I cite

thumbs up and down

I haven't started doing much work yet, mostly odds and ends as I fight the anxiety of not having my book orders in yet for this fall's courses. Since I'm not working much, I don't have many thoughts. I have consumed media (hours and hours of the Tour de France). Here's my two cents on the movies:

Wanted: not wanted at all. Just say no to exploding rats. Still, some cool images and ideas. Weird how the whole doesn't work.

Walle: wonderful, exquisite, heart-breaking. I want so see the first 30 minutes again and again. I loved the way that the ordinaries of everyday commercial objects, in all their mass productiveness, became enchanting. The difference between garbage and a cherished object of desire is that it is desired. Pixar as Lacan.

The Dark Knight: amazing. I want to see the last 90 minutes again and again. My preference would be to see just all the scenes with Heath Ledger.

Lars and the Real Community

We watched Lars and the Real Girl last night. I completely loved it.

I'm reading In Defense of Lost Causes. The second chapter has some wonderful readings of movies and Kafka letters. The basic idea involves the core Oedipal drama, a narrative that persists underneath all sorts of other stories. One of the strongest and most detailed discussions is of Frankenstein and the French Revolution. It's straightforward, so I won't summarize it here. It interests me, though, because of the way Lars and the Real Girl can't be reduced to an obvious familial drama but instead only works as an account of a supportive community, or more specifically, of the supports that community provides, the community on which people's identities depend.

The familial drama: Lars enters into a delusional psychosis. The triggering factors include the death of his father, the return of his brother after years of being away, Lars' consequent feeling like a stranger in his own home and his moving to the garage, the pregnancy of his sister-in-law (Lars' mother died giving birth to Lars), and the arrival of a new woman at work who stirs up suppressed feelings of desire. Lars orders a sex doll, Bianca, and treats her as his girlfriend. But he doesn't have sex with her. Because both he and Bianca are religious, Bianca sleeps in the room that was his mother's in the house now occupied by his brother and sister-in-law.

The charm of the movie consists in the willingness of the entire town to take Lars' delusion absolutely seriously. He takes Bianca to church, to a party. Bianca gets a job modeling for a local store. She volunteers at the hospital reading to children. She's elected to the school board. She is more than an object for Lars. She is an object for the entire community. So it's not simply that Lars displaces all sorts of feelings and desires onto Bianca. Rather, the community gives her a place. It lets her take a place and in this taking place to enable Lars to see that there is a place for him. More than a domestic drama about guilt and reconciliation, psychosis and recovery, the film is an allegory for the Symbolic as a providing place and meaning.

Of course, Bianca has to die. As Lars gets better, becomes more integrated, acquires a sense of place, learns more about what it is to be man (a lesson which has to do with accepting responsibility and which he demonstrates having learned in a wonderful scene where he performs CPR on a strangled teddy bear), Bianca becomes ill and eventually dies (she might even drown, but this wasn't clear to me). There is a funeral for her and priest remarks, without irony, that she has been loved, that she has contributed, and that she was truly helpful and unique.

Bianca was Real. A Real object for everyone. The gap or space she opened, occupied, and left as an object enacts subject as lack in the structure, the Real of the subject. The drama of the film, then, concerns the Symbolic order of the community providing a place when one of its members feels itself displaced (in one scene, as Lars' brother and sister-in-law go to the church to ask that its members help out and make Bianca feel welcome--the psychologist has advised them to go along with Lars' delusion--as one member voices aversion to treating a sex doll like a person and to socializing with a psychotic, another reminds them that they all are close to people with idiosyncracies and disorders; it's as if she reminds them all that even as deviance and transgression are the underside of the community, they are nonetheless part of the community; perhaps once could say that she is not so naive as to disavow the 'nightly law' but instead recognizes its inseparability from the bonds of sociality; or maybe it's better to say that all nights or all nightly laws are not the same; they can be differentiated, acknowledged, or disavowed in different ways).

Some theory friends (I'm thinking about Jane Bennett here) draw from Latour to extend and develop the agenic properties of objects. At times, that theoretical orientation seems at odds with a Lacanian one. I've wondered, though, if the Lacanian object might suggest more possibilities for convergence or intersection than often seems to be the case. Here, the material object Bianca animated relationships, friendships, opportunities to help, support, be together, speak, and eat that had otherwise seemed less alive. And she did this not simply as an object onto which fantasies or delusions were projected but as a material object and as a Real object. Her materiality incited various physical events (she weighed 125 pounds so dressing and bathing and moving her wasn't easy). And her insistence as a gap/lack and as an excess inscribed or reminded everyone of the prior inscription of a place in the community for Lars.

Sicko

We saw Sicko. It was great. The combination of horror, humor, disbelief, despair, and think that maybe something could change was intense--as it usually is with Moore's films. I left wanting to demolish all the health insurance companies and dissolve the government and create a new one. Best: the emphasis on solidarity.

Moore's proposals:
--universal health care
--abolition of insurance companies
--regulation of pharmaceutical companies as if they were public utilities

Paragraph 175

Watch Paragraph 175. I got it from Netflix. It's a documentary about the persecution of homosexuals during the Third Reich. It features interviews with some of the 10 gay men known to have a survived the camps and a lesbian able to get out and move to England. One man, who was arrested after a hustler dragged him into the woods even as he was saying that he was being followed, spent 8 years in camps. Afterwards, he told no one about it. He weeps as he says that he wishes he could have told his father, who had died. He doesn't tell his mother, out of shame, he says, but also out of a kind of compassion for her inability to handle what he would say. Exactly what he had in mind was unclear.

A lack of clarity, or the inability of some of us properly to read between the lines, opens the film. A man is on the S Bahn in Berlin, telling the camera, and his interviewer, about the intensity and the romance of the time, of the bombings and the stoppings of the S Bahn trains and the need to reach out to people when this happened.

The interviewer stops him, somewhat confused, and asks whether he is saying that he made love on the stopped train.

The man then asks the interviewer if he is slow--of course that's what he did.

Jesus Camp

I watched "Jesus Camp" last night (and, yes, I still read but these days I'm mostly reading a bunch of dissertations for a prize, student papers, and 9/11 truth websites; I've also been reading Lacan and Santner on pyschosis and hope to have something to say soon).

So, Jesus Camp: it's a good documentary, well worth seeing. As a pentecostalist camp director says, there are scenes that will have hard core liberals shaking in their boots (or something like that). The film follows several children from their homeschooled family life, through their experience at a North Dakota camp, to Colorado Springs to Tim Haggard's New Life Church, and on to Washington as they participtate in pro-life political actions.

The preaching at the camp is impressive--lots of use of toys to make points, involvement of the kids in preaching, speaching in tongues, singing (JC's in the house!), praying, weeping, blessing each other. The worship scenes are intense--lots of weeping and blessing one another. Someone brings out a George W. Bush cut out and they all pray for Bush. They smash cups to enact the need to smash the judiciary and sin and abortion and bring about revival in America. Someone hands out palm size plastic fetuses as the children weep and pray for the friends they've never met.

The camp director is convinced (rightly, in my view) that getting to the children, convincing them and organizing them is absolutely crucial. Interestingly, the Christian radio announcer included in the film for balance--he is Christian and worried about the influence of fundamentalist evangelicals in politics--is less persuasive on this point. He gets caught in the conflict between separating church and state wherein religion is a private matter and saying that parents' shouldn't be able to bring up their children the way they choose. He also wants to make religion a matter of free choice, while his opponent rightly points out the pervasiveness of indoctrination overall. I would have gone with a more fundamental argument: homeschooling should be against the law and the state has a compelling interest in raising kids who are questioning, critical, and literate.

A difficult and interesting scene involved the homeschooling of a kid named Levi: he is being taught that creationism is the only thing that makes sense (he has some cool creationist video game) and that global warning is a lie, that the evidence for it is insignificant. He is supremely confident in these truths that he is learning.

For me, the most difficult part of the movie involved an unnamed kid who, in the context of a service where the kids' were to confess their sins, the ways that they fail to live in Christ and go along with the crowd, and are all weeping--although, in a cool move, the preacher washes their hands with some bottled water--this one kid admits to finding it really hard to believe in God and to sometimes not believing the Bible. He is crying and clearly struggling. The camera goes to him, crying and clearly struggling, at various times throughout the movie.

I wondered about the kids who didn't express doubt. Did they repress it with their confidence and conviction? Or did they simply not have it? Were they really moved by the Spirit to speak in tongues and to go up to strangers and ask them about salvation?

I remember saying the pledge to the Bible and to the Christian flag when I went to Vacation Bible School at a Southern Baptist Church in Mississippi. I remember listening to Christian rock. But I also remember the tremendous, unbearable strain as a teenager: the other kids seemed so much more like real Christians, like they really did have a relationship with God. Many would weep at the alter after nearly every service. They would hold out their arms in prayer. I always felt strange and awkward, like, what are they doing? They would leave the room if conversation went in an ungodly direction. My mother, who taught some of them in Sunday School, couldn't stand their piety--this was in the 70s as the Southern Baptist Convention was grappling with fundamentalism. More and more charismatics were attending our church, which had been mainstream Southern Baptist up till that point.

But the struggle, the problem of the world, where sin was everywhere and constant. It seemed impossible--no matter how much one prayed--to be in the world but not of the world. It seemed impossible not to be perpetually drowning in sin. In the film, the preacher lambasts Harry Potter and a parent tells the kids not to tell ghost stories because that's an ungodly focus.

What a relief it must be to direct the difficult, unbearable burden of one's sin, one's struggle with sin, onto a struggle with the world. There is purpose and release; there is a sense that one's struggle matters, that one is a soldier for God bringing America to revival. Having the burden of millions of dead babies on one's soul might make it a little easier to deal with the temptations of Harry Potter and schoolyard gossip. As a soldier for Christ, purity matters--it's one's armor, one's shield. And, the sin is out there--not in me or at least, not so much.

Babel

(I'm a terrible reader of movies, so continue at your own risk; also, spoilers.)

I saw "Babel" last night. The movie made me feel tense and ill the entire time. It was also beautiful--visually and acoustically. I've been trying to figure out what it means, what it's about, how to read it. Then, when writing about the "9/11 Press for Truth" dvd, I realized that these are the wrong questions. There isn't an overview, an over message; there are strands and themes and connections and broken links, and a lack of contact in the midst of all sorts of media.

The film doesn't provide a cheap easy message: globalization is bad, the state is bad, borders are bad, guns are bad, sex is bad, Americans are bad, tourism is bad. It's not so easy. Borders are a pain and create problems. But, lack of state infrastructure is also a problem. The circulation of a gift in a gift economy can lead to tragic results. Accidents happen. Finding real human contact amidst unstoppable media is rare and fragile. Wanting it may even be a sign of damage.

Globalization is challenging on the human level--people don't understand themselves or one another and make all sorts of unreasonable, self-centered demands that they can't grasp why others refuse to acknowledge and respect.

There was one string of associations that seemed important, but which I can't quite find the right concepts for (which unfortunately betrays the superficiality of my understanding of psychoanalysis)--ideas of the mother and of sex. A deaf Japanese girl with a dead mother seeks sexual contact, desperately. But, she is left resorting to visual display (the 'hairy monster'). Is the trauma of her mother's death written somehow on her body? By removing her underwear, is she demanding that others confront her lack? That they see it? Touch it?

A Moroccan boy watches his sister undress. He also masturbates, but is interrupted before he finishes. And he unintentionally shoots an American tourist. His crime of shooting becomes entangled with his crime of watching his sister, as if seeing sex or adopting a sexual gaze is like adopting the gaze of a shooter or terrorist, as if the controlled stance of one is the same as the other--although it isn't since his sister makes herself the object of his gaze while the tourist doesn't know anything about it. Is this what it is to be a tourist, American, contemporary? To be always already the object of a gaze?

The American tourist is a wounded mother, not just by the gunshot, but by her own loss of a child. The other tourists want to abandon her, leave her in the small Moroccan town. They refuse to acknowledge the wounded mother, that she may die and that this death matters. The American children in Mexico are missing their mother--who is wounded in Morocco. But, they are cared for by a Mexican nanny who has been with them since they were born. Her boss demands that she stay with them and not attend her own son's wedding. She tries to do it all, and encounters a crisis at the border there results in her deportation. She can't have it all; she can't mother the children and her own son and attempting to do so results in her losing her home for 16 years.

The symbolic is the name-of-the-father. It's crisis in one of order, meaning, and authority. But what of the crisis of the mother? Is it the accompanying crisis of contact, of connection?

Hell House

I watched Hell House this evening. It's about a halloween presentation written and performed by members (and friends of members) of an Assembly of God church in Texas. Scenes in the hell house show sin leading to death. They also enact struggles between demons and angels over human souls. After going through the hell house, attendees are asked if they know whether they will go to heaven and hell and given an opportunity to accept Christ.

I was completely struck by the participants' commitment and investment. The amount of volunteer hours was incredible; the volunteers were also extremely dedicated. A great deal of emotion accompanied every part of the process, from the initial planning, to the casting, the rehearsals, and the performances. Much of this emotion was expressed in prayer. Since Assemblies of God are pentecostal, the prayer was often in tongues. But, it also involved music, touching, embracing.

Participants also had a sense of mission--they were actively involved in saving souls. In one scene in the church, the pastor told the congregation that they were sent to infect (I think that was the word, it might have been infiltrate, the metaphor matters but I can't recall it and don't feel like goofing around with the DVD, especially since it is in my son's play station and I'm really awkward with the controller) the world or society. His message, overall, was pretty loving.

Another man who was followed during the course of the film also seemed very loving. Both he and his daughter were actors in Hell House. His wife had left him for another man. He was now raising their four kids, including one son with cerebral palsy and epilepsy, alone. Even though he played a demon tour guide, he also went through the house and was very moved, moved to want to continue to pray after the invitation at the end. His daughter plays the 'abortion girl.' She is shown covered in blood because of taking RU-486.

One of the organizers was properly straight-forward and unapologetic about the role of fear. He didn't deny that hell house used fear to win souls. Instead, he said that fear was part (not the whole) of salvation and faith.

One really great touch--having kids in a kind of hole in the floor, illuminated with red lights, filling with smoke or fog, and covered with plexiglass. The kids press their hands and faces up against the plexiglass like souls trapped in hell's eternal torment.

The film ends with a number of people talking about the imminence of the Rapture, their conviction that we are living in the end times.

Confederate States of America

Rent CSA: Confederate States of America. It's a terrific mocumentary of a British documentary of the history of the CSA (so, alternative history of the US if the South had won the civil war). It relies on real history-for example, the racist ads are from products sold in the US and around the world up through the 1980s (many of them, a few stopped earlier). A nice touch: how awful confederate pop culture would be, particularly after a hundred years of excluding blacks. The film considers the radical impact of Canadian abolitionist culture, especially after all black intellectuals and artists moved there. Also, there is a fake commercial for a television show. I think the name is something like "Runaway" and the theme song is like a hillbilly version of "bad boys, bad boys, watcha gonna do" (remember,  no music made by black people in popular culture). Every clip looks exactly like Cops--no difference. Except here the men being chased, thrown down on the ground, hand-cuffed, and dragged off are slaves.

Marie and Manolo: or how really great shoes displace revolution

Paul, my friend, Lee, and I saw Marie Antoinette. Lee hated it. She said she would rather die than be forced to watch it again. She thought it was one of the worst movies she'd ever seen. Paul didn't like it. He was bored during much of it. I enjoyed it--even as I hated the ideological message. So, it's probably better to say that I enjoyed it because of its awful ideological message.

Filmy things first: Sophia Coppolla indulges herself too much in the film; there is very little directorial self-restraint. This translates into long boring scenes that go nowhere (and that seem to have no script supporting them; instead, people just giggle and make yummy noises), long video and commercial-like scenes that quick-cut from shoes (Manolo Blahnik), to cakes, to shopping, extended shots of Kristin Dunst lying around or sitting around, and over-reliance on pop songs to move the plot along. If you like commercials and mtv, then you'll love the film.  The visual and aural stimulation is, well, stimulating, um, to the eyes and ears.

Even though I thought there was too much pop music, too much reliance on songs instead of script, I liked this aspect of the film, as well as the contemporary speaking style of all the characters (most sound like vapid idiots; tres Paris Hilton). Jason Schwartzman was terrific--as unkingly a monarch as has been imagined on film.

So, what's the problem? No revolution, There is a short scene that cuts a couple of time to the mob outside Versailles, but that's it. No guillotines. No shots of poverty and upheaval outside the fantasy of Versailles. What we get is a sense of how cool it is to live in Versaille and be really rich and have great parties. It's like totally fun to have lots of champagne and really fancy pastries and like people who will make you whatever clothes you want--even lots of neat shoes. And its super fun when someone will give you an extra little castle so that if all the monarchy parts of being a queen get to be a pain you can just leave and be yourself. The queen lifestyle isn't easy, you know. (It's hard out here for a ....)

One might want to say that the film captures a problem, the insularity of the vision of the privileged and wealthy; so, the poor are present because their absence is so pronounced. Indeed, their absence produces the film, it's the constitutive absence that makes the film the film that it is.

What's more troubling is that revolution cannot even be imagined--the last shot in the film is of a room in Versailles--the queen's bedroom, I think--demolished by the angry mob, still and destroyed, but its former beauty and extravagance still apparent. So, not only must the revolting poor be excluded from the film in order for it to appear as Marie's insular world of Versailles, but the actual overthrow of this world, destroying it, is unimaginable. We see the royal family leave, Marie saying goodbye to Versailles. The sadness is the loss of... a really fun lifestyle with cool clothes and getting to hang with your friends and drink like tons of champagne!

I'm tempted to summarize the film as an ideological artifact:

In France, like two hundred years ago, there was this queen, Marie Antoinette. And she like tried hard to do what she was supposed to even though it was really hard because of lots of rules and everyone always talking about it and everything. And, like it was so unfair that mean people in the press said that she said 'let them eat cake' when she really didn't because she cared about people (she had lots of sweet little dogs and really loved them and she was very sweet to her husband even though he was kinda weird and didn't seem that into her). And so I believe that those people who tore up her house were like really intolerant and jealous of her lifestyle. So, it's good that we are in America now where people can have this lifestyle and it's ok because we are all like really tolerant of difference.

Nothing is credible

We saw Man of the Year yesterday. I enjoyed it (would easily put it in a course on politics in film along with Wag the Dog, Primary Colors, Bulwark, that one with Kevin Kline as a stand-in president). It was a good movie, not great, but good. It captures the hope we have that things will be different in politics, that there will be deviations from the scripted stupidity that passes for electoral politics in the integrated spectacle.

One of my favorite scenes features Lewis Black (Paul and I usually say, "our good friend, Lewis Black," because we once chatted with him while he was waiting for a plane out of Rochester). Black criticizes television for making everything credible and therefore nothing credible. He describes the way the screen equalizes an idiotic Holocaust-denier and knowledgeable historian: both are heads, on screens, saying stuff. Their visual equivalence seems to imply an equivalent validity--just decide for yourself; everyone is entitled to her own opinion; experts disagree...

What depresses me is that this is the sort of thing I've been thinking about. I have no academic value added. The movie makes the exact same point, clearly, and much more powerfully. Even though I like to think that I don't think in terms of cultural hierarchies (opera over television, jazz over pop), I guess that, deep down, I probably do. I expect academic work to be richer, more detailed, more compelling, with a richer analysis, than pop culture. The really sick feeling is thinking that everything I've just said is absolutely correct--which means that the problem is with my thinking, my writing, my 'work.'