Nov 24, 2009 0
Paul Auster, novelist and poet, talks about why the novel, and the book, will persist in the digital age.
The complete interview with Auster is available at Big Think. Auster was responding to Phil Roth’s gloomy prediction of the novel’s future:
The full interview with Roth is on the Daily Beast’s Vimeo page.
Nov 22, 2009 0
In to the Uncanny Valley
Joe Kloc, SEED Magazine Online
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/uncanny_valley/P2/
In Seed Magazine, Joe Kloc reports on PNAS findings that monkeys exhibit uncanny-valley-like-rejection of computerized/robotic monkeys. He also considers the history of (psuedo-) scientific explanations of uncanny valley, discussing Freud’s thoughts on the matter and the writings/works of roboticist Masahiro Mori. Kloc looks at how scientific explanations for the uncanny valley phenomenon are proceeding:
It has been suggested, for instance, that we avoid almost human figures because their peculiarities make them look sick, and we have developed an evolutionary mechanism for steering clear of pathogens. Another theory posits that we avoid figures with features slightly off from our own because they appear to be less-than-ideal mating material.
[Asif] Ghazanfar rejects all of these hypotheses. “What is really going on is much simpler,” he says. He believes the uncanny valley response occurs because an animal—human or nonhuman—is evolutionarily inclined to develop an expectation of what members of its species should look like, a supremely important skill, as it lets the animal know with whom it can and cannot interact.
In this sense, life-like robotic and computer-generated models occupy a weird middle ground in an animal’s mind: They are familiar enough for the animal to consider the possibility that they are of the same species, but strange enough that they don’t quite meet the expectation the animal has developed for members of its species. “Any face that violates that expectation is going to elicit the uncanny response,” Ghazanfar says.
Related Readings
Nov 2, 2009 0
In Harpers, Ursula Le Guin writes about how the end of books will not happen any time soon. She considers how book readers these days are readers by choice, since reading is no longer the activity of requirement, popular entertainment, or status that it used to be:
Even during what I have called the “century of the book,” when it was taken for granted that many people read and enjoyed fiction and poetry, how many people in fact had or could make much time for reading once they were out of school? During those years most Americans worked hard and worked long hours. Weren’t there always many who never read a book at all, and never very many who read a lot of books? We don’t know how many, because we didn’t have polls to worry us about it.
[...]
“If people make time to read, it’s because it’s part of their jobs, or other media aren’t readily available, or they aren’t much interested in them—or because they enjoy reading. Lamenting over percentage counts induces a moralizing tone: It is bad that we don’t read; we should read more; we must read more. Concentrating on the drowsy fellow in Dallas, perhaps we forget our own people, the hedonists who read because they want to. Were such people ever in the majority?”
Le Guin’s is concerned for the future of books, but it is not too much of a technological concern. Rather, she observes that much of the trouble for books comes from publishers:
Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.
[...]
[According to CEO's] a “good book” means a high gross and a “good writer” is one whose next book can be guaranteed to sell better than the last one. That there are no such writers is of no matter to the corporationeers, who don’t comprehend fiction even if they run their lives by it. Their interest in books is self-interest, the profit that can be made out of them—or occasionally, for the top executives, the Murdochs and other Merdles, the political power they can wield through them; but that is merely self-interest again, personal profit.
As Le Guin’s is saying, the big publishers and book sellers mainly promote and sell mass market, disposable books (whether hard or paper bound) in order to turn quick profits. This reminded me of something I read by writer and programmer, Paul Graham,
I can see the evolution of book publishing in the books on my shelves. Clearly at some point in the 1960s the big publishing houses started to ask: how cheaply can we make books before people refuse to buy them? The answer turned out to be one step short of phonebooks. As long as it isn’t floppy, consumers still perceive it as a book.
Graham’s broader point is that book publishers have come around to the idea that they sell media more than they sell physical objects, but that book publishers cannot sell books the same way movie and music studios sell their content.
The book, regardless of its form, is consumed with special care that Le Guin describes beautifully,
But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not “interactive” with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.
Oct 15, 2009 0
 Into the Dark: Seeing the Sacred in the Top Films of the 21st Century By Craig Detweiler Baker Academic, 2008. 320 pages |
 Through a Screen Darkly: Looking Closer and Beauty, Truth, and Evil in the Movies ByOverstreet Regal Books, 2008. 340 pages |
 Chasing Light: Looking for God in the Movies By Roy Anker Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2004. 402 pages |
In the past decade, an astounding number of books and websites have attempted to divine the Christian meaning and value of film. I am going to call this writing Christian film criticism, which is the most used term on the web and in other books. Christian is always a tricky term to use, but I think it’s the best1. “Critic” is also a complicated word to use, and Christian writers span from Roger and Ebert to academic style criticism— not to mention the usage of criticism meaning disapproval, which there is also plenty of. There’s a blog article, What on Earth is Christian Film Criticism, that does well at considering both of these terms. I really didn’t know that there were so many books about Christian film criticism until I started reading them. I’ve read parts of most of the books available, but there is a fair amount of overlap in these books and some of these books are poorer in quality and relevance2 Because of this overlap, and to be more concise, I’ll limit my survey to a few of these books, and I’ll consider in detail only three more recent, popular books: Through a Screen Darkly, by Jeffery Overstreet, In to the Dark, by Craig Detweiler, and Catching Light: Finding God in the Movies, by Roy Anker. Here is a more comprehensive list of books, which I’ve been reading:
Every Christian writing on film (that I could find) used, reused and overused metaphors of light and dark: “light in a dark world”; “divine light”; “chasing the light (of God)”; “being freed and absorbed by light”; “a hint of God’s light (peaking through darkness)”—I could go on. In Chasing Light, Roy Anker writes for several pages, in technical detail, about the process of making movies— that is exposing film to light. In many cases, as it is in Chasing Light, these light/dark metaphors are central to the writer’s purpose. The critic’s self-proposed task is to praise films that shed light on beauty and also understand the darker, unexposed parts of film. In most of these books, light is primarily a metaphor for the theology of general revelation. General revelationists believe that truth of a Christian God is revealed in the natural universe and common human events. General revelation is really a placeholder for anything that is not special revelation, which is the authoritative revelation of God i.e. the Bible. There is an important feature to general revelation, what Calvinist and other Protestants call common grace: it is evidence of God’s goodness plainly evident to all humans, including non-believers. As Craig Detweiler in Into the Dark explains,
God began with a beautiful creative act incarnated by Jesus. He is the most arresting image of God, the embodiment of kingdom ethics, and the ultimate lived Truth. We proceed with confidence because the Spirit behind the beauty of creation and the mystery of redemption is also the source of our discernment. We walk by faith, not by fear.
The notion of discernment is an important part of general revelation. Many Christian critics assert that the natural tendency of moviegoers is to have their morals corroded and their baser instincts stroked. But with discernment the Christian viewer can parse the bad parts of film (sin) from the good (the revelation of God)— they can “catch light”. Jeffery Overstreet, who writes reviews for Christianity Today and an online collection of reviews, Looking Closer, says that “The sacred is waiting to be recognized in secular things. Even those artists who don’t believe in God might accidentally reflect back to us realities in which we can see God working.” He will, with discernment, guide the reader into the dark world of Hollywood. But:
[I]sn’t this a dangerous endeavor? You bet you life. (And that isn’t all that we will bet?) There are dangers: pieces of broken glass, glimpses of death, and obscenities spray-painted everywhere. We’ve done a bang-up job of polluting God’s world and making paths to glory fraught with peril.
I recently read the book Rapture Ready, wherein I was introduced to John Howard and John Streck’s useful explanation of how contemporary christian music (CCM) artists abstain from or assimilate into secular, pop music. In Howard and Streck’s book Apostles of Rock: The Splintered World of Contemporary Christian Music, Christian artists are placed in three camps, separationalist, integrationalist, and transformationalist: the seperationalists are completely cloistered in the CCM world, the make indisputably Christian tunes for a Christian audience; integrationists, while their audience is still primarily Christian, are welcome to mainstream exposure; they cross-over the secular world with palatable, Jesus-is-my-boyfriend-style pop; transformatinoalist artists are harder to define because they are outsiders, and diversely so3. These categories are also useful for considering how evangelicals experience film. Christians who write books about Christians watching films are integrationalists, and sometimes separationalists. These writers are adamant that secular film is meaningful to a Christian worldview and instructive to everyday life, but they have selective, complex rules for what makes a film good. Sometimes these critics negatively critique a film for reasons of morality, or what you could call prudishness. But this is the case less than you might suspect. The question of a film’s goodness, rather, is measured by how well it shows the light of God or the darkness of evil. Detweiler describes this as a process, “from art (beauty) to ethics (goodness) to theology (truth)”. Films that show the darkness and “sinfulness” of creation are also to be appreciated, provided that dark and sinful characters are met with redemption or some other cinematic situation that demonstrates the emptiness of life without God’s redemption e.g. despair or death. Indecency and obscenity, while they are seen as unnecessary and gratuitous, are often ignored (with a couple of notable exceptions, which I’ll address later). Sexing and boozing hardly bother these writers in contrast to a much darker, more dangerous presence in films these days, moral relativism. Again, I’ll get to this later on.
To best summarize what I learned about the subject matter of the books I’ve read, I’ll just list the majority of subjects:
Babette’s Feast is a film that all Christian critics seem to gravitate towards. Directed by Gabriel Axel, Babette’s Feast is an adaption of a Isak Dinesen’s short story of the same name. It’s a simple story about two pietistic, unwed, elderly sisters in rural Denmark (Jutland). The film’s climax is manifest in a single meal: A talented parisian cook, Babette Hersant, serves the sisters for a number of years as a humble cook; then one day, Babette wins a Paris lottery, receiving 10,000 francs, and invests these winnings in a large, opulent feast, which the religious sisters deride as decadent:
[The sisters] decide to consume the feast but refuse to celebrate it, offering it up as reparation for sin. At the banquet is an army general who remembers enjoying a similar feast at the hands of Paris’s most celebrated chef, a woman. Babette remains unseen though out dinner, but despite all resistance, her meal has a dramatic effect on the diners. Stories are shared, enmities resolved, and new unity celebrated.6
Beyond Christian allusions to the last supper and the woman who perfumed Jesus’ feet, Christian critics see Babette’s Feast as a defense of joie de vivre in Christian life. It’s a argument against self-denial and retraction from pleasure, Godly or secular. Reading the various writing on Babette’s Feast is tiresome because there is so much agreement and redundancy between critics. The more I read, the more I found it difficult to decide which ideas are fresh and which are derived, but overall the writing seems to be derived, with many paraphrases and little attribution. But all the writing about the film helped me to better appreciate how Christian critics measure greatness in film. Consider how Roy Ankler swoons over Axel’s work:
Babette’s Feast is a quiet, lyrical drama, slow and painterly in style, packed with delicate but potent images that go to where words cannot stretch, even though virtually the whole story is set in the unpromising setting of a remote and unexciting place among mostly obscure, unexciting people. But it covers a great deal of territory cinematically, intellectually. and religiously— as only a few rare films have. In giving visual life to lsak Dinesen’s fetching story, screenwriter-director Axel makes plausible the toughest of all propositions, whether in cinema. literature, church, or anywhere: that God shows up in human affairs. that divine light does indeed shine, even in the most unexpected places and amid the manifold disappointment of human life. That comes as great surprise to the characters, including the religious ones, and even more to viewers, especially the jaded among them. The three elements that bind the whole of Babette’s Feast together are surprise, splendor, and love. The divine light becomes in this film a palpable manifestation of divine love.
Interestingly, Anker goes on to explain that Babette’s Feast show us how Christians best understand beauty, as they are closer to its source:
Axel’s telling of Dinesen’s Story suggests that because of its notions of divine love, the Christian community is the group most capable of imbibing and grasping the artist’s adoration of a world steeped in sensuous beauty, a beauty that is graceful in its own right and betokens the love of the God who put it there in the first place, It is this notion of a world framed by divine love and for love that lies at the center of Babette’s Feast.
Detweiler poses a related question that complicates this view. Pointing out the vapidity of most Christian pop culture, like CCM, he asks Christians “if you are in touch with the creator, shouldn’t you be the most creative.” As Anker admits, Babette’s Feast, despite winning an Academy Award, is not well-known among secular audiences. So, Detweiler says the Christian critic and artist must go into the dark and engage with the secular world. He says that there should not be sub-cultural art or conversations about art in the Christian world. This critic is like Babette, requesting that abstemious folks in the Christian community look at the beauty in the outside world. Surprisingly, many of the critics discussing Babette’s Feast don’t seem to notice or comment on this parallel with their own writing.
Jeffery Overstreet did make this connection. He recounts that he was moved by films like Babette’s Feast to provide a better online discussion of secular film: “I wanted to try writing about film the way C.S. Lewis wrote about books.” However, after reading his reviews on Looking Closer and reading his book, I question how closely he really looks at film, which leads me to a more detailed aside about Overstreet’s writing. Overstreet’s anecdotes and stories are a little too neat7, and one may suspect him of making things up. Overstreet boast of interviews conducted in “The God Room,” where filmmakers and actors discuss the religious relevance of forthcoming films. In one such interview, Overstreet talked with Patrice Leconte, director of Les Bronzes (French Fried Vacation), Intimate Strangers, and Man on the Train.
“Why are you so preoccupied with stories about temptation and about characters who must decide whether or not to transgress an ethical boundary?” Leconte responds, “There is something very curious and interesting in what you are saying. There is nothing more interesting than meeting someone who casts new light on your work. I have never thought about it, but you are absolutely right in what you say about the obsession in my movies main characters. It’s true that the situations revolve around the temptation of transgressing something that is forbidden… Thanks for shedding some light on my work .. I’m a filmmaker of transgression.”
While we could certainly read an irony or playfulness in Leconte’s answer, Overstreet is satisfied to leave it here, with no examination of what Leconte means by transgression. In this way, I found Overstreet to be self- referential and congratulatory8 about his position as a critic but to fall short of his professed task as a critic. Sometimes Overstreet corrects this impression with modesty:
If I hadn’t been paying attention, I would have missed them. This tells me that I’ve missed thousands of other meaningful moments along the way. So I go back, again and again. I pursue conversations with other moviegoers to learn what they saw so that I can fill in more of the picture. I want to learn how to train my attention and judge what is meaningful and what isn’t. In a word, I want to learn discretion.
Yet, I kept finding that Overstreet only looks closely at certain types of films, like Babette’s Feast. He’s too forthright with his druthers and not curious enough to understand films that he dislikes. Other parts of Overstreet’s film writing are short-sighted. A small example of this is his response to A.O. Scott’s review of The House of Sand and Fog,
[Scott] in The New York Times described it as “the story of two rights adding up to a monstrous wrong.” I’m not sure what he means by that. He is right in saying “There are no clear villains, no serendipitous, life-altering accidents, only the slow, inexorable escalation of hasty decisions and excusable lapses in judgment toward an unbearable final catastrophe.” It all adds up to “wrong,” but where are the “rights”? Certainly, the protagonists desire the right things, but they go about pursuing them in self-centered and heartless ways.
Overstreet misses the intentional double meaning of “rights”. It’s the belief in American rights, like the pursuit of happiness, that causes conflict in the film. A small mistake, but is suggests that Overstreet’s focus on matters of morality prevent him from finding deeper meaning in the film9. I’d like to move on from the pastoral to the galactic, but I should first discuss another case where morals cause this critic to stumble.
The following statement augurs trouble ahead, “I have several gay friends, and I value their friendship, even if we disagree on some issues.” In his review of Brokeback Mountain, Overstreet is honest in his belief the homosexuality is sinful, but he also seems to want the reader to understand that he believes homosexuality is no worse than any other sin (that the writer is not bigoted):
“Brokeback Mountain is a film in which all kinds of people engage in all manner of wrongdoing. Yes, there are two men who hastily plunge into an intimate sexual bond, and as a result, their relationship narrows to become an unhealthy sexual obsession rather than a flourishing friendship and love – they become enslaved to their lust, and it disrupts the rest of their lives. But there are also heterosexual people guilty of violent hatred, and heterosexuals who engage in hasty sex soon after meeting [...] “All of us, if we’re honest, can relate to the story of Jack and Ennis. Their story is the human story, from the Garden of Eden to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to Hamlet to The Lord of the Rings to Grizzly Man: At one time or another, we have all transgressed… we’ve pursued something we wanted, something that wasn’t what was best for us, without regard for the consequences our actions would have on each other, on the future, and on the world around us. Human desire oversteps its bounds, we are weakened by our inappropriate appetites, and it costs us something. That’s the real story of Brokeback Mountain.”
But this and Overstreet’s other remarks about Brokeback Mountain belie this idea. Homosexual transgression is not just sin, it is original sin. Gay love is the enemy of empathy:
“In the moment Jack and Ennis plunge into sex together, their relationship changes. You’ll see it happen as the story progresses. Their deepening care and understanding stops. They become controlled by and obsessed with their sexual connection. Their days of rich and flourishing friendship are numbered.”
Futhermore, Overstreet’s review starts to read like notes from a Narth meeting:
“Families and the church have failed these two men, it seems.”
And,
“We can surely feel compassion for Jack and Ennis, grieved that they grew up in such a harsh and lonely world, where they have not seen a good model of heterosexual intimacy, where they know nothing of God, and where they thus believe they can only find fulfillment in each other. By letting their sex drives lead them, they weaken their freewill. They submit to a master that does not know reason.”
Star Wars is a cosmic, well-packaged fabulation of good, evil, and (spiritual) force. As Anker writes,
“Against all odds, then, wrapped in the pop space western that is Star Wars, lies a fetching, luminous, and finally exultant fable of a holy trust, apprenticeship, and pilgrimage that culminates in a resplendent vision of servanthood, reconciliation, and a winsome portrait of the new creation that awaits the cosmos”
It’s no surprise, then, that nearly all Christian film critics write about the film and resoundingly like it10. Not all Christians feel the same admiration for Star Wars, however. They claim that the spirituality in the trilogy is too much like New Age and/or Buddhist beliefs. They are seperationalists— it’s not cinema, it is the “sinema”. But such detractors are clearly on the fringe, and probably don’t watch movies in the first place. Really, Star Wars is one of only a handful of films that are both entertaining (for kids and adults) and not offensive, and is therefore shown in churches all around the U.S. (Princess Bride is another example of this category of movie.)
This curmudgeonly set is worth bringing up only because diplomatic counter-arguments are made to this group by Overstreet, Detweiler, and Stone. Films that are colossally moral or spiritual are a good place to begin an argument about how secular movies provide spiritual enrichment. In Faith and Film, Brian Stone writes, “Though the Force of Star Wars resembles elements of Zen philosophy and ancient Chinese Taoism11, it also has characteristics that make it an interesting dialogue partner for reflecting on the Christian affirmation ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit.’” Using the Hebrew scriptures as his guide, Stone goes on, in tedious detail, to explain the commonality between the Holy Spirit and the Force in Star Wars. Stone’s broader point is that “[m]ovies do not merely portray a world; they propagate a worldview.” He argues that by merely objecting to sinful Hollywood values is not enough: “We must also become more responsible as Christians for engaging film theologically. [...] The relationship between Christian theology and popular film is, in short, an interfaith dialogue.”
In God and the Movies, Bergson and Greeley posit that God is portrayed in micro and macro ways in film. The macro portrayals of God are often epic Science Fiction and Fantasy movies, Star War being a prime example. The macro God is also cast in films with elements of magical realism they say:
“The God of magical realism is a God of enormous power, a God who can make bells ring even when there are no bells, a God how causes a spring garden to bloom overnight despite the snow, a God who saves a drowning man in a body of a whale, a God who can send the dead back to free a survivor of paralyzing grief.”
At first, I was lost in a discussion of magical realism because I only know this term in the literary sense, in the writings of Angela Carter or Garcia Marquez, but the writers go on to include films such as Like Water for Chocolate and What Dreams May Come, which seem more compatible with the term. Bergson and Greely’s point is that god-like forces, and evil forces, are revealed in both small and fantastic situations in films like Star Wars. The small revelations, like the moment “[w]hen Luke turn off his targeting computer and opened himself to pray for God’s help,” as Overstreet writes, taught us how to pray. An then there’s the big picture, which Anker writes about:
“Obi-Wan is after nothing less than the defeat of Darkness[sic]12 itself, the metaphysical power that seeks to destroy all that is good in the world.”
Additionally, Anker has a nice way of explaining the spiritual significance of the trilogy of the 1970 and 80s in contrast with the 2000s trilogy: “The future of the Star Wars saga lies in its past… [T]he first of the original trilogy to be filmed showed how light comes out of darkness. The trilogy now underway shows how darkness emerges from light, how people and societies come to lose harmony and hope.” Why is it, though, that even in epic films the largest displays of spirituality are usually the darkest ones— the portrayal of evil? Why is it that God does not, in the world we live in, reveal his light in miracles or any other heuristic events? Why must Christians insist of things like the resurrection, the virgin birth, and the intelligent design of the universe? Or as Lars Von Trier13 wonders ,
“The general assumption is that all people are able to differentiate more or less equally between good and evil. But if this is the case, why does the world look like it does? Why have all the good intentions of my parents come to nothing. And why do my own good intentions lead to nothing?”
I’ll leave these question aside, beside having just asked them. But I must point out that majority of Christian criticism is not about the beauty and truth of God in film, but rather about the absence of God.
You will find in Christian criticism that metaphors of darkness and light extend to all types of dichotomies: beauty vs. ugliness, decency vs. obscenity, absolution vs. relativism, the certain vs. the unknown, and so forth and so on. In writings on contemporary secular film, especially the many films that withhold any general or morals truths about the human condition, Christian critics exhibit near obsession with binaries of purpose vs. nihilism or religious enlightenment vs. fractured, postmodern meaninglessness. Detweiler is notably different in this regard. Detweiler blogs about working toward understanding between religious and secular, postmodern culture. He argues that movies are a good place for Christians to learn from a fractured, postmodern world. In his book, Into the Dark, he considers many of the films in the Internet Movie Database’s user-ranked list of the 250 Movies14, which is, as Detweiler admits, an odd list. Of course, the demotic and non-authoritative nature of the list is the reason Detweiler chose it, it samples the films people watch and talk about, not just canonical film. While Detweiler is fun to read, his book is not cohesive or well-organized and much of what he writes doesn’t make sense, critically or semantically. He will casually uses Biblical words, phrases, and allusions in any given sentence. It’s easy to miss his point or be perplexed by his point all together. Consider this statement,
Art and commerce met in the films created by Hollywood’s “holy trinity” of Coppola, Spielberg, and Lucas. Francis Ford Coppola served as the literal godfather to a new generation of filmmakers fresh out of film school.
Or one of my favorites,
Despite our unprecedented financial and scientific success in the modern era, the twenty-first century can be characterized as a return to the Dark ages
Here he writes about the films of Quentin Tarantino,
Like John the Baptist crying in the wilderness, Tarantino was a forerunner for the messy, transcendent movies that have followed.
And he later on continues,
To some, his success signaled the decline of Western civilization. But to dedicated fanboys (and girls), Tarantino’s unlikely rise demonstrates the newer, democratic possibilities of filmmaking, film criticism, and even theology: general revelation in action.
And there is more,
Quentin Tarantino married postmodern surfaces and brutal violence with the transcendent possibilities of film. Tarantino’s disciples were inspired by the psychic power of cinema to simultaneously outrage and inspire. While some were attracted to Tarantino’s higher calling, other unleashed even flashier (and emptier) forms of film noir.
These cryptic comments about Tarantino bring me to one of Detweiler’s main topics. Detweiler describes a resurgence of film noir and oddly identifies Tarantino has one of the most important figures in this movement, further placing Darren Aronofsky, Christopher Nolan, Alejandro Gonzales, and Guy Ritchie as Tarantino’s disciples. I had difficulty following Detweiler’s definition of film noir15, but I think I understand his broader point. He is arguing that in dark (noir) films sin bears itself out in the “grim consequences of a world without God”; indeed he says Richard Rodriguez’s16 Sin City is the “apothesis of film noir.” “Film noir at its best reveals our cold, cold hearts. It understands the murderous impulses that lurk beneath our civil veneer,” he summarizes.
Just like other critics, Detweiler professes the belief that to be human is to act sinfully. The real difference between Detweiler and other critics, in my reading, is that Detweiler argues that Christian’s should be willing to see and discuss any serious or popular film. He says that Christian is not an adjective. I took this as a rhetorical statement, since Christian is more of an adjective, a type of person or belief system, than it is a noun: Christian should not be a genre or label for art and Christian values should not be a measure of a movie’s watchability. It’s odd then, in his writing on postmodern art, when Detweiler regularly uses postmodern as an adjective; the suggestion seeming to be that postmodernity is not a cultural or historical trend, it’s a movement or a point-of-view. The same goes for moral relativism, which is not a trend from scientific or humanistic facts on the ground, but it too is a political, anti-Christian movement. Again, unlike others, Detweiler is not denouncing the glorification of sin and nihilism in movies these days. He tries to avoid accusing filmmakers of playing tricks on us, manipulating emotions, or tempting an audience into sin. Detweiler wants people to watch films as an occasion for understanding: ”Only when we agree that we have things worth discussing, convictions worth dying for, can we engage in meaningful dialogue.” Still, I did not do very well in understanding much of Detweiler’s book, partly because of the cant and mushy language he uses, and I often suspected that he was trying to appear more open-minded about certain films than he really was.
But these writers are compelled to be spiritual guides as much as they are critics.18 I’ve tried to describe differences in opinion among Christian writers on film as much as I’ve pointed out accordance. But the trend of seeing beauty, darkness, and truth— limiting notions in their own right— as strict, religious terms stands out in all of these writings. And I find that this tendency impedes the critics’ understanding of and imagination for the power of film. For example, is there room left in this view for how Jean-Luc Godard defines truth and beauty: “Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.” Or, how close can we look at certain films before we go blind?
Oct 10, 2009 0
I just found this extensive interview with Lars Von Trier from a few years back, in Sight and Sound, a translation of an interview in Die Ziet:
Die Zeit: Lars von Trier, who in your opinion has the power in an interview situation, the interviewer or the interviewee?
Lars von Trier: I could try to insist on a symbolic power. I could lay down the rule that during this talk you have to address me as King Lars. I could threaten to leave the room if you disobeyed. But that would do nothing to change the fact that in an interview, the same rules apply as in cinema. No matter what happens during the filming process, the power is in the hands of the editor. You havethe scissors in your hands so you have absolute power.
[...]
[Question...]
Lars von Trier: I come from a family of communist nudists. I was allowed to do or not do what I liked. My parents were not interested in whether I went to school or got drunk on white wine. After a childhood like that, you search for restrictions in your own life.
But communists actually have very strict rules.
[...]
[Question...]
Lars von Trier: That’s true, but that’s where things start to get very complicated. All my life I’ve been interested in the discrepancy between philosophy and reality, between conviction and its implementation. The general assumption is that all people are able to differentiate more or less equally between good and evil. But if this is the case, why does the world look like it does? Why have all the good intentions of my parents come to nothing. And why do my own good intentions lead to nothing?
There’s that wonderful guiding principle: always leave the toilette as you found it. Or: do unto others as you would have them do to you. Kant was right. It’s just that his imperative is a bit unspecific. But it is nevertheless one of the best guidelines for how people should live together. Apart from that I believe a society should treat its weaker members well. And that is not something that happens over there in America.
Die Ziet: Should we be thinking more about George W. Bush‘s sexuality?
Lars Von Trier: He’s a sexual being too and his psyche is very important for us all. I think he’s in love with Condoleezza Rice. And he’s dreaming of being whipped by her.
Sep 29, 2009 0
I’ve read no more of Dan Brown’s books than reading over a chapter of The Da Vinci Code. Because his books inspire so much enmity1 among other writers who make much less money, I’ve wanted to impersonate the Typical-Brown-Reader and earnestly read one of Brown’s books. It’s doubtful if I ever would have completed this reading (or been earnest about it), however, so I decided to fortify my distaste for a author I’ve never read with the Telegraph’s list of worst sentences in The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code:
“Death, in this forsaken place, could come in countless forms. Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years, and yet nothing could prepare him for a fate as barbarous and unnatural as the one about to befall him.” Opening Sentences of Deception Point.
My French stinks, Langdon thought, but my zodiac iconography is pretty good. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 3
“Although not overly handsome in a classical sense, the forty-year-old Langdon had what his female colleagues referred to as an ‘erudite’ appeal — wisp of gray in his thick brown hair, probing blue eyes, an arrestingly deep voice, and the strong, carefree smile of a collegiate athlete.” Angels and Demons, chapter 1
“He was sitting all alone in the enormous cabin of a Falcon 2000EX corporate jet as it bounced its way through turbulence. In the background, the dual Pratt & Whitney engines hummed evenly.” The Lost Symbol, chapter 1
“Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.” Deception Point, chapter 8
Related Readings
Sep 27, 2009 0
From Lens Culture:
David Lynch is endlessly creative, and his artistic output is usually quite bizarre and surreal. Lynch’s latest project is as a photographer and collaborator with musician, artist and producer Danger Mouse. Together, they’ve created a multimedia installation that is now on display in Los Angeles.
Fifty of Lynch’s photographs are mounted on aluminum panels that seem to float on the gallery walls, converging with the moody rhythms of the music from Danger Mouse’s latest album, Dark Night of the Soul.
Untitled, 2009. Digital print mounted on aluminum. Edition 1 of 7. Courtesy Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles.
The full DJ Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse(Mark Linkous) collaboration1, Dark Night of the Soul , can be heard at the NPR site, Dark Night of the Soul Exclusive.
NPR Music Blog description:
I’ve listened to the record all the way through at least a dozen times, and can confirm that Dark Night of the Soul delivers in every way you’d hope for. It’s beautiful but haunting, surreal and dark, but sometimes comical and affecting, with ear-popping, multilayered production work. It just gets more mesmerizing with every listen.
Sep 16, 2009 0
Polaroid by Marion, http://www.flickr.com/people/mironabside/
Sam Jordison in the Guardian Books Blogs looks back on Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Jordison points out that much of Coupland’s novel may be lost on reader’s now:
Nor can Coupland be held responsible for the passing of time. The fact that the book is so tied-in to its era is also a mark of how well he was able to situate it. Even so, reading Generation X almost 20 years after it was written is a strange experience. So much of it has become engrained that it’s surprising to be reminded that it was once new – that one person coined all those ideas and terms. But it’s also unsettling because so much now seems distant. In the middle of a recession, it’s hard to feel sympathy for Coupland’s clever-clever characters, Andy, Claire and Dag, as they sit around the pool in Palm Springs and affect depression because their jobs aren’t fulfilling enough. They seem fortunate, innocent and irritating.
Yet, despite the aging of Generation X and the aging the words Coupland used and invented to describe this generation1, it is still worth reading:
Gradually, however, to my surprise, I found myself warming to the book. Taken together, the stories began to offer a pleasingly skewed, whimsical view of the world. The adjectival excesses became forgivable when so much of the writing was also lovely (”Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being’s eyes”). The lead narrator Andy’s moaning also began to seem less superficial and more universally applicable. We might now think him lucky to have a job, but his deeper concerns still touch us all. Coupland teases these out with such gentle skill that I wanted to put my arm around the poor guy by the time he was saying things like: “I’m just jealous of how unafraid Tyler [his younger brother]’s friends are of the future. Scared and envious.
So what initially seems like a selfish complaint about graduate life at the fag-end of Reganism starts to take on wider significance. It’s a quiet meditation on transience, futility, forging a personal morality. It’s also an entertainingly raucous look at how to have fun in the face of such concerns: at the pleasures and pains of family life and at friendship.
Related Readings:
Aug 8, 2009 0
Cinephilic teenagers of the 1960s had The 400 Blows, Breathless, Dr. Strangelove; cinephilic teenagers of the 1970s had Harold and Maude, Chinatown, Taxi Driver; cinephilic teenagers of the 1980s had Repo Man, Blue Velvet, Stranger than Paradise; cinephilic teenagers of the 1990s had Rushmore.
I enjoyed reading Colin Marshall explanation of what Wes Anderson’s Rushmore meant/means for film .
Eleven years on from Rushmore’s release, Anderson’s detractors have unfairly (but not wholly groundlessly) labeled him a shallow, finicky production design fetishist fatally attached to a dwindling stable of pet themes; a 2007 Onion headline sardonically heralds that a new Wes Anderson film features “Deadpan Delivery, Meticulous Art Direction, Characters With Father Issues”. He has defended himself, and articulately so, as merely a craftsman who understands and accepts what he wants to make and thus looks to improve with each iteration rather than to diversify for the sake of diversification, much as a cabinetmaker seeks to produce a superior cabinet on each job instead of, say, a shoe rack just for the hell of it. (In this, he’s very much the artistic cousin of the criminally under-recognized Sang-soo Hong.) Should he deny the accusations of deadpan delivery, meticulous art direction and characters with father issues? He shouldn’t, and in any case probably couldn’t. Admirably, he owns them.
[...]
Rushmore has, after countless viewings over more than a decade, revealed its imperfections: it gets too plotty, especially around the Max-Blume rivalry; the ending’s a bit neat; many sequences use thirty shots where one would have done. But time has not diminished its aesthetic and human richness, nor the refreshing boldness of its willingness to simply be itself, a work that exists on its own terms without dictating them to the audience. Walter Benjamin once wrote that all great works of literature dissolve a genre or found a new one. Though of a different medium, Rushmore is indeed a great work and thus does the former, the latter or quite possibly both. But, much more importantly, it was the first film ever to feel as if it were made for me. And I’m hardly alone in the sentiment.
Jul 19, 2009 0
David Foster Wallace lives on for an “Infinite Summer”
One giant book, 92 days, thousands of readers — and the world’s most ambitious reading group
Joe Coscarelli, Salon
David Foster Wallace on BookWorm
The terrible and sad impact of David Foster Wallace’s suicide caused us to want to remember him as he first appeared in the KCRW studios, fresh from the publication of his breakthrough novel, Infinite Jest. He was brilliant and charming—and his death is an enormous loss to American literature.
Interview with Wallace on KCRW
I’ve been re-reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer, along with the online book club.
I read parts of the novel a few years ago, and over the past few years I’ve became fond of his non-fiction. I’d decided I would read IJ again after listening to several Wallace interviews with Michael Silverblatt.
In Salon, Joe Coscarelli explains why it’s worth reading the tome with a online community. Coscarelli points to the unexpected and quirky topics that are raised when a large group interactively discusses the book:
On the hyperactive discussion forums, everyone from Wallace virgins to connoisseurs can offer interpretations and suggest topics (organized by the reading schedule in order to prevent spoilers). One reader wondered about the book’s setting — a futuristic hybrid of the United States, Canada and Mexico referred to as the Organization of North American Nations or by the acronym ONAN — sparking a conversation about the biblical character Onan and the notoriously wasteful practice of masturbation (i.e., onanism). Elsewhere, the novel’s reference to a “trial-size dove bar” sparked a debate about whether Wallace was referring to the chocolate or the soap. Eventually, a fan — whose source claims to have asked the author personally — announced definitively that it was, in fact, a reference to the ice-cream bar. Puzzling over this kind of pop cultural minutiae is all the more fun when reading along with a few thousand of your closest Internet friends.
Bits of Wallace writing uncover the dread and loneliness of living in a televised, mass media culture:
Of course, “Infinite Jest” also captures what Wallace called “a real American type of sadness” — that of “a white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated” guy who is successful, and yet terribly lonely and adrift. Which makes the idea of bringing so many people together for a communal reading of the book all that more meaningful. To some, the “book club” may seem like an archaic social experience — connotations of housewives and airport novels abound — but many Infinite Summer participants enjoy the, well, infinite possibilities of this Web project.
I also find that Wallace’s style, with footnote within footnotes and topic that loop out of control, fits well— or anticipates— how readers approach reading in a digital culture.
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