Images Matter

Thomas Merton paraphrasing Hegel:

History–the judgment not of intentions only, nor of consequences only, but of the measure in which values have passed into facts by virtue of free action.

I heard a man in a meeting say that the only thing he could hope to do about the wreckage of his past was outlive it. When I read the above passage I am reminded that my life in recovery is not the philosophy that I read, the lessons that I learn, nor the dreams that I have. When I have been living within my compulsive behavior, every wisdom I have been exposed to or espoused has been nothing more than a futile intellectualization. My intentions were frequently noble, but without any action to make those intentions enacted life choices. The consequences of my compulsive behavior were frequently devastating, debilitating, or even shame-inducing. But my history is not just the futility of intention, nor the wreckage of consequence; my history is one of recovery. Choosing a sponsor, so that I could learn from his wisdom, was a value past into fact. Attending a meeting is a value that passes into fact. Listening to people share about what they are doing in recovery gives me new material to enact on a daily basis, and every day I physically try something in recovery (attempting honesty, keeping a gratitude list) I write another line in my history. A history that outlives the wreckage of my past and is a true reflection of my values because at the end of the day, those values have past into fact by virtue of free actions, not intellectualizations, but actions.

From Thomas Merton’s A Vow of Conversation:

“The artist who recognizes and loves his own style to the great damage of his work, the style being imagined as himself. At this point he begins to know and will his style, as it were, without contact with the world outside, whereas, in reality, the style is only a by-product of that contact. Thus you get style without contact, style without communication which is nevertheless accepted as communication.”

One can’t resist placing the work of Tarantino within the framework of this passage. His films, while being hailed as innovative, and as being in dialogue with the genre of exploitation films actually read as nothing more than a closed system in which the only contact is between the filmmaker and his own cinematic monologue. Exploitation films carried social commentary. What message does Tarantino’s supposed dialogue with that commentary deliver other than “I like the style of exploitation films”? His films don’t reflect any contact with the world outside, but rather, a rigid contract with the knowledge of his own style, which communicates a singular appreciation of that knowledge, and, as Merton suggests, is nevertheless accepted as communication (with the spectator). If films can also be consumed as mere entertainment, and should not be held to the moralistic mandate of having “meaning”, isn’t being entertained by a Tarantino film the equivalent of giggling at the man on the street who gesticulates wildly and rants while deeply engaged with his own internal stimuli?

The question remains, why does the mainstream spectator seem so ready to accept, appreciate, and laud an artist who is suffering the damage of his great work, imagining it to be himself, and communicating with nobody but himself?

I should have no desire to watch a film that stylizes violence for visual pleasure, nor glorifies violence as something to emulate. In the physical world I live in, I have been exposed to: a bloody woman at my back gate asking for help after appearing to have been raped, helicopters circling my neighborhood after shots were heard in the night, people shot and killed in neighborhood businesses, gunfire within the apartment directly below me, and shotgun wielding police outside my apartment door—and I haven’t lived in the absolute poorest neighborhoods. Whenever a filmmaker invites me to escape from my life for two hours, and spend ten dollars for parking, fifteen dollars for admission, and another fifteen for popcorn and a diet soda while I do it, I’d like it to be a film that does not encourage me to desensitize myself to my violent world, nor remove from me the defensive mechanisms that I need to recognize the dangers of my physical world. If as a filmmaker you want to array a seductive soundtrack and choreograph violence within a hyper-stylized template that offers an end result that can only be described as a false consciousness, I invite you to utilize the wealth you’ve amassed, and finance an epic, 3D, CGI-laden blockbuster of you fucking off.

Even the marked fluttering of the projector seemed to enhance the movie experience as DiCaprio drew deep from his seemingly fathomless depths of acting chops, and Scorsese deftly arrayed both familiar riffs (his ubiquitously present steadicam shot circling a stationary subject) and novel hooks (perhaps the longest and most realistically violent tracking shot that I can recall) to weave an ensnaring cinematic web that traces a parallel exploration of clinical psychosis and the mythological journey to the dark underworld of the unconscious. The only subjective critique that I can levy is against the young couple sitting in front of me who thought it was a paternally mature idea to bring their whining and chattering three year old to an archetypal tale about madness directed by a modern master known for creating visceral and horrifying images of violence; an example of delusional ideation that demonstrates both antisocial tendencies and borderline child abuse.

Shutter Island - Trailer

When Quentin Tarantino repositions the classic Hollywood hero into a fantasy re-inscribing of humanity’s moral failure during World War II, he encourages the spectator of Inglourious Basterds to withdraw from the problematic ethical responsibility that is implied in our own history as participants. It is in this fantasy avoidance of taking responsibility for our own historical transgressions by focusing on the virtuous white heterosexual male hero of Hollywood that I sadly call Green Zone the thinking person’s Inglourious Basterds.

Green Zone - Trailer

Effective film trade-craft involves supporting the text of the narrative with the conventions used to physically make the film, such as the choice to use handheld camera work to reinforce the idea of a chaotic or unstable story world. In the case of The Ghost Writer, the reverse is happening in so much that volitionally placed symbolism representing exercises in futility—sweeping up leaves in the wind, riding a bicycle in deep sinking gravel—reinforces the real-life, non-story world in which the filmmakers’ fielding of an intellectually blunted, emotionally inanimate, and wholly uninspired movie is futility in its purest form.

The Ghost Writer - Trailer

If mainstream American cinema resembles an illicit drug, in that it is an incredibly powerful, high-stimulus substance that occupies the mind while simultaneously fomenting passivity, then Hollywood is the prototypical pusher, vending an overpriced product without regard for the long-term effects that habitual users encounter. And if a simple representation of addiction that eschews cinematic hyperbole and follows a more straightforward and reserved method of film trade-craft can be said to serve as an intervention for the typical addict qua moviegoer, then I strongly recommend that you take the first step in recovery and begin treatment by viewing Crazy Heart.

Crazy Heart - Official Trailer

If the right-wing complaints against Avatar are true, that the film makes an explicit statement against colonial militarism and wanton, conspicuous consumption of natural resources while attempting to violently dominate a native culture, then the implicit statement made within the film– that the native culture is best served by a white military man who not only speaks for the culture but becomes its de facto saviour and is rewarded for such with the sexual favors of it’s first daughter–belies a problematic left-wing position that seems to be unaware of its own xenophobia which keeps “the other” at an objectified and safe distance through an unmistakable process of exoticization. However, I must recuse myself from commenting further on the above, owing to my complete absorption during the film with my own post-colonialist desire to cop a peek at the barely and yet tantalizingly obscured and exoticized “nipples of color”.

Avatar - Official Trailer

Are the flight attendants stationed in the front of the aircraft more attractive than the ones in the back?

Is the aircraft choreographed the way one might imagine a stage would be in a corporate “theater in the cylinder”, with the physically gorgeous actors performing in what would be considered “downstage”, visible to the highest paying spectators and embodying the corporate narrative with allure, while the Plain Jane with unfortunate skin slums it back in the “cheap seats” and is watched by significantly less spectators secondary to a seating design that mimicks the forward facing array found in classrooms, churches, and courtrooms where there is always a singular performer occupying a central locus of agency?

If so, the person in power is at the head of the class, seated on the bench, or behind the altar, displaying her body like a seductively kinetic corporate pamphlet; and she’s an airborne knockout available only by upgrading to first class.

If an actual, physical, American road is the most apt symbol for the trajectory of United States culture and civilization, from Lewis and Clark’s pragmatic and disciplined forging across the North American continent, to Jack Kerouac’s open road of modern bohemianism, then the film The Road symbolically plots that trajectory across a not only dead, but entirely decomposed landscape where humans are reduced to such a primordial need for survival, concepts like tragedy and cruelty are as numbingly distant as morality and kindness. And if the final destination of that metaphorical road is an equally dead and empty ocean, the paradoxical origin of this planet’s life in totality, then this film was a faithfully executed exploration of the most untrammelled nihilism, completely devoid of both the covertly narcissistic phenomenon of ennui, and any conventional cinematic representations of good and evil.

The Road- Official Movie Trailer