“If you fail to feel the pain of others, you do not deserve the name of man.” – Saadi Shirazi, translated words of Bani Adam inscribed at entrance to UN headquarters.
Category: History
Baptism Through Drowning
Ah, the Purgists are back, though in truth, they never really leave us. It’s not even a sane argument but the dark brooding of a psychopath’s wet dream, a psychotic belief that Utopia must come at the cost of inflicting a massive amount of human suffering, degradation, and punishment. Sin, after all, must be purged, and what is more sinful than modern civilization? Of course, the suffering must be born by others, the masses, never by themselves, safe behind their ivory towers. Too many people in charge of too many things think like this. If we could purge this parasitic form of thinking from the souls of men, how much better off would we have been as a species? How many wars and injustices would have been averted, how fewer drops of innocent blood would have been spared?
Gravity’s Rainbow
“If there is something comforting–religious, if you want–about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”
Art
“Art is a lie, a lie that makes us realize the truth.” Picasso (maybe)
Muriel, or the Time of Return
Where does reality reside? In our memories alone? The fragments of our daily lives broken and reassembled into a coherent whole? We usually construct the story centered in first-person: This happened to me; this is the story of MY life. An illusion, though perhaps a necessary one given the elusive nature of what we mislabel “the events of our lives”. In truth, nothing ever happens to us as there is neither a happening nor an us, but a trace, a remnant of what has elapsed. Time erases us long before the action arrives to cleave to our bodies. Events are superficial and cannot penetrate. The action is determined, but the contours of our being are left undetermined. The decentralized rhythm of existence conjoins a greater totality within the duration. Not my broken pieces. Our broken pieces, synthesized into a totality we struggle to comprehend.
Muriel perfectly conveys this deeper reality. From the edits, the disconcerted shifts of time and tempo and emotion, to the dialogue shifting between the objective (the trite and commonplace observations that we tell to mask our deeper feelings), to the subjective, the unconscious, the longing, the haunting memories that evoke loss, grief, regret.
As Resnais explains: “A classic film cannot translate the real rhythm of modern life. In the same day, you do twenty-six things, you go to lectures, to the cinema, to your party meeting etc. Modern life is fragmented. Everybody feels that; painting, as well as literature bares witness to it, so why should the cinema not do likewise, instead of keeping to the traditional linear construction?”
And like a shroud or a tapestry hung above the scenery, appears the angel, Muriel. The haunting figure of a murdered woman, an Algerian girl tortured and raped by Bernard and a companion, hovers over our world like an omen, a judgement, a collective death sentence, but also hints at, if not the possibility of salvation, perhaps the miracle of atonement.
What Troubles Thee, Sir?
“Not things, but opinions about things, trouble men.”
War, What is it Good for?
War is not politics by other means. It is not the outcome of failed policy but a policy of failure itself. What is the objective? Victory? A Pyrrhic one at best. A cleansing of bloodlust? There are not enough scapegoats to sate man’s thirst. Peace? A madness and a delusion. To the victor go the spoils, clutching a worthless and dead carcass. This, alas, is your reward. No god, no country, no honor, no salvation, no freedom. War, yes. The Devil, probably.
In Cold Blood
Perhaps the strongest argument ever made against capital punishment came from a murderer.
“Those prairiebillys, they’ll vote to hang fast as pigs eat slop. Look at their eyes. I’ll be damned if I’m the only killer in the courtroom.”
Anti-Oedipus
Foucault’s preface: “Last, but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism. And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini – which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively – but also the fascism in us all, in our heads, and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”
“… something essential is taking place, something of extreme seriousness: the tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.”
Notes on Sirk
“Perhaps no more monstrous children, outside horror films, were ever seen in Hollywood than those who interfere grotesquely with their parents’ lives in “All That Heaven Allows” and “There’s Always Tomorrow.” Sirk’s lesson has a long throw—politics motivated by a demagogic plea “for the children” is a code for reactionary moralism.” – Richard Brody
Much of American history has been dominated by the overt. reactionary moralism of the middle class. Book banning, anti-pornography, abortion restrictions, etc. – all sold as necessary draconian measures to protect the virtue of children. But the only virtue of childhood is getting to be young. The rest is whistling past the graveyard.
The Hack 