probabilityfields

I had to deliver a check to my new landlord and needed to kill some time before we met, so I stopped into the Half Price and I found this collection of four Bergman screenplays. I’ve been wanting to read some of his stuff for a long time, so I was super excited. But I quickly slipped into existential dread, as Sarah’s photo clearly illustrates.

I was watching the Pussycat Dolls reality game show thing (not really) and I came up with a great idea for another reality game show thing: The Next Ghostbusters. This is a solid gold idea! Contestants will have to live together in a decrepit firehouse, drive around in an old ambulance, make toasters dance, and each week they’ll get sent on real ghostbusting missions. One by one they’ll be eliminated, or “slimed,” until we’re left with four new Ghostbusters! The winners of course would go on to star in Ghostbusters 3, which will be a horrible disappointment. Harold Ramis, give me a call.

I can’t remember the last time I was this excited about a movie. Just watching the trailer I had to hold back tears.

This was Steve Martin’s first short film from 1977. I know I’ve seen it before but I ran across it again thought some of my readers might enjoy it.

“If you’re studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.” — Steve Martin.

They played V for Vendetta on HBO tonight and I got back from a night of drinking just in time to catch it. I’d seen it twice before. Both times at the Alamo Draft House in Austin and both times I was probably more intoxicated than I am now. So three viewings combined with slightly lower BAC can comprise a ’sober’ analysis, I say.

So I’ll start off by saying that I enjoyed my first two viewings. Mostly because Natalie Portman is so pretty, the beer was so good, my friends were so fun, and V paraphrased Emma Goldman’s “If I can’t dance it’s not a revolution” (I love that line)…and the movie had some good parts. Specifically, the exploding buildings were wonderful. V conducts a recording of a well-known piece of music whose name I can’t remember (get used to it) as the Bailey, in a perfect phallic image, explodes.

The Wachowski brothers are known for quoting fashionable philosophers (The Matrix: “Welcome to the desert of the real” [Baudrillard said it before Morpheus]). The orgasmic-orchestral explosion of the Bailey recalls the quote by an art-intellectual-whose-name-escapes-me that said something about the 9/11 attacks being a wonderful performance.

And I’d have to agree. I saw it on TV. It was amazing. A giant plane hit the first tower like only Hollywood’s biggest budget could wet-dream-of. Then the cameras were there, wishing they’d been able to capture such a spectacle. But sure enough, we’ve got another tower, and another plane: perfect! An instant replay! The media should have thanked them for their foresight. Osama should have taken over Paramount.

Back to the film: the Bailey blows up. Then we get the suggestion that blowing up a building can change the world.

“Oooooooh.”

But this is different from 9/11: V is a good guy. And after seeing some policemen try to rape poor Natalie, we want to blow the goddamn building up with him. And the innocent lives lost? Well, we can assume that no one was inside the Bailey. Kind of like the even-better-music-video-explosion-ending of the pre-9/11 Fight Club.

CUE: Pixies “Where is my Mind”

So yeah, I cheered when the buildings exploded, assured that no lives were lost, that this battle was fought between symbols: a mask and an edifice. Wow, if that were what life was like. Unfortunately, it’s not. People die, or get maimed, survive guilty and alone, walk around with ounces of ash in their lungs and die slower. (And yet the destruction of symbols is still the primary goal.)

So yeah, back to Tarantino: remember the scene in Pulp Fiction where QT does a terrible job of acting and he complains to Samuel L. Jackson that his house doesn’t have a sign out front that says ‘Dead Nigger Storage.’ Holy crap, how powerful is that scene? It’s amazing. A suburban middle class white male who’s afraid of his wife’s wrath gets to say the dreaded N-word in front of a black man with a ‘fro and a gun! Awesome!

The ultimate white man fantasy: to be cool enough to say nigger in front of a tough black guy.

And V for Vendetta is the post-9/11 white man fantasy where we get to blow up buildings like radical Islamists, only no one dies that doesn’t truly deserve it.

Wouldn’t it be great if there weren’t any poor or brown or black people and us white guys could just have another bourgeois revolution?

Then again, perhaps there’s some universal element here that can show us how we’re deep down all the same and that we should learn to love and accept each other. Sure, but I believe that anyway.

My biggest problem with V for Vendetta’s plot is that the mask becomes a man, falls in love, dies, but still succeeds. I think that once the mask became a man he should have died and failed. And that the masses with masks should have run amok and raped and pillaged the country. That would have certainly been truer to history. The whole film pivots on the relations between individual/ideology, individual/society, and ideology/society. But it failed tragically because it glossed over the bad parts with clean and spectacular destructions of people and things a la The Count of Monte Cristo. In these ways, it was maybe the worst embodiment of film: projection of the fantasies of white middle class men.

Despite all this, the Wachowski brothers have proved that they can make amazing films. And even by painting morality in broad strokes you can do some good. Obviously The Matrix made people think about the moral consequences of the media, and V has some great anti-Bush comedy and a pro-gay rights mini love story. But for the Wachowskis the phrase ‘grand scale’ only means ’special effects.’

I’ll end it with a quote from the great Roger Ebert, “To attempt a parable about terrorism and totalitarianism that would be relevant and readable might be impossible, could be dangerous and would probably not be box office.” I think V falls somewhere in the middle of all of these.

P.S. My more astute readers might question my use of the n-word in the title, obviously placed there to be edgy. My answer would be that only my friends read this blog, and that anyway it’s just a cry for help for anyone to tell me why I shouldn’t ever use that word.

It’s not the robuts in movies like “The Terminator” or “I, Robut” or “The Matrix” that are evil. Some would say that they can neither be good nor evil because they only do what they’re programmed to do. But I’m inclined to say that when they’re good (bringing us orange juice and saving children) they’re great, and even when they’re bad (destroying the human race) they still serve a purpose.

You see, the robut is the epitome of Enlightenment thinking, the idea that rationality holds the key to peace and happiness on Earth. When Kant said, in not so few and small words, don’t do anything that you wouldn’t hold up as a universal law, he was basically speaking Robut, a language of simple and rational conclusions designed to make the world a better place.

In the aforementioned films a problem usually arises when the robuts come to the impeccably rational conclusion that humans should be destroyed. At this point in the movie we’re forced to face the fact that as a species we pollute, murder, make war and a whole bunch of other stuff that sex, art and religion couldn’t possibly make up for. It’s no accident that the robuts in these movies usually appear as grotesque replications of ourselves. The robut is an extension of human consciousness, pointing out our uselessness, and threatening the quick fix solution.

Had we been able to come to this conclusion ourselves we would have most likely descended into a suicidal orgy. But as attractive as that sounds, it’s simply not an option for most people. So, in spite of this perennial aporia, these movies usually end with a triumph of the human spirit.

But what is the human spirit? Certainly more than the mere will to go on living knowing that your existence is a plague on the world. Against cold rationality, the human spirit welcomes multiplicity and mystery. It suggests that the robut jumped off Kant’s bus too soon, and proudly sports the old cliche that it’s the journey, not the destination.

The evil robut is a mirror in which we first see our vile and corrupt nature, but come to see the beauty of our spirit.

I finally switched to Word Press with the help of Jeff James and I ‘m pretty happy with the results. Enjoy the new look. I’ll probably make some more changes as I learn more about WP. Speaking of new looks, my camera is looking pretty sexy these days.

So it’s been a while since I got my new camera, but in all that time I never actually filmed anything worthwhile. So last night I was home alone with my sister’s dog, Tanner, so I pulled out my camera. The resulting footage could be described as a neorealist reworking of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. But with a dog.