“Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.” White Noise.
Category: Culture
AI
The problem with AI is not its ethics. It’s the aesthetics, that is to say, a problem of conception. You can assemble all the pieces, make everything adhere to a strict pattern of seeming life, of virtual consciousness , and yet we are left barren, no life, no consciousness. Why? Because the truth isn’t out there waiting to be seized like a prized possession or devoured like a meal. The truth is found in the aesthetic experience, a shared sensibility that shifts and vibrates and oscillates in every fiber of our being. AI, at least in its nascent form, attempts to fixate its defined boundaries. AI quickly becomes a mental cage (as we fret and obsess about making its ridiculous output somewhat less ridiculous). It is dead life without time. Time is the secret ingredient that we are lacking. Experience under conditions of time yields consciousness. This is life, this is biology. And like life, we resist any aesthetic that feels like shackles and chains. The anarchy of our spirit.
Tradition and Irony
Irony rises as the traditions of society relax and loosen. It intones new power dynamics while giving only superficial support to the previous rules (the ruling regime).
Tati
Tati’s metaphysics can be summarized as follows: Nothing goes according to plan, the way God intended.
Tati’s revelation is a miracle.
Attention
Seeing the world through a child’s eyes.
“This is what comes from the wrong kind of attentiveness. People get brain fade. This is because they’ve forgotten how to listen and look as children. They’ve forgotten how to collect data. In the psychic sense a forest fire on TV is on a lower plane than a ten-second spot for Automatic Dishwasher All. The commercial has deeper waves, deeper emanations. But we have reversed the relative significance of these things. This is why people’s eyes, ears, brains and nervous systems have grown weary. It’s a simple case of misuse.” – White Noise.
Pyaasa
“Life’s real joy is found in making others happy.”
In Vanda’s Room
“Bad guys like us never die. It’s the innocent who die.”
Fassbinder
There is a unifying principle that underlies Fassbinder’s critique of modernity. Fascism isn’t a political program. Fascism is an inherent, pervasive condition, a cancer at the center of modern life. How do we deal with this fascism? How do we hold it at bay? Characters seek out the safety of anonymity, the cold comfort of depression, passionless lives, the perfection of inauthentic, tired, rote mechanical repetition. This is one possible response to fascism. Violence, extreme self-destruction is another. Neither are a cure, of course, but a temporary salve, a mild palliative at best. Sadomasochism in this sense is not a disease unto itself in need of further psychological treatment, but a logical response to fascism. The cauldron broils, the frustrations builds. Scapegoats become necessary. There must be a cause to our ills. This is why left wing critiques were off mark. You can not reduce the complex psychological makeup of a character to prototype. Petra’s loneliness, madness, and cruelty have nothing to do with her lesbianism, and everything to do with the fascism of modern life.
Is there no way out of this? Perhaps not. It is a bleak, pessimistic view of modern lives. The role of the artist is to bring this disquieting truth to the forefront, examine it under extreme conditions, not to present a 15-point political program to cure fascism once and for all.
Bad Guys Win, Now What?
What if we inverse the cinematic denouement: the hero dies and the bad guy wins?
Well, that’s just tragedy, no?
Okay, but what if we turn it into a mass slaughter?
Cue: The Great Silence by Sergio Corbucci. The effect is oddly unsatisfying. Why oddly? After all, the audience is denied the typical gratification, the tasty dessert of Justice revenged after a cold, hard meal. What’s odd about that? Well, this is not the satisfaction, I mean. What I mean is this: there is no redemption, no arc to justify the purpose of the story as presented. Not character redemption, but a narrative one. There is only cruelty and oblivion. We are moving away from political pessimism and closer to political nihilism or quietism, defeatism, though I doubt that’s the impression the Director was attempting to convey. On an artistic level, what am I supposed to do with the hour and forty odd minutes preceding that point? I can’t flush the experience away, nor would I want to. It’s a great film! The setting is inspired. The snow bound western, the stuff of legend. It’s movement is anatomical and clunky in parts, but that give it a real charm. The acting is powerful. Kinski is unsettling in his calm sociopathy. When is Trintignant ever not incredible? Muted Hope in a brutal world. There are no fair fights. The man who is as good as his word is as good as dead. The ending makes sense as a rejection of cinematic troupes. But we are no longer in the realm of drama perhaps and have almost crossed over to…documentary?
The promise and lie of cinema is that it can reveal unbarred the living soul. In this, I detect a cautionary tale of the dangers of hyperrealism. We’ve become too sophisticated cinephiles. We know full and goddamn well that film is a projection of our desires. But as we lose a feeling of reality in our lives we seek a projection of our lost reality into film. Hyperrealism is the threshold, live at the max, dial up to 100, exaggerated authenticity, etc. The desire to be grafted onto the medium of film, to be absorbed and lost in its orgiastic possibilities.
Death by Hanging
“Come now, even God sometimes screws up his timing.”
The Hack 