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Jan. 29th, 2014 11:52 pmLa Jetée:
So mortality makes beauty possible, the memory of beauty gives one the ability to find what's needed to survive, but ultimately it isn't you that survives, just the very system that bound you to death in the first place, proving that beauty itself (at least as used) was a trick played on you.
Sounds like a good fit with the genes-vs-vessel conflict I'm most interested in. I'm unsure I'm not stretching it to fit that, though - the preoccupation with technology might be just what it looks like, after all, with the time travel merely representing how a fully technologized (and de-natured) world is ultimately founded on the acts of imagination of natural persons and desires. The whispering German (rather than Russian or American) scientists suggest that, fitting (e.g.) Night and Fog's closing argument that the influence of technology on society was the cause of the Nazi atrocities. The fully technologized people don't seem so bad, but a) theirs is no place for someone with natural desires and b) if you think about it their world would seem to be predicated on this guy's turning down their offer - meaning they knew he wouldn't take it, conceivably because they were party to these manipulations.
The far future was associated with unicellular life, I believe? That could either mean Marker associates them with lack of variety (contrasted with the animals in the scene of completed contact with his sought-for image), hence a step back, or that they're the entities - finally, apocalyptically embodied - that popped up way back when. Is Marker anticipating depictions of genetic influences AS technologies, like Lynch's eraser factory, Carruth's flower drugs? Makes sense of the prior, bodily implication within the system suggested by the loop. But presumably some other interpretation could be provided by the inorganic technology camp, like how photographs make beauty, even teach minds to photograph and enslave themselves to what they've made.
Forgot to add: If the organics have it, though, Marker's time inversion anticipates something central to an even more impressive fiction: Little, Big.
So mortality makes beauty possible, the memory of beauty gives one the ability to find what's needed to survive, but ultimately it isn't you that survives, just the very system that bound you to death in the first place, proving that beauty itself (at least as used) was a trick played on you.
Sounds like a good fit with the genes-vs-vessel conflict I'm most interested in. I'm unsure I'm not stretching it to fit that, though - the preoccupation with technology might be just what it looks like, after all, with the time travel merely representing how a fully technologized (and de-natured) world is ultimately founded on the acts of imagination of natural persons and desires. The whispering German (rather than Russian or American) scientists suggest that, fitting (e.g.) Night and Fog's closing argument that the influence of technology on society was the cause of the Nazi atrocities. The fully technologized people don't seem so bad, but a) theirs is no place for someone with natural desires and b) if you think about it their world would seem to be predicated on this guy's turning down their offer - meaning they knew he wouldn't take it, conceivably because they were party to these manipulations.
The far future was associated with unicellular life, I believe? That could either mean Marker associates them with lack of variety (contrasted with the animals in the scene of completed contact with his sought-for image), hence a step back, or that they're the entities - finally, apocalyptically embodied - that popped up way back when. Is Marker anticipating depictions of genetic influences AS technologies, like Lynch's eraser factory, Carruth's flower drugs? Makes sense of the prior, bodily implication within the system suggested by the loop. But presumably some other interpretation could be provided by the inorganic technology camp, like how photographs make beauty, even teach minds to photograph and enslave themselves to what they've made.
Forgot to add: If the organics have it, though, Marker's time inversion anticipates something central to an even more impressive fiction: Little, Big.
