(no subject)

Shouldn't have read Barthes so close to appointed bedtime.

Not that I much mind him. He writes annoyingly, as translated, but I've had worse, and have read bits of him before so knew to expect some such -ness. And his enthusiasm is touching - he really did think he was suggesting something liberating, or naming a liberation already in progress.

And doubtless it is a liberation - not what he's suggesting, but the various stuffed substitutes one can convince oneself resemble how the Barthernet, the text-making about text that knows it's text, might manifest. They liberate from the fear that you might not be doing it right, that you don't understand the work as well as others. Whereas the text, as defined by Barthes, anyone can understand as well as anyone else, after all. He does keep it open to the system people, grudgingly, or anyway the three or four groups of them he presumably had to socialize with. And even if he hadn't left that opening they would have taken it - theory is vulnerable to these folks in exactly the way literature departments were vulnerable to theory: where there is transcendence without certainty the first passing huckster promising their merger, at some cost appearing trivial but in the small print compromising everything, will take over. Transcending transcendence, getting above any measure of high and low, must be remarkably appealing to those who fear they're mediocre, justly or not.

And especially so in a gradated hierarchical system where advancement must be to an inevitably large (but not total) extent arbitrary, like in literary studies. The anxiety that what you're doing might be worthless gets added to your fear you're doing it worthlessly, and in cases where mispromotion has occurred the mispromoted will be dealing with a number of underlings with more talent than themselves at understanding areas where training can only be of limited value. I'd add too the special problem of the increasingly non-fictional orientation in most readers as they age - students of poetry and imaginative essays being less vulnerable to this, maybe, but still affected. You want to put away childish things, or anyway move from a value to a knowledge footing, but value is what got you into this mess: unless you're a true believer, someone who knows just what they found in literature in the first place, the tendency to fall out of love with the works and consequent need to establish some other relationship with them (since they're still your job) will make certainty-movements - including equally certain certainty-destroying movements - awfully tempting.

And there's just enough '60s in there still to appeal to the '60s in some of the young. But - like the rest of the '60s - it's not quite the right kind of '60s.

(no subject)

Drive seemed to me pretty bad, just another in the recent run of arted-up action movies - compare Hanna, which for some reason married the now aged rave aesthetic to the Bourne Identity premise, and The American which was beautifully photographed and strikingly moody and completely tedious and shitty. These pretty movies are awful dumb. I'm not really sure what the point of attempting dignified presentation of idealess human-squishing would be, especially at the cost of crowding out actual entertainment. I'd claim it as more narcissistic filmmaking but there seems to be an audience for it, hence perhaps it's just successful pandering? An audience I guess consisting of people who want the simple but fear it will be laughed at by someone around or inside them, so fall with relief for something that takes up trappings of complexity but is not in fact complex. So characters stare at each other, or do something one half swerve off from what you expect, and you think, gee, they have thoughts and this movie is about real, fleshy people and their human-type concerns, except not really, no.

Whenever there's such a massive praise fail I tend to assume something's happening with the cultural moment, as for example with the pure godawfulness of Gladiator: Crowe was adding some missing nutrient, for filmgoers and critics, and they gobbled him. And spat him out a few years later and seem a bit retroactively embarrassed, as they maybe also became about Braveheart and Dances with Wolves. Maybe that's what's happening here, something about the heroism? 'We' don't believe a person can be good anymore but need to...and maybe if he does enough bad, but not too bad, before he goes good, and has to do enough bad while staying good, and shuts up so we don't have to try to imagine what credible personality could do the necessary veering and just hope there is one, then we get that hero click.

But some of the praise seems to be for style, which in this case I'd just call stylizings, since there were a bunch of disconnected ones and all amounted to nothing. Is this just the knowingness trap? The film wants us to pick up that it knows it's doing things in a certain way, and we pick up that signal and are flattered to be let in on something but have no idea what it might be, but nod that yes, we totally know, and believe our own nod because we recognize one of the many movies being pointlessly, ostentatiously borrowed from - Thief, Lost Highway, even American Gigolo for some reason? Man, I have a temper today. Movie sucked though - I saw in passing someone comparing it to Mulholland Drive and got super-excited, enough to see it on a weeknight.