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Jun. 13th, 2012 03:20 pmFool me four hundred twenty-seven times, Lindelof: shame on both of us.
Jun. 13th, 2012
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Jun. 13th, 2012 04:17 pmI'm interested in the "overachievement" excellence category, where there's a certain, usually limited value to your premise you could have coasted on, but for some reason you didn't. But the excellence is all still found within the potential of that premise - is all still structural. You haven't achieved universality, but you've pushed the provincial so far that we're startled to feel some universe blowing through it.
Not thrilled with my ability to explain that, but I can give some examples.
The film Brick - "noir in high school" was going to be done eventually because of inherent cuteness. But not this well. It's not among the greatest noir, but it's ridiculously good given that it's a novelty act. This is a problem recommending it, since people will assume by your enthusiasm that you think it's up with Miller's Crossing. There's a distinct delight when things are much better than they should be, but you kind of kill that for others by resetting the "should" with your praise.
The On a Boat song and video. A little bit of parody would have gone a long way - there was no need for the song to be so musically good and thematically exciting (it makes me want to be on a boat every time). Likewise that literal video version of Toto's Africa I can no longer find anywhere: the original video is completely ridiculous and all one would have had to do was point that out. And I'm not surprised, given my enjoyment of Community, that its creator turns out to be the guy behind Cirque du Soleil: Sex Crimes Investigations, made for a cheap cable sketch show and based on an ass-random juxtaposition. But it's really great! Not great-great, just great given there's no call for it to have been great, which makes it even greater, though also a terrible waste of talent I suppose.
Doubtless you can think of plenty of your own. This may explain a large portion of disappointments in the wake of recommendations - the thing was loved for surpassing or subverting expectations, but the poor recommended-to goes in expecting it to earn her love for its own sake. The Usual Suspects probably meant a lot more to people who'd come to expect little from post-Tarantino crime films past certain kinds of posturing, banter and violence.
I guess this is related to growing up with attachment to genre - detectives, pirates and superheroes are largely ridiculous but were once really cool to some of us. We grew out of taking them seriously but the eggshell fragments are still scattered about our person. Surprisingly profound attachments were made, so you reliably get both lovingly parodic and artistically ambitious revivals a generation or two after the genre's initial splash, neither of them seeming to be called for based on the intrinsic importance or continuing cultural role of that genre, but made sense of by a generation of artists having grown up inside it.
Obviously you can generalize this phenomenon to a lot of other art - Don Quixote, most prominently. Maybe even all of it. But it's at its most bemusing, in some ways most gratifying, seen in genres whose silliness and appeal are both still live inside you somewhere. Taking silliness seriously enough to let it be excellent, that's somehow amazingly enlivening, maybe makes you feel for a second the world could be a place where every whim could be pursued into amplitude. A terrible idea but a lovely thought.
Not thrilled with my ability to explain that, but I can give some examples.
The film Brick - "noir in high school" was going to be done eventually because of inherent cuteness. But not this well. It's not among the greatest noir, but it's ridiculously good given that it's a novelty act. This is a problem recommending it, since people will assume by your enthusiasm that you think it's up with Miller's Crossing. There's a distinct delight when things are much better than they should be, but you kind of kill that for others by resetting the "should" with your praise.
The On a Boat song and video. A little bit of parody would have gone a long way - there was no need for the song to be so musically good and thematically exciting (it makes me want to be on a boat every time). Likewise that literal video version of Toto's Africa I can no longer find anywhere: the original video is completely ridiculous and all one would have had to do was point that out. And I'm not surprised, given my enjoyment of Community, that its creator turns out to be the guy behind Cirque du Soleil: Sex Crimes Investigations, made for a cheap cable sketch show and based on an ass-random juxtaposition. But it's really great! Not great-great, just great given there's no call for it to have been great, which makes it even greater, though also a terrible waste of talent I suppose.
Doubtless you can think of plenty of your own. This may explain a large portion of disappointments in the wake of recommendations - the thing was loved for surpassing or subverting expectations, but the poor recommended-to goes in expecting it to earn her love for its own sake. The Usual Suspects probably meant a lot more to people who'd come to expect little from post-Tarantino crime films past certain kinds of posturing, banter and violence.
I guess this is related to growing up with attachment to genre - detectives, pirates and superheroes are largely ridiculous but were once really cool to some of us. We grew out of taking them seriously but the eggshell fragments are still scattered about our person. Surprisingly profound attachments were made, so you reliably get both lovingly parodic and artistically ambitious revivals a generation or two after the genre's initial splash, neither of them seeming to be called for based on the intrinsic importance or continuing cultural role of that genre, but made sense of by a generation of artists having grown up inside it.
Obviously you can generalize this phenomenon to a lot of other art - Don Quixote, most prominently. Maybe even all of it. But it's at its most bemusing, in some ways most gratifying, seen in genres whose silliness and appeal are both still live inside you somewhere. Taking silliness seriously enough to let it be excellent, that's somehow amazingly enlivening, maybe makes you feel for a second the world could be a place where every whim could be pursued into amplitude. A terrible idea but a lovely thought.