BAD COUNTRIES!

These days, even a child can see how nicely the IMFication du monde is progressing. National sovereignty, which once was a, perhaps THE guarantor of capitalist prosperity is being consumed in the process of Jüngerian Total Mobilization, like Verne's steamship consuming itself in Around the World in Eighty Days. It's funny now to see the rhetoric of moral failure placed on the obliging western states as they struggle and fail to play the rigged game.

As a corollary: Given the rise of these zombie national economies, under the control of Papa Docs hither and yon, how long, I wonder, will rational economic actors pay (in taxes, in patriotic spirit or conscription) for the past incarnation of a state, or perhaps for the future promise of one?

CALL YOUR AGENT

Culture Workers must be constantly aware that spectacular (as opposed to secret) production will inevitably amplify certain aspects of a work, beneficial to the spectacle, and create an ugly Image-in-the-World that might take a whole series of lifetimes of contravision and traduction to undo.

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.