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[proximoception]

I bought my father Vidal's collected essay volume, United States, for Christmas '93, mostly to annoy him, and ended up reading it myself and becoming a Vidalhead for a year or two. He gatewayed me to a lot of other authors - like Calvino, who he helped canonize - but I had trouble when coming back to him later, a few of his most personal essays excepted - like the fantastic On Flying. His political writings of the last decade or so have been particularly eyebrow-raising. Still, I must have read more pages by him than by almost any other author, only Bloom and Roth excepted, and Shakespeare counting rereads. He's a person I knew in my head and still know.

Good to see Mulholland Drive at 28 on the new Sight and Sound list (Vertigo's heading it confuses me, but infinitely less than the continuing presence of The Rules of the Game not far behind). Surprising how many movies on that list I've never seen: Sunrise, Man with a Movie Camera, Late Spring, Au hazard Balthazar, Mirror, Stalker, Ordet, Gertrud, Pierrot le fou, Satantango, Close-Up, Jeanne Dielman, Pather Panchali, Journey to Italy, Histoire du cinema, Battle of Algiers, Shoah. I think I tuned out before the end of La Jetee too. Sometime there will be some time.

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[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I guess that's more or less what I was musing about at the end of my Blue Velvet entry a few months back. But Novak's performance may be what most maims Vertigo for me, while Watts is one of the greatest things about MD! Perhaps it's that I believe Watts feels what she's projecting, even if no one would ever behave that way, whereas Novak not so much.

But Vertigo's also tediously overschematic and next to meaningless. Even I know there's something there, hence its being so fertile in imitations, but it's not Loved for meaning, precisely. I wonder about the mothers of the people it appeals to. Maybe it's a veiled variant of Spielberg's A.I., and I lack the proper balance of grievances.