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My wife and I have introduced a thing where each of us takes one night a week out by ourselves while the other watches the kiddo. (We’re late getting to this - it was suggested long ago - but what the hell were we going to do with our nights out in the old place, so the time is right…) On my night, I headed down to see the Rodchenko exhibit, but the damn place was closing (nice opening hours here, god). So I had to come up with something else to do with myself. Good movies were out - they’re reserved for some barely imaginable time when we can see them together. So I saw Cloverfield instead. I feel an obligation to see such things, which my wife definitely does not share, and so… 

(Parenthetically: $26 to see a fucking movie? Are you out of your minds? I saw the damn thing in the worst and likeliest of all possible places I guess, but back in the states there’s a constitutional right to affordable consumption of crap movies. I think it’s administered by the Dairy Board, whomever it is who gives the free milk and bread to the starving grad student moms… But I digress…)  

So. Not much to say about Cloverfield. Fun I guess. The genre’s looking very, very tired. But in the very fatigue of the form, I do think we’re seeing something new and interesting afoot. Semi-new anyway. The producers and writers of the thing are all at least my age, but the presumed audience, I guess is a lot younger. Young enough, in fact, to have the same relation to the attacks so heavily quoted in this film as my students are starting to have. For a few years there, we were all in it together. Now, it’s getting a bit strained. Shocking when it dawns on you that your youngest students weren’t even teenagers when the shit when down. In a year or two, when we’re dealing with kids that were seven or so in 2001, it’s going to feel even stranger - for them as much as for us, who somehow can’t stop threading it into our conversations. 

In Cloverfield, I think we see early signs of an anxiety not about terror, but about its absence. It is a movie tailor-made for a demographic that has grown up hearing about 9/11 but which has only vague, mostly false, memories of it. A generation who parents worried about shielding from the tv, even when they were far too young to distinguish the threat of annihilation from the threat of, dunno, the scary shit that lives in your closet. 

(Heard Bush mention the other day the “attack that occurred six-and-a-half years ago.” It’s been a long, long time. Wow…)   

The yupster parties in loft spaces (hahaha) on the Lower East Side (hahahaha) are going to feel something missing, are going to long for the crisping threat that something will happen downtown, that there will be a reason to run up to the roof, that their emotionally desolate choice (just for instance) to leave the girl behind to take a VP position in Japan (? - oh, i see, godzilla. Try Dubai…), the iron continuities in play behind that, will come to a sudden and abrupt end when some rough beast inaugurates another round of trauma sex, epiphanies of “what really mattes,” a war or wars to momentarily back and then, later, pretend that you opposed from the start etc etc etc. 

But unfortunately, this dystopian fantasy is positively utopian in its impossibility. The crows won’t come home to roost, not here, not anymore. The world, dearies, has moved on. The Time Warner Building ain’t the double-barreled omphalous of the world anymore - it’s in the wrong country to matter. No one’s going to expend good fissile material on a nation and an economy doing a great job fizzling out on its own. The catastrophes to come for the kids that were meant to see this film are going to be far less picturesque, and certainly won’t be available for videotaping. 

Anyway, wow. At least I’m blogging again, right?

One other thing, on a related note: saw this little number at the end of the extremely long strand of ads (mostly for cars and other new dystopian movies) that ran before Cloverfields:  Brilliant, and very very strange indeed. And strikingly beautiful! An ad for adlessness, if there ever was one. It may become the totemic youtube of this youtube intensive blog!

And even better, way better, is that the damned thing looks like the opening sequence of an absolutely incredible (and a good deal more horrifying, to many in the wider audience, than Cloverfields, which isn’t very horrifying at all) of a very different sort of speculative fiction, one about a specter lurching back from the place where dismissed specters go in order to decapitate the idols of the era, break open the walls of the buildings in the expensive neighborhoods, and leave most bedazzled and exhilarated at the sweep of violence that has rubbled so many things we thought could never go, that we believed, despite ourselves, that the world simply couldn’t live without.  

We wait for the image, the conjunction, that will blind us or make us at last see, that will reset the operating system and let us move under a power “not our own” but all our own, just differently, newly, once and for all.

But the right image, the effective conjunction, never comes. We have flags and mothers and cheerleaders, we have the soft core and the hard core, the lynchings, the bombings, and the children.

These clips lend us access to a world that has passed. Nothing does the trick anymore; we must find another aesthetic with which to break ourselves into compliance with our baser, animalian, that is to say human, enlightened, imperatives.

This is exactly the sort of thing I was trying to talk about here, especially in the comments.

Frustrated with the rightward drift in Portuguese politics and the scarcity of financing, [Pedro Costa] ventured abroad — to the West African islands of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony — and made “Casa de Lava” (Down to Earth,” 1994). The story of a nurse who accompanies a comatose laborer home to Cape Verde, it changed the course of his career.

The Cape Verdeans he met sent him back to Lisbon with gifts for relatives who had emigrated there. The delivery mission led him to the shantytown of Fontainhas, where many Cape Verdeans had settled. He decided to set a film in the neighborhood, using residents as actors.

The result, “Ossos” (“Bones,” 1997), centered on the newborn infant of two hapless teenagers, is a parable of economic and spiritual desperation as oblique and concentrated as anything by Bresson. Mr. Costa was dissatisfied with the shoot, not least for having invaded a residential neighborhood with the unwieldy machinery of film production.

“We would be shooting late at night and shining lights into people’s houses,” he said. “I realized there’s something wrong with the way movies are made today.”

Mr. Costa set out to address not merely logistical headaches but also the responsibility that comes with picking up a camera. The act of filmmaking is premised on a discrepancy of power. As Mr. Costa put it, “The balance is off between those behind and in front of the camera.” His next film, “In Vanda’s Room” (2000), went a long way toward redressing the inequality.

Encouraged by Vanda Duarte, an actress in “Ossos,” he continued to film in Fontainhas, which was being demolished. This time he did so with a small video camera, often by himself. He grew close to his subjects and shot for almost two years. From 140 hours of footage he shaped a three-hour film.

A series of shadowy domestic tableaus (the camera never moves, and Mr. Costa used only available light), “In Vanda’s Room” is a stark, intimate portrait of a community whose world is literally falling apart. (Bulldozers are continuously heard on the soundtrack.) It feels at times like a documentary but is actually the result of long conversations and multiple takes. Ms. Duarte and her friends, who sit around, talk, prepare heroin fixes, smoke and shoot up, are not documentary subjects so much as actors playing themselves.

Sounds wonderful. Now where am I going to get my hands on the movies?

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Jane Dark has a great post up about the Transformers movie… and far more than the Transformers movie. One thing, though, and a thing that I can’t really go into sufficient depth on right at the moment, as I have neither text nor time. Jane writes:

And yet it is by far the most detailed reconstruction of the iconic violence from the events of September 11, 2001. Indeed, among acts of imagination, this is the one that has been pointedly disallowed: the image not recreated in the increasing wealth of historical recreations. To think that image from a perspective too close to reality would be, as we are all given to understand, somehow pornographic; one way to understand this movie is as a sort of measuring device displaying the necessary distance of fantasy at which the events in question can be screened. Or as a particular registration of the certainty that this one day in history is to be the Rosetta Stone of American cultural imagery for the foreseeable future.

It is worth mentioning that Don DeLillo’s new Falling Man [SPOILER WARNING!] does actually conclude with a ramped-up, tour-de-force type rendition of what went on inside the towers. I’d say more, but I need my book, which isn’t at hand… Exception that proves the rule, I think…

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I haven’t watched much MTV since I was a teenager. Actually, I haven’t watched any MTV, that I can remember, since then. It’s all the death of Kurt Cobain and then things get foggy for me on that front. But I do remember Kurt Loder, the talking head of the MTV news division (?), and the guy who famously broke the story on Cobain’s demise…

So I’ve been out of the loop for a bit. But what in christ’s name is going on with Loder’s review of Sicko, which is new to me, but is apparently generating major blog juice from the look of the google results. Someone over at Daily Kos does a pretty good job on the surface level bullshit in this piece, which feels like the fruits of some major right-wing foundation research help, and whose subtextual message could be more or less summarized as: “Lissen up, kiddo. You vote for Edwards, and the text time you do funnel shots in the backyard of the college Eating Club, you’re going to be waiting in line at the hospital behind some smelly black dude who just got his head clubbed in my the cops. Mommy and Daddy might as well not call, there will be no strings to pull. It’ll just be your unconscious ass rationed right to the back of the line while people who haven’t even gone to college, let alone successfully pledged at Alpha Sigma Sigma, get treated in the order they arrived. And you wanna talk about the boob job that daddy promised you if you make all Bs this semester. Forget about it. It’s A cup for you, cupcake, while the cleft-palate kids take all the surgical aestheticians for their greedy selves.”

Enough of that. One other thing though. Loder takes up the Cuban medical tourism meme that I last engaged with over at Acephalous.

What Moore doesn’t mention is the flourishing Cuban industry of “health
tourism” — a system in which foreigners (including self-admitted multimillionaire film directors and, of course, government bigwigs) who are willing to pay cash for anything from brain-surgery to dental work
can purchase a level of treatment that’s unavailable to the majority of Cubans with no hard currency at their disposal. The Cuban American National Foundation (admittedly a group with no love for the Castro
regime) calls this “medical apartheid.” And in a 2004 article in Canada’s National Post, writer Isabel Vincent quoted a dissident Cuban neurosurgeon, Doctor Hilda Molina, as saying, “Cubans should be treated the same as foreigners. Cubans have less rights in their own country than foreigners who visit here.”

God is this little argumentoid getting wide and fast circulation. Without taking up the reasons why
Cuba might need to sell medical services for hard currency, let’s just remember that 1) the only reason why the US isn’t a bigger player in the medical tourism business is because medical services are so frigging expensive that you’d be crazy to come here rather than other places with cheap, quality medical care and 2) on the upper-end of the medical spectrum, we already do do a bristling business in selling medical resources to foreigners. I’m sure there are statistics, but for brevity’s sake, an anecdote: my mother suffers from, and has suffered for more than 30 years from a certain chronic-progressive, and ultimately fatal disease. (I’d rather not say which, for pseudo reasons… But you can probably fill in the blanks yourselves….) And for the past five or so years, she has been under the care of the guy who is commonly known to be the very best practitioner in the country when it comes to her condition. How did she get in with this guy? A friend of a friend happened to be president of the research hospital where said doctor works, and got her an appointment - no easy task. So, yeah - if your mom suffers from this disease, she’s just basically not getting in to see this guy. (Obviously I don’t begrudge her the care - I just begrudge the system that generates results in this fashion…) And when she goes for her quarterly checkup, the waiting room is largely stocked with non-Americans of one sort or another - petrodollar spending middle-easterners seem to be the best represented demographic. The office, I believe, keeps a block of rooms at a local hotel reserved for their exotic patients. Perhaps this situation would even continue after the arrival of single-payer health care in the US - there are exemptions that allow it to happen in Canada, and maybe they’d build them in here too as a sort of kickback to doctors.

In the end, whether homegrown or imported, it is the wealthy and connected who have exclusive access to the best care in the US… But let’s just not mistake the equation at hand: even in the worst case, the question is between an egalitarian system with a sliver of free-market capitalism at the very top, or a radically inegalitarian system with the same sliver at the top. In other words, our entire system is structured along the lines of the fractional element of the Cuban one that Loder calls out in his piece, that he deploys as evidence of the hypocritical downfall of socialized medicine…

Above all else, it is a bit strange that Loder would write a piece like this. I’ve sifted through his other reviews looking for a similar level of, what to call it, contextual-investment as in this one and I can find nothing like it. Smells like a bit of prefab work to me…

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(xposted to Long Sunday)

It is helpful, if also a bit unnerving, when media culture generates near proofs, direct materializations, of theses that you’ve already been walking around feeling smugly smart about. The thesis that I’m thinking about right now isn’t exactly mine, but it is one that has held my attention for a little while now. And I think I can localize the origin of this line of thought down to a single passage from William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, a passage that clues us in to the significance of the novel’s title.

“Of course,” he says, “we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. … We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.” (Clipped from here).

It is an argument about science fiction that is also an argument about the experience of time at present, or vice versa. And it is in an excellent description of the state of speculative films today. In one of the DVD extras for Children of Men (unfortunately not available on line) the set-designers and stylists discuss the fact that Cuaron wanted everything in the film to look like stuff from today, only older and more weathered, which is exactly what we get. The future as present-less-infrastructural investment. Disaster movies set themselves in a next year that looks a lot like last year, while Al Gore’s apocalyptic infomercial confusedly quivers between easy futural solutions (buy carbon indulgences!) and a deeper, more convincing sense that we are always already fucked.

Newsmagazine features on future stuff has morphed into special issues on What Is About to Happen, and What Are They Doing to Stop It. From this…

to this…

(Survival Guide???? See what I mean…)

What set me to writing this post (the “near proof” mentioned above) was the trailer for a new PKD film-adaptation, reportedly quite terrible: Next.

A PKD symptomatic in with the protagonist can only see into the proximate future - a future that apparently climaxes with the detonation (or do they stop it???) of a nuclear device in an American shipyard. Right. It is tough to think of a premise that comes closer to exactly mimesis of the dominant temporal strategy of the first four years of the Bush administration, which I was only half-gulible enough to half-take serious, as I anxiously sort-of awaited the truck bombing of the synagogue and the two cop cars constantly parked in front of it at the end of my street in Brooklyn.

The progression of PKD films over the past quarter-century is vividly emblematic of the recision of the future; with each iteration, we draw closer to the present, and even drop at times back into the past. First, there’s Blade Runner, with its replicants and super-huge video screens and so forth, even if things are dusty and noirish. Then there’s Total Recall with the robot drivers and Mars Today and tennis sim that Sharon Stone practices with. But A Scanner Darkly is a retro future, set in a Californicated past of stoners and beautiful losers, no matter where (when) it thinks it is. (I know I’m leaving a few out, but bear with me….) And then there’s Here.

When I teach utopian / dystopian fiction from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to my undergraduates, I usually start by taking them on a little mental journey back to a time when the question future was actually up for argument, and then bring them back to the here and now to ask them what, if anything, they can imagine significantly changing during the course of their lives. More and better video games, older and older people, fewer and fewer good jobs. But, of course, no fundamental alteration in the political or culture organization of things - their kids, if they have them, will live in the same sort of world as they do. Maybe someone will cure cancer, perhaps there will be free tv on the internets, but mostly things will rest as they are.

The first time I used this ploy, I actually waited to hear what they thought the future might look like. I have since learned to lecture straight through the socratic counter-point. They don’t answer; they’ve never, it turns out, even considered the question - at least the vocal ones haven’t. It is all entirely new to them…

It is tough, though, to know exactly what to make of this development - the foreshortening of the future from way, way out there to quite soon to almost now down toward in selben Augenblick. On the one hand, of course, it marks a foreclosure of the concept that the world might be radically otherwise, as there will never be any time for it to radically change. On the other hand, the whole scenario calls to mind Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and its resistance to the Social Democratic concept of progress as a “progression through a homogenous, empty time” in favor of a “notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop.”

At any rate, perhaps this sort of issue is exactly the sort of thing that the present day literature department should take up as a task. We English professors love the conjunction of the aesthetic and the political. But something has happened that makes it nearly impossible (save through pseudo-blog) to make this argument publically.

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Need to upgrade that last link (to a trailer for Red Dawn) into its own post.

For some of you, the hallucinatory and insane apropos-ness of this film will be old hat. But if you’re not familiar with it: that there is as quick an introduction to the long and almost entirely hypocritical history of US foreign policy towards national movements of self-determination as you’re going to get. And since we’re all talking about this sort of thing, it also is a crystal clear materialization, for the benefit of the baffled, of our gun laws…

A nice summary of this theme in the movie from wikipedia:

The private ownership of firearms is also presented as part of the film’s anti-Communism. Early in the film, a bumper sticker seen on a truck states a classic gun owner’s creed; “They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.” The shot moves down to a dead hand holding an empty Colt pistol as well as shots of the same pistol being pried from the dead person’s hand by a Soviet paratrooper, presumably from a police officer or armed civilian gunned down earlier during the invasion of Calumet, Colorado. As the protagonists flee the initial invasion of Calumet, they stop at a local sporting goods store owned by one of their fathers. He tells them to gather supplies and gives them several rifles and pistols along with boxes of ammunition. (The father and his wife are later executed because of the guns missing from the store’s inventory.) In a later scene, a Cuban officer orders one of his men to report to the local sporting goods store and obtain the paperwork of local citizens who own firearms. The Cuban officer specifically refers to Form 4473, which is the actual form used to record the sale of a firearm by a dealer to a private citizen in the United States. These scenes speak to the long-standing issues of government gun control.

Whether these principles apply to the citizens of the states the US has invaded is another story, of course. Relatedly, I’m not sure if I’ve ever really noted the uncanniness of all of the those hoisted AK-47s, until now.

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(Xposted to Long Sunday)

I’m sure soldiers, ever since there have been soldiers, have hooted adolescently in the throes of combat. What would we expect, that they’d go about their work gravely, constantly reminding themselves of the seriousness - the mortal seriousness - of the things that they do, the weapons that they discharge? That is undoubtedly too much to expect. The stupid talk and yells undoubtedly represent a release from the psychosis inspiring and inspired actions that they are committing.

It is not new, it is not groundbreaking, to think: “They sound like the subset of students that you see hooting and unawarely spewing stuff they heard in a movie somewhere. They always talk like this, yell like this. They likely feel most themselves when they most completely give themselves over to the canned material they have been served, night after night, for their entire lives.”

What we hear is not the organic, the militaristically gnomic, the earthy - it is the sitcomedic. MTV trashtalk, some Full Metal Jacketisms (Kubrick would have loved this, at least in a way) thrown in.

And, because you too have seen the same movies, at least a lot of them, you are able to try to reconstruct any possible reason, any scenario at all, in which the cars that speed in, crash, disgorge their occupants, who then are blown away by the Americans. The sniper was in a car? The insurgents, after a lengthy pause, get into their little cars and attempt, as an act of insane bravery perhaps, to speed past the marines’ position? Why?

Unlike the talk, no, the actions of the “insurgents” don’t fit into any plausible script, especially not the one posted at the end of the video.

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What a day. One horrendous thing at work (not horrendous for me per se… but horrendous in just that way that brings home minus abstraction and distance, all joking aside, what a shit place the world is), followed by a delightful moment of post-mla schadenfreude (my sector of the world seems a little more just and competent), but to top it all off……………

…………….this:

Oh lord do I love it. (What is it you ask? A reel of the faux media/design content developed by a firm called Foreign Office for Children of Men, of course…) Half the delight I take in the speculative genre comes of this sort of material. I don’t really love gizmos and the like, but neo-brands, speculative graphic design and media accouterments, yeah, that’s all me. Why? Um, see this blog. Have you noticed the title?

I especially love this sort of thing in a movie like Children of Men. Why bother advertising in a world in which there are no new consumers to capture, the market must have self-destructed decades ago, there really is no point to any of it anymore? But what the hell. You know they’d still be there, the ads… everywhere…

(Special note to the folks that made this stuff for Children of Men, if you happen to technorati by: Though it might seem at first glance that I am unlikely candidate for employment with your firm - as I’m not trained in design, I’m kind of an almost religiously-intense communist, I’m an English professor, I’m just post-30 so not really in the market for an internship or such like, I really do think it would be in your best interest to give me a call, and then a job for life. I would say goodbye to all that for the chance to tinker away at faux-ads, faux brand identities. I will learn to use photoshop. I will learn to edit videos. I will make videos of dogs wearing fur-lined jackets. I will even make real ads for nasty corporations, so long as I’m permitted, at least some of the time, to make up brand identity kits for fake corporations in dystopian movies. In short - and I’m not kidding - I’m pretty good at what I do now, fully employed and so forth, I have a phd from an internationally elite university in totally the wrong field to do this, but I will move * tomorrow to where you are and, well, be really intensely ready to make faux ads.

* so long as you’re located in New York, London, Shanghai or any smaller city that’s ever been profiled in Wallpaper.)

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(Xposted from Long Sunday)

K-punk has a truly brilliant piece up about Children of Men. For one thing, he does a terrific job of decoding the squeamish-making situational conceit of the work - a world in which women can no longer have children - a conceit which of course sends us when we first hear about it almost automatically in all sort of directions that aren’t really borne out by the film itself (anxiety about working women, anxiety about homosexuality, anxiety - a la Pat Buchanan et al - about the death of the “white race,” etc…) K-punk’s version is much more (aesthetico-ideologically) optimistic and truer to what we see on screen…

The third reason that Children of Men works is because of its take on cultural crisis. It’s evident that the theme of sterility must be read metaphorically, as the displacement of another kind of anxiety. (If the sterility were to be taken literally, the film would be no more than a requiem for what Lee Edelman calls ‘reproductive futurism’, entirely in line with mainstream culture’s pathos of fertility.) For me, this anxiety cries out to be read in cultural terms, and the question the film poses is: how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?

Children of Men connects with the suspicion that the end has already come, the thought that it could well be the case that the future harbours only reiteration and repermutation. Could it be, that is to say, that there are no breaks, no ’shocks of the new’ to come? Such anxieties tend to result in a bi-polar oscillation: the ‘weak messianic’ hope that there must be something new on the way lapses into the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen. The focus shifts from the Next Big Thing to the last big thing - how long ago did it happen and just how big was it?

I’m going to say more about this on my own site when I get a chance, but one of the (very basic) things that I loved about the film was that, despite the fact that human life itself is dwindling out, that these people are living in either the aftermath or the final stages of what looks to be the ultimate catastrophe, one which will surely culminate, within a few years, in the end of the human race, they go about their business - commuting to work, stopping for coffee, watching tv, etc. The film pounds us with the savage uncanniness of the thought of rejiggering our retirement accounts, redoing the kitchen, or, of course, seeing movies as the world ends around us…

Think of the dystopian works that share this stance: 1984 and the cafeteria talk, Josef K. thinking about his missed breakfast at the opening of The Trial, etc…

One does wonder about the economic organization of this imagined world. Certainly it’s not our system - can’t be. Uncreative destruction without growth, hyper-full employment, hyper-inflation geometrically beyond Weimar precedent. There’s no sign in the movie of what has happened on this score, save for the fact that we see no one - save for the coffeehouse people, presumably - who isn’t a public servant…. And there are ration books…

If it is socialism, it is of course a stripe of national socialism. But what do we make of a fantasy of a socialism that can only arrive by natural dictat, after the real end of history, just before the end of mankind itself?

9/11, of course, wasn’t the end of the world in any sense, no matter what anyone wanted us to believe then or wants us to believe now. But I do distinctly recall as I shuffled around Brooklyn Heights that day, a sense that something strange in just these terms was afoot. On the one hand, there was a palpable if tacit giddiness that seemed to stem from the idea that there’d be no more work that day, tomorrow, maybe even the whole week. People I ran into coming home early from work were excited to be off, if also horrified. A snow day, as it were, for the entire city. (It is controversial to register this ambivalence, of course - remember the recent dustup about Thomas Hoepker’s photograph?) Something else to think about, something to do other than paper shuffling or service work, or studying etc. On the other hand and at the same time, I am quite sure that many of us, just days or hours or minutes or even seconds after the climactic scene, were thinking “but what about that work that I have to do.” I know for a fact that an acquaintance of mine, despite being aware in a general way of what was going on, continued to work at his dissertation chapter in the university library, tapping away as the whole world freaked out.

Just before the first tower fell and I was forced by the cloud of dust to head home, I remember making deals with myself about just how much time I could give myself for this sort of thing. I was reading for my oral exams at the time - I think I decided that I would take that day off but no more. In the end, I started reading again on September 13. Or maybe it was the night of the 12th.

Long story short, I think our fantasies and fears about catastrophe, dystopia, and the end of the world have quite a lot to do with somewhat banal anxieties and ambivalence about the work that we do, the conditions under which we work, and the possibility that our work situations might one day change. But I’ll say a bit more about this soon.

Anyway, more later. But do go read K-punk on this - I’m not saying here anything he hasn’t said far more penetratingly and eloquently. It’s a brilliant post…

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So, I’m getting ready to do something with the Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Drive, which might just be my favorite moment in film, and I’m looking around to see what’s been said about the scene… And I find this:

Without reference in the screenplay, the surrealistic Silencio sequence was shot in late 1999 as a finale to the original TV-Pilot. The idea around Club Silencio is a results of a deal between Disney’s Touchstone Television and David Lynch. The company contributed 2,5 million dollar more to the Pilot project (to a total budget of 7 million) with the proviso – which Lynch grudgingly accepted – that he shoot extra footage to be used as a “Closed ending.” Disney’s Buena Vista International intended to recoup the company’s money by releasing the longer version as a film in Europe.

That there is one hell of a confluence of the demands of the market and artistic genius… And one hell of a “closed ending.” I wonder what the Disney folks thought?

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I don’t really get to go see movies anymore, not since the kiddo. In the last 19 months, we’ve seen exactly 2 in the theater - fuckin’ V for Vendetta and fuckin’ Borat. Both profoundly disappointing - terrible enough to give up the game altogether. Just to recall the baroque calisthenics that we put ourselves through to see those floaters…

(What makes it so difficult is that movies show either at 7ish [before she goes to bed, and the babysitter arrives, if it's Saturday] or 10ish [way too late for the babysitter]. So we, um, go to a bar and drink. Which is getting a wee bit old, I have to say. I think I speak for both of us…)

That said, we’re going to find a way to see Children of Men, though I’m worried that I’m going to be disappointed with that one as well. The front half of the trailer -

- looks quite brilliant. The second half, well, just doesn’t seem to live up to the oasis-cynicism of 28 Days Later. Do you know what I’m talking about? If not, please do rent the movie. Wonderful to make an apocalyptic horror movie (spoiler!) whose resolution suggests that the last thing we should want to do, when the genetic revision occurs and the neighbors have gone slaveringly vampiric, is to leap into the arms of our friendly local military men, in whose menage far worse nightmares ensue. Truly brave, or, at least, the genre let them sidestep the universal call for responsibility in filmmaking.

I’m hoping that it will be at least richly symptomatic. I mean what, after all, is the point of fantasizing predicting an end to human reproduction? And why are these things exclusively set in Britannia nowadays?

With hope, I’ll report back soon…

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(go look over at the colonel’s and then come right back…)

I actually love hearing about this sort of stuff, as I’m constantly in search for raw plots to stage in class (or writing) as a backdrop for the non or complexly plotted stuff we take up. I.e. one wishes that one could order at the bookstore Generic Capitalist Romance for the students to buy and read before the start of the semester…

Dreaming of a socialism, but codedly, un-comprehended, confusedly, with deliberate blindness, packed into moralising notions of just desert and fairytale.

The happy ending: we know what it requires. The filmmakers’ can put a $ figure on it. But it can be imagined at once only as the miraculous reward for Prince and Princess Glamorous Deserving and movie fairy dust land, air-castle impossibility.

Just so. And what I can’t help taking away is the idea that if you just stripped the middle out of the before and after, the torques and twists of romance, you would have plotlessness, yes, and with it…. well… this legitimate desire…

(In short, this draws my eye because I am thinking about - almost exclusively at this point - the relationship between the political temporality of plot and the specter / promise of socialism. I am thinking about taking it right back to the Aristotle and trying to start anew. And, more broadly, I am trying to think carefully and honestly about what it is that the sort of thing I can write might actually do…)

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More here…

This is not going to be easy to get my hands on, is it? I’m actually working on something, something that has to do with maoism and tel quel and so forth… And this would be helpful, I think. But where to find this. Sure, yes, I know. But I don’t live there anymore.

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No, seriously, how grating, how absolutely symptomatic, of the slip of paranoid resistance under the fold of herbal essence “cool” in this video, friggin urban outfitters truckstop simulation, as it flashes from Dick himself, grubby and incessantly ticing, to these, what are they? Do we even need the missing labels?

Seriously, seriously. It’s a brilliant video. The human correlatives of Dick’s maddening prophesies respond to prophet himself with all of the inanity that he might have expected, feared…

UPDATE: Sorry. Was I unclear? My wife didn’t get wtf I was talking about either. I think it was my fault. But finally, after expanding a bit on my QEDing this video, she pointed me toward this, which is everywhere. Yes, that’s sort of what I meant. Am I being mean, a bit bitchy? Oh yes. But, really, it’s not just that. Rather, come on now, like the Foer that she is already incessantly compared to, the issue is what they’re picking for the big bucks, the mega-sophisticated marketting campaigns, our corporate guardians of culture. Pretty face, young, sure. But what troubles is the lack of interventional import, timeliness, human response. (It’s not in them. Look what happens when they try.) Bleach washing the f’d up stuff of the past, post relevance, to ensure a completely winterfresh and saltine reading xperience. Dick. Nabokov. Alan Moore. You name it. I mean, these are the big vehicles. I don’t know why I expect anything better, but… God, the cleanliness of these people. We are sure, at least, that they won’t make trouble. Spawn of the meritocracy (uh oh - getting close to home now), they multitask, they moon, they Brittany-up before the Obvious Issue. No. I just don’t know why I expect any better,here in ‘merica.

(META-UPDATE: Sorry, been struggling thru Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory at whole pages / hour. I think it’s starting to rub off on me, a bit.)

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