THE METALEPTIC SOCIETY

Imagine a dystopia where:

Every reference is unstable, a half-sign, which makes crucial and tautological allusion to another half-sign, and so on. The primary labor in such a society is decoding, and to work in this way is to encourage a schizophrenic frenzy. 

Yet, it would not be wrong or unjust to call such a beautiful society cinematic.

TEMPS DU LOUP, INDEED...

Under normal circumstances, Georg Lukacs's Favorite Filmmaker™, MICHAEL HANEKE, is like that guy at every dinner party who spits fury at the fucking bourgeois all night long, and stuffs his pockets full of hors d'oeuvres for the long trip home in his Fiat topolino.

In other words, as hagiographer, he lives nicely off the masochism of his favorite class. And, really, not even Spielberg or Griffith dared to get the kind of mileage that Dear Hanky gets out of his poshlostian "spiritual" close-ups of children.

But once in an eternity the guy has to unfurl his freak flag during the battle. Like that ineffably strange moment where he takes a dazzling leer at some bizarre underwear adjustment truly worthy of Von Stroheim. Thus:




Of course, it may be that underwear in Austria is somehow different, structurally...