PLANET NSK

Nobody does it better.

HOTEL JIHAD

“Clenching your fist for the ones, like us, who are oppressed by figures of beauty…” 

L. Cohen, Chelsea Hotel No. 2

Hey -- why the dickens do I have Hotel Chevalier (Wes Anderson, 2007) on my computer? Because it’s the Bugsy Malone of Fake Truffaut Movies™, of course! Well, that’s kind of a start. Because it proves without question, as it slithers so discretely past the Star Wars girl’s ass that les travelling are so, like, ah, une question de morale. That ass that sends Moustache Boy on a gazillion-thousand mile (No problem, I’ve verified the exact distance on google maps) orientalist funhouse quest back to mommy. Because Hotel Chevalier is transmedia that beautifully goes nowhere. Because it gives the eerie feeling of being an ad for itself. Because no one yet has had the moral courage to deal so incisively with the problems of rich people trapped with their iPods in a hotel room like Wes. 

And as we learned in Sofia’s oscarwinner, hotel rooms are a kinda sweet prison for the shambhalic, symbolic class, whose job is to just be nowhere and everywhere at once. Because the too-perfect Sarstedt song is a sonic analogue of the mise-en-scene – a travelling of a velvet list, where, rather than the shock of poetic invention, we instead find weak, blasé iconography and brand names ₍₁₎, not least of which is, pardon my French, the cul sacré. 

What about the really cool Louis Vuitton-Bill Murray-Alienation synergy, dude? Alienation sells suitcases. And suitcases are the very symbol of displacement, of alienation. You don’t have to be Sherlock Barthes to figure that one out. Specular marketing; a more commercial version of the final shoot-out in The Lady from Shanghai; displacing the real object of desire into other mirror-images: “I’m looking at the marketer in the mirror and I’m telling him to buy”.  When we watch something like Hotel Chevalier we are suddenly allowed to be part of the melancholic entourage of the shipwrecked₍₂₎  people of the hotel rooms (cf. Dylan & co. in don’t look back) and we remember that the lovely that Sarstedt wrote his song about died (this is too sublime to be anything but myth) in a hotel fire. 

The Hotel Room manifest as Debord’s crucial principle of separation - the basic means of state control over our oppressed artistic class – the gulag and juzgao of the spectacle. 

“After all the empty time, all the lost moments, there remain these endlessly traversed postcard landscapes; this distance organized between each and everyone. Childhood?  Why, it’s right here; we have never emerged from it.”                                  

 -- G. Debord. 

Ah, Childhood! What Hollywood most prizes is finding grown men (sorry, girls) who are hostages to their ruthless 12 year old selves. And so we must realize, aghast – that our author really means this, all of this, and that it’s not some absurd kitsch trifle but private, cryptic neo-realism! Wes Anderson’s The Scream. So that was the heavy and secret shit Henley and Frey were muttering about back in ’77 before they got drowned out by the politically naïve Clash. “…check out any time you like, but you can never leave…”  This is what it is like to live, be, get room service, even to die, nowhere. The price of entry to the Utopia of Celebrity, as El Señorito Cunanan found out, is a ghostly houseboat existence just within spitting distance -- the reverberant & blank wall of techno drifting over to tantalize -- from the real presences of SoBe. Again, the melancholy spirit of separation. 

And here’s a further minor key tragedy for power, coming soon to a very small screen near you, that the melancholic artist-as-culture-hero is no longer much wanted nor required to produce the spectacular – free at last! -- because the average person is too busy producing and curating their own homely corner of the spectacle to actually consume it properly. The next perfection of separation is when we all get to move with our camera phones into The Hotel (which we earnestly hope won’t be too soon besieged by jihadists! ₍₄₎) But maybe Wes and Sofia₍₃₎  are onto a new genre: Hotel Regionalism. It’s a genre with spindly, restless legs in a bespoke suit – a genre that travels. Her next one, sadly, is to be a hotel picture too, I hear. ₍₅₎

And Hotel Chevalier remains, because, finally, I guess there really are some things that are more abject-ish than the tracking shot in Kapo. How much is this swell hotel room costing us, Wes? Only 750,000 million euros. ₍₆₎  The only bit of truth in this sick yellowy world.

Notes: 

1. From the beginning, Rock-et-Roll was always hawking shoes, who the hell knows why – but the whole thing went crazy by the mid-1960s, and even St. Lou was selling Dior by ‘67.

2. Los Naufragos de la Calle de La Providencia, the castaways of Providence Street, Alcoriza and Buñuel called them.

3. These people are my close friends so I feel comfortable using their christian names in a piece of serious criticism.

4. Let’s at least note the cynical perspicacity of the salafist jihadi Boxers in their choice of hotels as targets. They are noah’s arks, floating prisons for the technocratic, symbolic class. Merely signing the guest ledger is an admission of globalized guilt. Meanwhile, Hotel Chains needs must up-armor and make their prison architecture more explicit as a sort of enticement. Hotel managers: Watch 55 Days at Peking and teach the staff/guards to use Kalashnikovs.

5. I know, I know --  perhaps, there were masterpieces of mono no aware to be found in hotels once upon a time. Shimizu, Tati, Abel Ferrara. Non-transparent films shot as if through frosted glass that inscribe separation as loss, as the transience of stuff. The important thing is to choose well, that is, resonantly, in what you mean to mausolize -- to cast in amber in the film.

6. Price Includes VAT.

COLLOIDAL YOUTH

 Our correspondent in Lisbon tweets:

A gang of Pedro Costa sycophants have begun a squat in Fontainhas,
hoping their hero will make a film about their society.

IN PRAISE OF A HACK

Is there another great filmmaker as often and roughly maligned as Claude Lelouch...?

The Balzac of the cinema. Give it twenty years after he's dead. The truth will out. And that snot-nose Desplechin could learn a few tricks from him.

Yes, he deals in generic nonsense that he makes idiosyncratic; shaves off infinite variations of the same universe. But he is absolutely the author of his films. Every shot is his. Every film has a dangerous balance between casualness -- the improvisation -- and causality.

Frames: for someone often accused of empty, pretty shots -- Lelouch's images are more like slurred snapshots, handheld in advance of steadycam, where everything is sacrificed to an expression of an often obscure emotion. There is never anything "stock" about what happens in his films. You cannot exactly predict the subtle course.

La Bonne Annee: another one of Lelouch's infamous dog's breakfasts -- but mesmerizing -- as usual there are a few amazing "technical" moments...for instance:

The plan sequence (a virtuosic helicopter shot) of the rehearsal of an escape, with laconic voiceover narration by Lino Ventura. This escape is shown in advance of the climax, and its' successful execution will provide the lovely irony of the hero trapped in the exact center of his beautiful criminal scheme, just at the moment where the Woman who lives like a Man realizes that she loves him -- as the cops take him away.

This is not Borzage, but Lelouch.

The way his films are structured is remarkable, extraordinary, as coils of meandering moments that we do not fully understand, but require a sort of active fusion as we circle around them in mind.

The "business" of the film now resolved, the film then shifts again to a drama of re-entry and reconciliation, Ventura's, who wonders who he can trust, who wants to reject, to hate -- and the Woman who lives like a Man, with a hint of terror, suddenly realizes that he won't meet her eye.

The scene plays out.

DIARY EXCERPT

The other day, as I walked past a homeless man, foul and unkempt, I was surprised to hear him say that he “was despairing of the ability of Art to change anything, even its’ own underwear...", and that consequently this situation was eroding his not-unconsiderable faith in Marxism. Holding back an irresistible impulse to thrash and lecture him at cane-point, I gave him .50 euros and told him that this time, instead of getting another wash-water pastis, he should take this money and go see‘um The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, starring that Prince of Players and Jamones, Chris “plummy-tonsils” Plummer. 

My cane bearing so close to his nose, the fellow nodded gratefully.

QUEEN OF DEBT

Party Girl...

Radical in her passivity. Notice how this runs against the grain of the usual romantic protagony.

How disappointments grow entwined with a life. The making of a certain woman -- through a gallery of melancholy poses.

A woman who must be visible to her court.

Broken Glances at the camera. 

The superficies, the wealth of visual detail, the Antonionian concern with stuff, builds until we wonder what exactly the point is.

To shut out the world.

This movie was baffling before the "recession". Now everyone is a bit of a Marie Antoinette.

The author recognizes the throttling density of the superficial world, but does not deplore it. She thinks it's "sad" when the nice -- the beautiful things -- are violently broken.

But the author also finds this Resignation noble.

Sofia, in her own weird (& expensive) way, has paradoxically made a film  
as austere in its images and emotions as Rohmer's. 

REPETITION COMPULSION

The Mimetic Curse of the Ancients: monkee see, monkee do. 

1869: N.B. Forrest, recently a general in the C.S.A. disbands the original Klan.

1915: The Birth of a Nation is released. Super-salesman "Colonel" Simmons, mightily impressed by Griffith's mega-hit, starts cross-marketing the new Klan by running ads next to the posters for the film. It works. By 1920, the second Klan has 4 million members.

"The cross-burning ceremony, however, was a new wrinkle on the sheets. Burning crosses had never been part of the Reconstruction Ku-Klux. They had come from the exotic imagination of Thomas Dixon, whose fictional Klansmen had felt so much tangible pride in their Scottish ancestry, they revived the use of burning crosses as signal fires from one clan to another. The ritual of the burning crosses figures dramatically in Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake." 

(The human) gift of seeing resemblances
is nothing other than a rudiment 
of the powerful compulsion in former times 
to become and behave like something else.  

-- Walter Benjamin

An unstable situation: 

Everyone wants to become something else. 
Everyone is a vague metaphor looking to use anything to concrete. 
The blank image can produce us as we consume it. 

MEDIA APOCALYPSES

All lost moving images have at least existed for some viewer in the past. The unseen is an integral part of our lives, even if not directly our own. (…) The fact that the unseen is beyond our control is an excellent antidote to our claim of authority over the visible world, and administers a good shaking up to our deluded obsession with permanence. Sooner or later you and I will both disappear, along with our visions and memories of what we have seen and the way we have seen it.  – Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema

I would have sought as my own country a happy and peaceful commonwealth of which the history was lost, so to speak, in the darkness of time. – JJ. Rousseau

Images multiply unstoppably and we continue to die along with our flabby memories. From the fading & quixotic perspective of the film-materialist, the virality of electronic images is a sort of nihilistic vandalism – applied pataphysics, a Debordian game gone horribly wrong. In a box somewhere, in my own private archive, I keep a videotape copy, on magnetically drifting elegiac Beta, of Lindsay Anderson’s film if… strictly as a memento mori of the relentless cyclic quality of these media apocalypses – the rich man’s 8-track tape, in Steve Albini’s always fresh post-punk luddite formula for this creative destruction which every babe in toyland recognizes as necessary. Platform shifts are now required as media apocalypses, not just -- as is so cynically presumed -- for commercial reasons, but as constant re-filtration, to rescue the senile, confused low country of attention against the ocean of cancerous human creation. Not just the Mona Lisae, but the Duchamp moustaches, too, and Fulano De Tal’s faux-subversive lil’ remixes, as well as the vast rotting estuary of “garbage” images that we don’t even notice.

An action from somewhere in the lost territory of the historical. Paolo Cherchi-Usai, once upon a time the senior curator at the Eastman House, made a film called Passio out of five elements: silent images reflecting the secret crisis of cinema, black leader, calligraphy, tinting, and Arvo Pärt’s music, meant to be played live. He called the film a sequel to his book The Death of Cinema. He destroyed the negative, and allowed a certain number of prints to circulate, to be slowly destroyed, consumed by the slight, wearing violence of projection and the vagaries of time. In short, by pointedly NOT refusing his film a history, thus a life, and eventually a death, in this ridiculous age of the eternal.

Where stands the conservative impulse in the formless nothing of post History? What does it mean to preserve an image, as in the mnemonist’s trade, when the foolish drive to preserve images is now under siege from metastasis, rather than scarcity? Images which are now the firmament, the faint pressing at the eyes, the sense of the dead, the outnumbering crowd. It’s important to wonder these things, because the curatorial instinct is fetishistic, it is the peculiar force of the object itself, in all its haeccitas, the thisness that seduces its keeper into erotic custody. Because the thing always captures the keeper, and not the other way around. So, how exactly should we feel about these noumenic and numeric cloud-armies of perfect copies, zeroes and ones – the shit only a mainframe could love.  The aesthetic of losslessness is here. Cherchi-Usai, that old skool geezah, would say we can only love the damage and the patina.

So when someone, in casual conversation, tells you losslessness is the new memory – spit in their face, I authorize it, they are fucking pod people. Losslessness. Look at the word, admire it its brazen beauty for a moment. Because losslessness is one of those deadening orwellian words, on the reassuring border between cant, violence, and advertising. It says that one is losing less than nothing – which is exactly what is declared with authority when something is being irrevocably lost. It is also a concept that involves altering the texture and substance of the “present”, and spiritualizing it, turning us all into Madame Blavatskys and images back into the ghosts they always were.

It was never a coincidence that auteurism, the outbreak of cinephilia, and television, were co-eval: when films were modulated on television for the first time they, along with the hard work of the dream factory, actually became visible and cherished, and therefore their future and eventual loss could be actively mourned.

Digitalization is seriality ₍₁₎ on a environmental scale. It turns everything into a Warhol, but it also crashes the market along with the disk drive. “I’ve got a Brillo Box, but I say it’s art, it’s the same one you can buy at any supermarket, cause I’ve got the style it takes…”  Like Debord, Andy understood that Capital had fled to image -- he’d go apoplectic when the other guys fetched a higher price than he did. The Warhol Foundation, that angry corporate behemoth, still doesn’t get the joke – its business is suing people who make fake warhols. “These boxes are not authorized by the artist and should be removed from the official list of Andy Warhol Brillo boxes.” The key was that Andy, like any factory owner, always worked ‘em hard and cheap. What you’re really buying when you buy a Warhol is the spreadsheet history of what culture philistines like you paid for it. Only the intercourse of the philistines is valuable. The art objects themselves are worthless. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Rather than spending the time and energy de-authenticating warhols – the Foundation should buy Warhols at market rates and then destroy them for the sake of the few that survive. There’d be a beautiful symmetry in the sight of Andy’s millions consuming themselves for the sake of the posterity of the art market.

The studios, of course, are in an even worse position – they spend gazillions to make and publicize fake art into zeitgeist material that is transient, accessible, forgettable, interchangeable and immaterial and fatally easy to copy and then they sweat with outrage when people steal it. And so they are left scrambling for the dregs of some Veblen Effect off of 3D and IMAX. That hustler with the folding table and the cracking software, man, he’s just doin’ the Duchamp shuffle. Since information, being a poor relation of the hegelian Spirit, as the cliché goes “wants to be free”, then and therefore, if all you have to bring to the culture table is information, then you’re necessarily both a fighter of freedom and an emperor with no clothes. The people, they of the dream maquila, who once provided the ancient parts for the spectacle are baffled. They don’t understand that they no longer produce the “official” spectacle, which is of fast declining interest to the mass – that actually the process of domination is now out of their hands and has moved, has diffused as Debord would say, into the producer-consumer of the spectacle, that is, you and I. We, who have nothing to gain but these, our pleasant chains.

Because working the spectacle actually gives pleasure. One can’t deny that. Like all those people who thought it would be “fun” to have a blog, until that bittersweet day they felt the simmering resentment of the tiny mass who depended on it, and they knew at last the mutual & rancorous captivity of the small fascism of interplay. Who exactly is a Follower of who, each little mussolini wondered, suffering in silence?

Hollis Frampton, in visionary wizard mode, speaks of photographs, film and video as excremental attempts, essays in a tentative attempt “to construct something that will amount to an arena for thought, and presumably, as well, an arena of power, commensurate with that of language.” A material precursor for something that no longer needs any scaffolding. I very much like this poetic image of coral-like translucent husks of excrement growing, as if by some fungal process, into an invisible sorta-cathedral of the spectacle. But cathedral is not right. Hollis is clear, this is not exactly a place, not a medium or an extension, but an electronic uber-category. A new collectivity for our subjectivity.

IMAGE-UTTERANCE

Now is not the time to rehash the endless semiotic debates about whether film is a para-language or an idiolect full of sound and fury, signifying, like, whatever…; or, conversely, whether reality is a sort-of film, but we can wonder if, a lo mejor, digitalization is the familiar shift from language as sound, as utterance, to language as sign-image, but this time, weirdly and perhaps, uncomfortably, in reverse. A pole shift, from the materialized-objective to the sensorized-subjective. From the relatively opaque, thick and erotic surface of luminous silver to the protean, transparent, watery, ravening electronic image, condemned to flow, homeless, from container to container until exhausted. The electronic image is, in its algorhythmic essence, of the class of mathematic objects, that knowable intermediary in the platonic scheme between the ideal, i.e. the ‘look’ of things, and the damp crumbs of the material world. The white noise chatter of the electronic image marks us all as neo-platonists, hostages of the ideal.

AND -- images not just ideal, but exchangeable – a flowing currency. So it’s not so far fetched to think of the internet as a mad inflationary economy where everyone can print their own money.

But for the sake of paradox, let’s introduce here Frampton’s law, which we can use for a good, savage précis of the digital age:

"Ironically, the very fact that film and the photograph escape certain conditions of ritual, the fact of their reproducibility, has virtually assured their disappearance. The more copies of (images) we can make, the more we are assured we don’t have to make any because we can always make them, and eventually, of course, none will have been made, and (they) will disappear."

Without notice, let’s add. Because the vanishing of specific images will mean nothing in the oceanic flux of the spectacular, just as it was impossible to notice the people vanishing, the growing blank spaces, in the sweet heyday of Stalinist photography.

Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, materiality condemns Art – yes, I’m going to speak of that -- to decay and destruction; it’s inefficient and faulty; so mono no aware, so human scale, so fucking what…? Cherchi-Usai says that the mournful work of preserving images is triage. Save one film and you lose, forever, a thousand others. Memory, the subjective, personal counterpart of art, is revenant-like – it is the living part of something dead, and it needs to go underground once more. And nostalgia, let’s remember, was Debord’s final bit of show-business. Now, losslessness might mimic a biological process, but let’s not get confused – it’s not that unlike spitting in the wind. It might be the perfect moment to consider that other, more interesting suggestion in Bazin’s The Ontology of the Photographic Image; whether materiality, destruction and decay, and memory are essential or accidental components of art.

Once upon a time we preserved some particular thing because it had some kind of fragile, tenuous cultural value, which rhymed our fragile, tenuous lives, even if such value wasn’t apparent to the initial percipients. We weave what survives (which is randomness, pure accident) into a story, into History – where it all makes sense – but now we don’t have to worry anymore about The Unseen, thank heavens. Debord’s famous circle is now hegemonic, part of our inner achey-tecture:

“Everything that appears is good; 
                whatever is good will appear.” 

History may be gone, but the issue of memory dogs art, it might be the only reason for art. Art must be memorable enough to be preserved, memorable even just to feed our reveries.

Two related questions, therefore! Is art really necessary any more? And/or must it be mnemonic, still? This technological skin, this extension-environment-activity called the spectacular, activates (with an almost inaudible right-click) the reverie-function for us. It is our reverie as gulag. Debord is only subtly wrong when he puns this off of Freud: “The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.”  Now, in the day-time people are forced outward into reverie, as it were, outside of themselves, and what’s more, conscripted to produce the spellbinding reverie-fabric as well. In a swell irony, it was left for the spectacle to really achieve the situationist goal of fusing the artist with the spectator; the everyday with the mad poetic gesture. Did you ask for gesamtkunstwerk? It’s called Facebook for now. 

And more bad news for the anarchy kids: detournement , the corporate symbol of which is the ubiquitous youtube embedded window, the window that looks at us, that same detournement  which even on its best day (April 11th of ‘59, I think) seemed a pretty weak strategy, even for the prevention of boredom, quickly got detourned  by the gods of media, those clever little ironists. 

Debord et Wolman, S.A.: 

“It is thus necessary to envisage a parodic-serious stage where the accumulation of detourned elements, far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with rendering a certain sublimity.”

We are so there, Guy-Ernest! Thus:

Q: As the writer of Downfall, the superb film about Hitler’s final days, I’m sure you’ve seen your work parodied on youtube literally hundreds of times with the various “Hitler Mash-up” videos. What do you think of those videos? If you find them at all amusing, do you have a favorite? Or are they too inappropriate? I confess that I find “Downfall of Grammar” pretty amusing…

Bernd Eichinger: I find those parodies tremendously amusing! Obviously, the film and this scene in particular is a real fire starter for people’s imagination. What else can you hope for as a filmmaker? This is moviemaking heaven!  My favorite one is when Hitler is having his tantrum over his losses in the real estate crisis. Hitler’s real crisis at the time was also about a gigantic real estate loss:  the loss of all those territories he had conquered fuelled by false credit and driven by avarice, megalomania and extreme ruthlessness. And then history’s Dow Jones came crushing down on him….I find this parody so funny because it’s historically relevant.

Check this out! Eichinger sublimely hi-jacks the meaningless and forgotten Hitler and his real estate crisis, and everyman detourns Eichinger. The “Hitler Mash-up” by borrowing the formal strategy of its ancestor, certifies the “reality” of Eichinger’s mash-up. The circle is closed again: you, little man, have successfully and tremendously amused Lord Eichinger, who is laughing all the way to the bank. But...but... BUT! Too late the producers realized that the joke-image was supplanting the film object and Hitler-as-market-concept, making them invisible. The process needed to be stopped, but how? Only a flesh and blood Hitler and a real Gestapo would have the power to demand such a tribute. Hmmm. But if you were to pay homage in a different way, say, by burning the negatives at Konstantinfilm, in emulation of Gudrun Ensslin ₍₂₎, our führers would likely not be so amused. 

I mention this last in a laughing-nostalgic way, because it is no longer so easy to destroy these zombie images. There is no sense of religious sacrifice in the destruction of digital data. No dark nietszchean joy. There is no will to destroy zeros and ones, which makes for gently pulsing, forgotten Zombies with nothing to do but wait patiently on the next apocalypse. Which probably explains the obnoxious popularity of that genre.

Notes:

1. As defined by that tragic neo-lamarckian, Dr. Paul Kammerer: “The recurrence of the same or similar things or events in time and space - events which, as far as can be ascertained, are not connected by the same acting cause” aka meaningful, resonant, a-causal co-incidence. The secret hiving of the universe.

2. Played, in this universe, by Johanna Wokalek.

AUTO-AUTEURISM

Historically, your abuelo's auteurism polemicized that that film object that the middlebrow thought was JUNK, the second or third rank product generated by the studio machinery, was really the work of an individual artist. These artists themselves, more intimate with the way the sausages were ground, often denied their artistic condition -- their scars and humiliations were still fresh wounds, and any autonomy from what they often saw as hackwork could only be bought with occasional success --  but at the same time, being artists, they loved the attention that was lavished on them by the abuelos. It was infinitely harder for the White Elephant broker to ever find his way to the love of posterity. Smart people, for this reason, cannot give George Stevens his due.

This termitic class of auteurs today we might find among people like Sheldon Lettich, Jay Roach, Sidney J. Furie, Yamada Yoji, etc.

What we often have today is that the middlebrow geniuses, (Tarantino, Aronofsky, Scorcese, Nolan, Boyle, etc...) who often have solid artistic credentials from the hardscrabble universitas indiecae, but in contrast, whose films, almost by definition, have that pretentious air-sucking quality (The idea of art as an expensive hunk of well-regulated area, both logical and magical, sits heavily, etc...) but also have baroque & cannily pre-meditated termitic spaces in them. The infestation is always under control. Incoherence is always a PRODUCT in these films.

There is no terrifying Farberian purity here because the audience WANTS a White Elephant disguised as a termite.  Only THAT can inflame their callow seriousness.

What's a poor schmuck to do...?

Self-consciously INDICATE the termitic spaces with a flourish, which rather defeats the purpose...but the kids eat it up anyway.

The ideal solution would be another auteur assigned scenes at random to work against the grain of the baggy monster. But that would be just re-starting the dream maquila all over again.

MUSIQUE ACONCRETE

Rene Auberjonois: He was talking about people who were walking uptown as we were walking downtown. The conversations that we would hear pieces of:

"and she needs a hysterectomy..." 

"his brother-in-law" 

(Altman) said: "That's the key to it. You don't need to hear EVERYTHING people are saying to know the world they're living in."

LA BEAUTÉ EST IMBAISABLE

Von Stroheim, the Verhoeven of his time. A high-lowbrow genius.

ASSISTED REALITY

Here's a cool idea for a show!  A team of celebrities that parachute into areas of world-misery to focus audience empathy on them.

You vote where they go! They might get HURT! 

Or spend money!

MERCURY THEATRE

Nolan's latest radio drama comes with his usual slovenly "based on an executive's notes" action sequences, lazy-ass father-son lacrimal porn, a terrifying array of hmmm-that-might-be-interesting thematic concerns, knowing "auto-auteurist" references to his and a million other films, and paint by numbers videogame architecture. In other words, he delivered what was expected.

And the problem with these overstuffed lazy-boys that blockbusters have become is that they have too many fulcrum points for anyone to care about any of them.

No ragged hobbyhorses to ride out of the theatre. But enough exposition to kill all the horses of the emperor's terra-cotta army.

The exposition is what is interesting here. There's a Wellesian film about storytelling trapped inside of this one somewhere. Nolan's artistic failure in this instance is his pedantry -- he can't resist closing every gap in meaning -- jamming it with more explanation. He is so worried about confusing the audience with his nonsense that he keeps adding more.

Which makes it rather funny that he's intentionally flubbed his last bit of magic: the reveal that our protagonist is a Quijote, a madman, almost exactly like the Leo of Shutter Island. Who is, in Nolan's defense, a twin of Leonard in Memento. But Nolan swallows this final triumphalist note with a weird, guilty legerdemain. A psychotic who has preferred the dream life to reality (everything he accuses his wife of is true of him) suddenly receives the stamped visa back to "reality". WTF?

The infection of the one film by the other is what makes this one rise above mediocrity. Inception fights off the contamination, suffers it like swine flu, to deserved box office gold. There is a strange beauty achieved in the flurried interpenetration of images.

Instead of doing something really interesting by making the REAL WORLD drab, unsentimental and anti-magical, and showing us the character's despair -- Nolan goes with a trick ending that certifies the audience's growing desperation that nothing matters. Except the smiles of children.

KITSCH NIHILISM.

The Dream is Real. That shit sells itself.

ASI ES, PUTO!

Moving forward in the attempt to assemble the collected works of Licenciado Roberto Sosa, the star of Highway Patrolman, a fine film by Sam Peckinpah Alex Cox, and also the malefic acousmetre of Tony Scott's L'homme brulante, we find this little oddity, where Sosa is playing an allegorical figure of some sort in an agit-prop music video. The band Molotov, perhaps a little obscure today, was a mejican Buffy Saint Marie and Camper Van Beethoven hybrid, which unfortunately perished in a freak accident in 2007, when their tour plane collided with the Cessna Citation of Los Tigres del Norte on the tarmac of the Guadalajara Airport.



Sosa is a phenomenon here -- sometimes Walken, sometimes Al Pacino, or often Franco Citti. As I said, I am mystified by what he's trying to convey. From 4:11 on, the video by Jorge Aguilera, becomes beautifully, sublimely incoherent.

PAN Y CIRCOS DE ROCK at the ZOCALO!

CARELESS OPINIONS THWARTED

Hey Amici:

I know a lot of you damned drunkards think Katie Holmes is the greatest actor in screen history.

Well, fuck you. REALLY.

Ecce homo:

HEEDLESS WOMEN

Look. Lucrecia Martel is a genius. She's 3-for-3 on the features. So it's not really a problem that the recent film is a remake. Add the creaky woo-woo haunting stuff, spare a dab of fashionable class consciousness, subtract the modernist flat space and free indirect narration, and you get this:

It's not a problem because Opening Night is itself haunted by yet another ghost.

Not her.

But by this guy...

STATE TRAUMAS

(one of a continuing series on spectacular grief)

Did you hear the one about the aircraft full of famous Polish marytrs that crashed on the border between commemoration and oblivion...? No? Well...

Here's how Rod Serling would write it...

The dignitaries are on the plane, flying to commemorate the tragic and fatal event. The plane lands safely. But it's 1940, and they are rounded up by the NKVD to join the rest of the Polish officer corps. The dignitaries, mostly wheezing old men, try to warn the others about what's coming, about the history of soviet treachery, 1980, etc...They are accused of senility, naturally. One young officer believes them, and leads an escape of the oldsters, back to the guarded presidential plane. They seize the plane, but the engine is riddled with 1940 vintage bullets, and the plane crashes, back in the present. Investigators find the body of the young officer, whose name is on the death lists in the official accounts of Katyn, along with the mystery of his pre-war uniform. The anomaly is hushed up. Koniec.

Back in "real" Poland, mad grieving crowds, surround the memorial cross in front of the presidential palace.

"First they finished Kaczynski off and now they want to hide the truth about it," said Katarzyna Zaluska, a 35-year old office worker, giving vent to a suspicion among some supporters of the late president that the Polish government shares responsibility for the crash.

Terror is best experienced in crowds, of course. It's best that the crowd sees its terror, humiliation and grief amplified by the screens.

Demurred one illustrious & sober public intellectual:

"In any case, when tragedy struck, the human attitude prevailed. Everyone is terrified to see human bodies torn to pieces. Everyone travels by air. Everyone is terrified."

By accident, he's hit on another beautiful hegemonic linkage. This is how systems become mental environments -- and then, scaling down, set the dimensions of mild inner gulags.

Someone tried to ride the dragon of the nation's grief, but the thing was too wild. A heightened, exalted state.

The production of Grief in perpetuity. Direct "access" to trauma-events. At odds with the usual way of transforming trauma into myth.

Nothing can be settled. The meaning can always be dragged back into the court of mediation. And it will be. The aircraft perpetually flying in the limbo airspace between 1940-2010.

Nightmares fed by the restless, paranoid feeling of a secret life beyond the merely visible.

AUTHENTICITY FOR THE MASSES!

Far be it for me to single out Richard Brody of the Nueva Yorker, the accursed & despised biographer of JLG, Heidegger of the Cinema, I will be the first to admit that I am not fit to shine his shoes -- perhaps even to shine anyone's shoes. And in any case, the bogus assumptions that litter this piece...

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2010/08/breakfast-at-yesterdays.html

...belong not him in particular but to an entire generation. But there is double plus good crystallization here.

Let this make me a partisan of Maureen Dowd, but if I have to read another half-baked boomerista apology for how THEY saved US from compulsory sexual morality and the oppressive codes of the grey 1950s (what an elastic achievement!) -- forgive me, my friends, but I will go all Jeanne Dielman.

THEN, SAYS BRODY:

Far be it from me to diminish the artistic achievements of Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch, who are high on my list of cinematic heroes, but it’s worth recalling that their work reflects the effects of social tensions and pressures that, I think, most of us are glad to have escaped. The classic romantic comedies are, among other things, sex comedies without sex. The famous “Lubitsch touch” is the way he puts his finger on things off-screen that he can’t show on-screen, and Hawks’s comedies, with their scintillating and borderline-smutty symbols of unexpressed desires and deeds, let us know precisely what he wasn’t allowed to tell us. Their comedies may have pointed to the prevailing hypocrisies of public life, but they also depended on them, and it’s impossible to take seriously their exquisite, intricate sublimations without considering the restraints to which their art, and all art at the time (remember problems with, say, “Ulysses” or “Lolita”?), was subject.

 NOW SAYS BRODY:

Their films highlight the gleefully or bitterly honest display of sexual impulses that sometimes join with and sometimes cross up romantic designs—and reflect the concrete situations of the characters (and, for that matter, of the filmmakers) far more frankly than was ever possible in the studios’ heyday. As for elegance, that of Wes Anderson is worthy to be placed alongside that of any of the classics—while at the same time reflecting a creative tension with “the new freedoms” (as the Coen brothers have so precisely and memorably apostrophized them).

 AND BRODY ALSO SAYS

They (filmmakers in the era of Classical Hollywood) were all, more or less, lying to us; some of them did better at nudging and winking and letting us know that they knew that we knew that they knew. Sure, there’s less elegance in today’s movies; there’s less elegance in modern life, because the norms of social behavior are far less stringent, and our game faces are, by and large, not so different from the ones we see in the mirror.

What's really at stake here is not ELEGANCE or CENSORSHIP, but an allegiance to a flattened code of realism that masks the eternity that is bourgeois morality. What makes these dusty stories powerful and resilient is that they needed to be completed, articulated and excavated by the audience, which was being taken far more seriously by the artists in question than Brody suspects. To say that one has to embrace these supposedly discarded and repressive ideologies in a kind of nostalgia trip is bald sophistry.

A beautiful artifice is more real than the most authentically banal realism.

In the event that nostalgia exists here, it's for a target rich environment of semes both in the culture at large, a passionate sophistication for de-coding in the audience, and an art object that inflames the desire for the forbidden. Sounds kind of subversive, doesn't it? Brody, in his Freudo-Libertarian Utopia, has forgotten that repression is the key to great art. And that the super-marketing of imaged (fake-authentic) sexuality and violence is a far more effective repressive tool than the old double coded "lies" of Hollywood. But by all means, rock on with Joe Swanberg, dude. I'll stick with Lubitsch.

What else? Looking at the past involves a sort of intellectual honesty that may be incompatible with an ideological belief that things are better than they were before. There is a perpetual delusion that travels bundled with bourgeois culture, particularly if such culture is nominally progressive. Test failed, here and elsewhere.

The mild cancer in the "progressive" ethos is that, insofar as it wants to caricature and play the tedious  'gotcha' game with the past, and wallow in the warm mud of moral self congratulation, it winds up obscuring, in its absurd dogmatic faith that things are any better now, the current inflection of very real, often the exact same, hypocrisies and repressions inherent in our day-to-day existence.

Despite what Brody disingenuously suggests, our "game face" is actually more mercurial, anxious and situational than it ever was. Why? Because the Subject understands that she must frantically produce her authenticity, a burden that we would not normally wish on any person.

Another naivete: Culture is always in its' essence "reactionary". For better or worse, it says let's keep this stuff that we say works. The cultural position is always conservative -- falsely nostalgic for something that was lost/never was. The progressive ethos looks at the society in terms of problems -- it's a technocrat's dream. Problems obviously require a managerial class to render, address (and create) them. It's a Monarchy not based on tradition, but on flux. The advantage of this system is that "progress" in a relative and fluxing frame can't ever be measured, only theorized or expected.

The manufacture and consumption of authenticity is the going concern of the spectacular.  Realism is the language of that production.




addendum: On the same subject, Wise Elder Glenn Kenny is talking historic modes of production, while slapping down M. Dowd, for the sake of picking over some diminishing pop Kultchural returns.

Klen Genny thinks lubitsch is undead, undead

THE SPOILER TABOO

Anxiety gnaws at my insides. Sweat dribbles off my nose. I’m trapped in a Dostoyevsky novel. Why? I have a vague terror that somebody (is it my Double…??) is going to reveal some crucial plot point of some cultural artifact that I have yet only a peripheral awareness of, thus de-spoiling my potential pleasure – robbing me of some undefined future “experience” that might bring me joy. There is no question. Spoilers defile me.

Wait a minute. Uh…

Nobody should actually give a shit about spoilers, but as many an entertainment journalist in the age of the internet has discovered – There will be Blood when the spoiler taboo is not properly observed.  Spoilers shouldn’t be anything -- but they represent an interesting psychological, political, erotic, and economic phenomenon.

First of all, spoiler etiquette implies a basic charity towards a childlike mode of being where one’s authority figures are taking care that you, the unspoiled, don’t stumble over the sadistic power differential in your knowledge-power relations. It’s a come-on. They are servicing your ignorance, while stoking your desire, hypocrites lecteurs!

The “innocent” – or perhaps we should call them the pre-initiated, are begging not to be told something that they long to discover. It’s probably not too much of a [SPOILER] here to suggest that this is an Oedipal scenario par excellence.

When reviewers must avoid spoilers, they immediately mystify the banal – empowering the factual “she’s got a dick!” with some kind of fetish power. This kind of writing is quasi-religious –writing these real absences never fails to make something more interesting than it inevitably is. Willfully obscuring, we might say teasing, language – that is language designed to hide something, is inevitably propagandistic. But also erotic, in that it delays and expands the masochistic anxiety inherent in NOT KNOWING.

MATTER IS A DRAG

The further away from use-value, and thus its material conditions, a thing is -- the more gravitational suck it has in an economic system --

and therefore, the more money that can be made from it. 

Matter is a drag on capital-image.

RISK RHETORIC IN ART

Artists once said: "Uh, let me show you this -- you haven't looked at it quite this way. Useful? No, I don't think so. Let's just bring this old fuddy duddy Christ into the modern era, etc."

The humility of transposition.

In between, there was Warhol.

Artists now say: "I'm investigating this -- I'm exploring this like it's the Zambezi. What I'm doing is dangerous." They all adopt the persona of Indiana Jones, the intrepid scientist with the pistol, but they speak in Grant Writing phrases.

It's bullshit.