![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Sep. 4th, 2011 08:21 pmPT Anderson? I am undecided.
For one thing I'm abidingly confused about what people liked about There Will Be Blood. Seriously, I don't understand. Day Lewis poured a lot into it, but I respect that to the exact extent I respect someone who can do an impression of their boring aunt so pitch perfect that they too are boring. What was of interest about the story, ideas, characters? What did it say or amount to? Why should I have cared? It's annoying to not know if you're missing something or if everyone else is.
Because it felt narcissistic - puffing things big without their earning bigness, taking someone else's story and smooshing it about, grabbing at important emotions and topics then saying nothing coherent about them, throwing out conventions designed to protect audiences from excessive boredom or confusion without discernible payoff past change itself. But a lot of that might be exactly how a movie feels that you just weren't up to.
He dazzles better than most, I admit. That scene in Magnolia where the caretaker's ordering the porn magazines from the grocery service, for example - the guy can enthrall. But narcissists can do exactly that, and only that, for you. The only reason these people compel my attention is that they are the one group beside geniuses that can be, often are, taken for geniuses - exactly because us non-geniuses have only a hazy understanding of what geniuses are doing, else we'd be geniuses too. Desiring to be a genius, or prove the genius she's convinced she has, a non-genius will come up with a mockup, her cartoon take on what a genius would create. One that may closely resemble our own reduced, clouded memory/anticipation mockup of what a great work of art might be like. Maybe the energies that get released in the process are valuable in themselves, I don't know - at any rate your fellow non-geniuses may at least take them to be. May even appreciate telltale signs of nongenius - finding out the grownup in the room is just a child pretending to be may mean make believe rules get to apply. The excitement that doesn't make sense can't be taken away by the sense police. Can be taken into excitements that we let not make sense in ourselves.
Some connection to genre here, and to comedy. Narcissists handle some kinds of comedy well, are quite foreign to others.
But anyone who uses the words narcissist and genius more than once each in an hour needs forty knee lashes, so I'll go take care of that.
For one thing I'm abidingly confused about what people liked about There Will Be Blood. Seriously, I don't understand. Day Lewis poured a lot into it, but I respect that to the exact extent I respect someone who can do an impression of their boring aunt so pitch perfect that they too are boring. What was of interest about the story, ideas, characters? What did it say or amount to? Why should I have cared? It's annoying to not know if you're missing something or if everyone else is.
Because it felt narcissistic - puffing things big without their earning bigness, taking someone else's story and smooshing it about, grabbing at important emotions and topics then saying nothing coherent about them, throwing out conventions designed to protect audiences from excessive boredom or confusion without discernible payoff past change itself. But a lot of that might be exactly how a movie feels that you just weren't up to.
He dazzles better than most, I admit. That scene in Magnolia where the caretaker's ordering the porn magazines from the grocery service, for example - the guy can enthrall. But narcissists can do exactly that, and only that, for you. The only reason these people compel my attention is that they are the one group beside geniuses that can be, often are, taken for geniuses - exactly because us non-geniuses have only a hazy understanding of what geniuses are doing, else we'd be geniuses too. Desiring to be a genius, or prove the genius she's convinced she has, a non-genius will come up with a mockup, her cartoon take on what a genius would create. One that may closely resemble our own reduced, clouded memory/anticipation mockup of what a great work of art might be like. Maybe the energies that get released in the process are valuable in themselves, I don't know - at any rate your fellow non-geniuses may at least take them to be. May even appreciate telltale signs of nongenius - finding out the grownup in the room is just a child pretending to be may mean make believe rules get to apply. The excitement that doesn't make sense can't be taken away by the sense police. Can be taken into excitements that we let not make sense in ourselves.
Some connection to genre here, and to comedy. Narcissists handle some kinds of comedy well, are quite foreign to others.
But anyone who uses the words narcissist and genius more than once each in an hour needs forty knee lashes, so I'll go take care of that.
