real object of this post, however, is to recommend the books in this series for anyone who is interested in learning about philosophy. They are, for the most part, very readable. They assume a certain familiarity with philosophy, history, and literature, but this depends on the subject. The intro to Kant, for example, spends about 5 brain crunching pages on Hume before getting on to the main subject. It would probably be better to just read the Hume first.

The authors (mostly prestigious profs) tend to be good salemen for their subject, but they rarely, if ever, try to hide the problems. The intro to Nietzsche, for example, is as stirring a read as the real thing, and the man who wrote it, Michael Tanner, seems to have a sense of admiration and affection for his subject mixed with an appropriate skepticism. It's a book I would recommend for its own sake, not just as an introduction to a great thinker.

Here is what seems to be a complete list (they are always making new ones). I want the Intro to Chaos!

Thomas Pynchon on 1984

Wow. Maybe I am a little dizzy or something, but I just wrote this roughly five page paper in less than an hour. And I honestly think it is one of the best things I have ever written. It flows a little better than my writing usually does, which, if you simply read this site often, you will see is often stilted and artificial. I never want for ideas, but I often have a hard time writing with a style that isn't tortured. Well here is my paper, unfinished. I like it especially because I got in a few jokes, and the last line is excellent if I may say so. I think part of the reason this came easier for me is that I wasn't writing about any movies I have a strong attachment to, though I like them all. Even though Sandra Dee is so cute in Imitation of Life you want to strangle her!

Know Your Place

The most fundamental characteristic of the “American Eden”—or any Eden for that matter—is that it does not, and cannot, exist. Ontologically, utopia is non-existent (the very meaning of the word—“no place”—tells us this). Since the alternative is unbearable, cultures create the fiction of utopia, an illusion that sustains the viability and survival of civilization. In the American case, utopia is always a work in progress, and this common ideal is a fundamental characteristic of the nation. All civilizations identify the impediments to utopia as the Other (therefore death is the ultimate Other), and living in harmony with this Other is not sustainable, because it entails the death of the idea of utopia, an intolerable condition. Conflict with the Other, then, serves the extremely important purpose of deferring paradise to the future, and paradoxically providing hope.

The Other can be defined any number of ways, but in America the primary conflict, the great “original sin” of this country, is race. To some extent anyone non-white is an Other, but in The Searchers and Imitation of Life, different approaches, different ways of creating the illusion of utopia, are presented for both the role of, respectively, Indians and Blacks in the American paradise.

The Searchers is at the same time a critique of the American utopian ideal and a powerful representation of that ideal. The film encapsulates nothing less than the fall and subsequent restoration of paradise in the American west. Like all Westerns, The Searchers represents utopia through the domestic. The Edward’s homestead, out in the middle of nowhere, is like a tiny garden of Eden. When Ethan arrives he brings death with him, in the form of his own dark and conflicted past. He immediately produces conflict with Marty, who is 1/8 Indian. Even though the home is later destroyed by Indians (who are not seen), the true destruction of Eden begins with the arrival of Ethan, and it is no surprise that only he and Marty, he and the Other, survive, with the one other exception, Debbie, a captive of Indians.

The rest of the film deals with Ethan and Marty’s attempts to bring her back. Eventually Ethan does find her, and the happy ending of the film suggests utopia is restored. Ethan, knowing his place now, expels himself from Eden, because it cannot exist in his presence. Ethan knows intuitively what is the Other, and what is not, and he knows Debbie is the Other, and he knows Marty is too. His self-banishment is a result of his desire to allow the Jorgenson’s to create the illusion of utopia, something not possible for him. In many ways the utopian ending is a fabrication of the supposedly happy ending, and the film’s true subject (as it is really only Ethan’s film) is his own personal banishment from paradise, represented by the illusion of the happy Jorgenson home. In this way, The Searchers goes well beyond its genre to become a work of supreme art about man’s tragic destiny. The film even goes so far as to suggest the final heartbreaking truth that man is his own Other, and that not paradise is possible for him. Ethan knows his place is not in paradise.

Imitation of Life deals with the other great racial strife of this country; that conflict between whites and blacks. Again, it shows that paradise is only possible when the Other knows their place in society. Instead showing paradise as domestic bliss, it becomes fame and money, a more contemporary version. Lora and Annie, at the beginning of the film are both poor single mothers. When Lora begins to achieve fame and success, Annie, who is black, gets to come along for the ride. But Annie is a very gentle soul (the title oddly recalls Imitation of Christ), who knows her place. Almost immediately, even before Lora’s fame, she takes the role of her maid. Over time, and as Lora’s stature increases, the roles become more ingrained, and more permanent. Annie’s unwillingness to assert herself even allows her light skinned daughter a chance to escape from the role assigned to her at birth by her skin color, as she passes for white at school. There are two separate roles for Annie in the film. On the one hand, Lora is able to enter paradise because Annie knows her place, and assumes the role, not of an equal, but a servant. (Consider the happy and contented slaves of the antebellum south in Gone with the Wind.) On the other hand, her very existence as Other holds her daughter back, and dooms her to that same subservient role. When she dies (of heartbreak?), she allows her daughter to escape from her destiny. Much like Ethan, in both cases she has to banish herself from paradise to make the illusion possible for the other characters. She too knows her place is not in paradise.

The Last of the Mohicans, yet again, gives us an Other that knows his place. The end of the film, in particular, presents the idea that the illusion of paradise is only possible when the Other knows their place. The lead couple, Hawkeye and Cora, both white, represents the future of America, and Chingachgook, Hawkeye’s surrogate father, denies himself this future at the end of the film. [check notes for some quotes.] Chingachgook, just like Annie and Ethan, learns to know his place, and that place is as the white man’s inferior. As a member of a “disappearing race,” he must “heroically” accept his tragic fate to make the American paradise possible.

The Stalking Moon shows what happens when the Other does not know his place. Sam Varner takes Sarah, a former hostage of Indians, and her half Indian son to his home in New Mexico. Like an Edenic couple, they plan to start over again and create a domestic paradise. When the boy’s father, Salvaje, shows up to claim him, and therefore to implicitly claim a stake in the future paradise, he must be banished. Sam does not desire to hunt down Salvaje and simply exterminate him; he is content to let him live so long as he lives outside Eden. But when Salvaje arrives and forces the issue by making a claim on paradise, he has to be put in his “place” by Sam. Notably, the principal action of the film shows Sam defending their home from Salvaje playing the role of intruder. His mere presence in the house defiles it, and utopia is out of reach so long as he sticks around to harass them. Once Sam kills him paradise, or the illusion of paradise, is possible. The conflicted identity of the boy will presumably become the next Other which defines the Same.

The Matrix uses science-fiction in order to make more abstract and philosophical statements about the role of the Other. The metaphysical context of the film conveniently side-steps any issues about possible utopias by suggesting that reality is the illusion instead. Utopia, you see, is only as far away as a state of mind. Neo, as the savior who will break all bonds, threatens the existing order and promises salvation. What is the role of the Other in such a scenario? While the Agents of the film, as the prime actors on behalf of the matrix itself, must be completely destroyed, and any and all humans still stuck in the matrix are potential threats and therefore Others that can be disposed of, what place does the Other have besides being dead? In order to “know the place” of the Other in The Matrix, one must see the matrix itself as the Other. That is, one must see reality itself as the Other. The matrix, as the reality of those trapped inside it, is forced to (or is beginning to be forced to in the first episode of this trilogy) know its place as an instrument of the people inside. The Matrix, then, knows that utopia is impossible in reality, yet it imagines that reality is amenable to human will. The place of the Other, the place of reality (defined as that which impedes utopia) is to disappear, and reveals itself to be illusion instead. Like the Others discussed previously, there is no place for reality in paradise.


And here is an extra picture of Sandra Dee being extra cute:

The Other as Image: Vertigo and the Reflection of Desire

“Courage also destroys giddiness at abysses; and where does man not stand at an abyss? Is seeing itself not—seeing abysses?”
-Nietzsche

“Obsessions are the demons of a world without faith.”
-E.M Cioran

In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), the desiring gaze, the gaze that dreams not only of power but also salvation, transforms and reshapes that which it sees. The film shows a kind of seeing that is not seeing. The protagonist suffers not because of what he does not see, but because what he sees is not real, as it is only the reflection of his desires. The Other is literally created, given an identity, through seeing it, while the actual identity of the Other is destroyed. When the protagonist of Vertigo sees a woman, he engages only with her image, and so she exists only as an image. The desiring gaze, in particular, creates the object of the desire, and therefore eliminates the actual object by replacing it with the object that corresponds to its desire. Vertigo is a movie about seeing; and about a certain kind of blindness as well.

James Stewart plays Scottie, a retired detective. He is asked to follow the wife, named Madeleine, of a rich and powerful friend, Gavin, who believes she has been possessed by a dead woman from the past. Gavin claims she becomes like “someone I didn’t know. She even walked a different way.” Scottie decides to take the job, and begins to follow her everywhere she goes. Unknown to Scottie, the whole story is a lie, and Madeleine is being impersonated by Judy (Kim Novak) so that Gavin can murder his wife by faking her suicide.

So Scottie follows Madeleine, always watching but never seen in return, on her errands and wanderings. Hitchcock provides many point of view shots for Scottie, and Madeleine is almost always seen from behind or in profile. There is not one single shot in the film from Madeleine/Judy’s point of view. Aside from being adorned with Hitchcock’s usual objects of fascination (blonde hair and grey suits), Madeleine never speaks. She is a silent, moving image of desire for Scottie. Hitchcock even goes so far as to associate her visually with a woman in a painting, the dead woman she is supposedly possessed by, Carlotta Valdez. In the early portions of the film she exists only as an image.

Interestingly, there is another woman in Scottie’s life: Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes). Scotty rarely looks at Midge when he talks to her, yet she is clearly infatuated with him. When Scottie enters her apartment and asks her questions regarding his case, she complains that he never says anything like “you look wonderful.” In fact, he never comments on her appearance at all. Midge asks Scottie jealously, “Is she pretty?” Scottie’s watching of Madeleine is in marked contrast to his inability to “see” Midge.

When Madeleine attempts suicide by jumping into the ocean, and Scotty saves her, it appears on the surface that she becomes a real person at last, or at least something more than an image. When Scottie emerges with Madeleine from the water, he takes her home, and not to her husband. When she awakes, nude and in Scottie’s bed, she says her first words in the movie, almost fifty minutes in. Nothing she says will matter, however, since Scottie has already constructed her identity for her. And even though he has touched her before (and removed her clothes) the first true contact he has with Madeleine, accidentally touching her hand when reaching for a cup, is a shock to Scottie. For him, the image of his desire has come to life. So begins the romance.

While Scottie finally makes contact with the woman he has been following, she isn’t Madeleine. In fact, Madeleine ceases to exist at this point, both literally and figuratively. When Scottie fishes her out of the sea, and emerges with her in his arms, he has produced the corporeal object that corresponds to his desires. Not coincidentally, it is at this point that Judy begins to truly pretend to be Madeleine, as she acts as if she is falling in love with him. The complexity of the situation deepens, however, as Judy begins to fall in love with Scotty for real.

For the first time viewer of Vertigo, the story up to this point seems much like a fairly conventional (if adulterous) romance/ghost story. The truth, clear at the end of the film, is that Scottie has been tricked, and has fallen for an illusion. As if he is trapped in a movie (as, indeed, he is) Scottie participates in a situation where nothing is real, and no one is who they pretend to be. His love for Madeleine is directed toward a woman who does not really exist, and he is still only in love with an image.

When the trap springs, and “Madeleine” dies, Scottie is distraught to the point of being catatonic. He is a fallen man, tossed out of paradise, and he begins to rebuild his life, but he retains the memory of this imaginary woman who represents a perfect love. In a famous dream sequence Scottie falls through a grave to his death. To add to the religious metaphors, Scottie is accused by a judge of being negligent and responsible for Madeleine’s death. The rest of the film takes place after the fall, and Scottie is saddled with guilt for Madeleine’s death.

Initially, Scottie is easily reminded of Madeleine. He sees glimpses of her everywhere. His gaze is once again reconstructing his desires; he is seeing what he wants to see. A blonde woman in a grey suit excites his imagination, as he thinks for a moment that Madeleine has come back from the dead. After several more false starts, Scottie sees Judy, the woman who pretended to be Madeleine, on a sidewalk. She is clad in garish colors, with dark hair and a misguided hair style. She is, alas, imperfect, and Hitchcock toys with his audience when he provokes us to think that Ms. Novak doesn’t look as she should. (It is a well documented fact that Hitchcock insisted that Novak not wear a bra in these scenes. The numerous mentions of bras and corsets throughout the film, contrasted with Judy’s choice to not wear a bra, make for a subtle feminist commentary in the film.) Scottie is, of course, unaware of her real identity, but he sees Madeleine in Judy, and he pursues her doggedly. When he looks at her, he doesn’t see Judy, he sees Madeleine, and the subsequent transformations he forces her through are actually a dramatization after the fact, as the real transformation already occurred when he looked at her the first time. Judy asks him, “Do I really look like her?” For Scottie, looking like her is enough to be her.

Scottie is still haunted by bad dreams, reenacting again and again Madeleine’s death. Judy, for her part, is also haunted by memories of love. She gazes longingly at her grey suit in the closet, obviously wishing to put it on again. She writes a letter and confesses to the whole charade, but she tears it up and resolves to continue to let Scottie believe Madeleine existed so that he might begin to love her as she really is. She responds to the perfection he sees in her, and she sacrifices her identity for his love, for her own desires. Hitchcock, no feminist, doesn’t see Judy as the victim, and those who claim Vertigo as a feminist text might want to consider that she is the woman as betrayer in the tradition of Eve. She creates the initial lie, and she surrenders to the next one partially in order to bask in the perfection that Scottie sees in her. She too fails to see, if only momentarily.

After a period of rather prosaic and dispirited courting, Scottie begins to transform Judy into Madeleine, or, at least, into the image of Madeleine. Since Madeleine was only an image to begin with, he effectively recreates her. He buys her the grey suit, and dies her hair blonde. Judy initially resists his attempts to remake her. Distraught, she says she knows that she reminds him of Madeleine, but “not even that very much.” Judy, too, has fallen from the ideal romance portrayed at the beginning of the film. Her motivation to change for Scottie is not only in response to his love, but in order to regain the imagined perfection of their initial courtship. She is more conflicted than Scottie perhaps, because some part of her wants to hold on to reality, and she desires for him to love her as she really is. At one point she accuses him of not wanting to touch her. Scottie denies it, but he looks away from her as well. It becomes clear at this point that Scottie cannot accept real love, precisely because it is real, and imperfect. He cannot touch it, or look at it, because he dreams of perfection, and reality only gives rise to despair for him. Finally, she gives in, and says, “If I let you change me…will you love me?” After the makeover, in an astonishing scene, Judy emerges from the bathroom as an exact copy of Madeleine (therefore as Madeleine), bathed in green light. When Scottie kisses her the camera rotates and transports him to the mission where Madeleine died. This is his only and only moment of redemption, and it is an illusion.

Judy’s lie is discovered when she puts on a piece of jewelry identical to the jewelry worn by Carlotta in the painting, and Scottie recognizes it. In highly ironic fashion, Judy is found out only because she goes too far in becoming Madeleine, in becoming the image. Scottie, so willing to accept the lie before, begins to see Madeleine as the image she is when Judy puts on the necklace. In an effort to exorcise the past, Scottie takes Judy to the mission where Madeleine died to reenact her death.

Why Scottie makes Judy do this is perhaps the crucial point of the film. He all but pushes her off the tower himself, something Jimmy Stewart would never be allowed to do, but the meaning is clear: he means to kill her in order to maker her transformation into Madeleine complete. The necklace punctures the illusion, but Scottie persists in following through to the end. She has to die in order to finally be Madeleine, since Judy’s actual existence can only be imperfect, no matter how exact a counterfeit she is. That she is actually killed by blind chance in the form of a nun, a representative of God, only heightens the tragedy. Scottie’s dreams of perfection necessarily entail despair, because perfection can only exist as the image, and can never exist in reality. When Madeleine threatens to become real she must be destroyed. If she lives, with Scottie knowing the truth, then the illusion will be destroyed, and Scottie will see. So when Judy is found out he has to kill her in order to make her transformation complete.

The pessimist philosopher Schopenhauer shunned the romantic music of Beethoven. Much like the music of Beethoven, Bernard Herrmann’s beautiful swirling score for Vertigo embodies dramatic romance and obsession. Schopenhauer argued that the Will to life in men, represented by conflict and heartache, leads inevitably to disaster, because it only finds existence in constant war with itself. Man is doomed to conflict because that is his nature. The only cure, he felt, was to retire from the Will, and to engage in what he called a will-less knowing. The best way to do this was through the quiet contemplation of precise and orderly music, such as Bach, or, in some cases, Mozart. Midge tells Scottie, after Madeleine’s death, that “Mozart’s the boy for you.” At the beginning of the film, in Midge’s apartment, Scottie turns off in disgust music that sounds like the epitome of what Schopenhauer described. Scottie is a tragic character because he is driven by forces outside his control, represented by Herrmann’s score. His doom is his inability to subdue his passion. The subject of Vertigo is the very romance of the movies themselves, and of the power of the images they present. The face of a woman on screen is perfect precisely because it offers the audience nothing but the image, and we are free to imagine it as perfect. As André Bazin wrote, “The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world that corresponds to our desires.”

The great tragedy of Vertigo is not that Scottie painfully attempts to recreate perfection, it’s that the perfection itself was always a lie. Scottie’s final lonely moments show a man bereft of all hope. Atop the bell tower, gazing down on Judy’s body, he suggestively turns his palms outward. Besides representing a gesture of final resignation, it also suggests that even to the end Scottie cannot touch the perfection he searches for. One would like to claim that now Scottie can see, but it’s unclear whether this is the case. Perhaps the death of Judy allows his illusions to persist, as they must for him to even go on living. Before the recent restoration, the film was to end immediately after the Universal logo, with Herrmann’s score finally ending with a sinister version of the romantic main theme of the film. The lights in the theater were then to come on, and the audience would then walk out of the theater, as if waking from a dream.