Even such an apparently trivial domain as fashion provides a nice example of how ideology displaces/conceals class antagonism: the fashion for stonewashed jeans, for instance, imaginarily resolves class antagonism by offering jeans which can be appropriated by those who are 'down' and those who are 'up' -- the upper strata wear stonewashed jeans in order to appear in solidarity with popular strata, while members of the popular strata wear them in order to look like members of the upper strata. So when members of the lower strata wear stonewashed jeans, the seemingly direct coincidence between social status (poverty) and clothing (worn, torn jeans) masks a double mediation: they are imitating those who are imitating an imagined popular class look ... The ultimate irony here is that the company which specializes in such products -- destined to blur/displace the class gap -- is called, precisely, Gap.
Monday, August 14, 2006
From Slavoj Zizek's The Fragile Absolute (Commonplace Book)
Movie Trivia
Anaconda comes close to being the strangest cast assembly ever. It's like someone describing a dream: “I was looking for giant snakes in a jungle with Eric Stoltz and Ice-Cube. And Jennifer Lopez was there, and so was Jon Voight and Owen Wilson...."
But single weirdest assembled cast list in the history of cinema is Transformers The Movie: Eric Idle, Casey Kasum, Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack (the guy from Unsolved Mysteries), the fast-talking guy from the Micromachine comercials, and Orson Welles. And Weird Al Yankovic provided original music, which means that Weird Al Yankovic and Orson Wells did a movie together. No kidding. Surprise your friends and family.
Another bit of pointless movie fun: in A Clockwork Orange, when Alex returns to the house of the man whose wife he raped, the man is living with another man who is working-out and who opens the door for Alex. That man is Darth Vader’s body in Star Wars: A New Hope.
And Monica Bellucci, the woman with the strangest resume in Hollywood: the wife of Vincent Cassell (the master thief from Ocean's 12), she was Dracula's bride in the 1992 Dracula film, she was the weird hot woman in Matrix: Reloaded, she was Mary Magdalen in The Passion of the Christ, and, in the film Irreversible, her character was the victim of an anal rape scene that played on screen for a single, uncut nine minute shot. (A reviewer on Salon.com said of the scene "It's just nine minutes, but it feels like an hour, or a year. It was enough time for me to think about my life and wonder how I wound up as the kind of middle-aged ex-bohemian who would go to see a movie like this on purpose.")
And not quite movie trivia, but something worth noting in passing: a friend of mine, a costume designer, one told me that the best costume design in cinema was Cameron Frye’s outfit at the beginning of Ferris Buller’s Day Off, because it subtly but perfectly and instantaneously communicates what you need to know about his character: the neurotically worried Cameron Frye has both suspenders and a belt, a double back up.
I don’t have anything to say about this trivia, other than I think it is funny, and more people should know about it; our days are somehow better off for these things being true.
But single weirdest assembled cast list in the history of cinema is Transformers The Movie: Eric Idle, Casey Kasum, Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack (the guy from Unsolved Mysteries), the fast-talking guy from the Micromachine comercials, and Orson Welles. And Weird Al Yankovic provided original music, which means that Weird Al Yankovic and Orson Wells did a movie together. No kidding. Surprise your friends and family.
Another bit of pointless movie fun: in A Clockwork Orange, when Alex returns to the house of the man whose wife he raped, the man is living with another man who is working-out and who opens the door for Alex. That man is Darth Vader’s body in Star Wars: A New Hope.
And Monica Bellucci, the woman with the strangest resume in Hollywood: the wife of Vincent Cassell (the master thief from Ocean's 12), she was Dracula's bride in the 1992 Dracula film, she was the weird hot woman in Matrix: Reloaded, she was Mary Magdalen in The Passion of the Christ, and, in the film Irreversible, her character was the victim of an anal rape scene that played on screen for a single, uncut nine minute shot. (A reviewer on Salon.com said of the scene "It's just nine minutes, but it feels like an hour, or a year. It was enough time for me to think about my life and wonder how I wound up as the kind of middle-aged ex-bohemian who would go to see a movie like this on purpose.")
And not quite movie trivia, but something worth noting in passing: a friend of mine, a costume designer, one told me that the best costume design in cinema was Cameron Frye’s outfit at the beginning of Ferris Buller’s Day Off, because it subtly but perfectly and instantaneously communicates what you need to know about his character: the neurotically worried Cameron Frye has both suspenders and a belt, a double back up.
I don’t have anything to say about this trivia, other than I think it is funny, and more people should know about it; our days are somehow better off for these things being true.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Technical Difficulties
The images are down for now, as is geoffklock.com, but they will be back shortly; the images are linked to the website, and the hosting company is working out some problems on their end. If you are new, and want to read something, you can read the posts in the archives that don't discuss images.
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
David Cronenberg's A History of Violence
When I first saw A History of Violence I didn't like it. My initial impression was that it was a lame parable about America along the lines of "If a man with a violent past can be accepted by his loving family at the end of this film then America can still be a proud nation in spite of the terrible things it has done." But this k-punk blog made me re-think it a bit. (You have to scroll down the page, but the images from A History of Violence make the blog about it easy to spot).
The K-Punk thing is a little too much in the vein of Slavoj Zizek, who reduces movies to mere examples for his Lacanian theory, but it makes some good points, the main one being, I think, that everything in the film has the quality of a movie set, so that the whole thing looks artificial from start to finish. This gives it an uncanny quality exacerbated by the fact that when we switch from small town America to gangster-land we see one seamless world, but feel like we shouldn't.
Compare the effect to one used by David Lynch in Lost Highway. In that world we cross over from reality into fantasy but don't yet realize it. In the film Pullman kills his wife because he is ashamed he cannot satisfy her in bed. In jail he imagines that he is someone else, someone who has what he lacks; he imagines he is a virile young man and then is released because, in Lynch-logic, if he is someone else then he didn't kill her. But the fantasy cannot last and reality intrudes until the fantasy breaks down and he becomes Pullman again. Lynch obscures where reality begins and ends but you can still find the divide, once you get how Lynch thinks.
A History of Violence, on the other hand is ALL MOVIE, ALL FANTASY but TWO INCONGRUENT ONES. The Norman Rockwell world and the Gangsterland world are both important parts of the American psyche, but they don't go together. Freud writes that in the unconscious, there is no sence of logical contradiction, there is no organization on that level. A History of Violence gives us a genre film -- two genre films -- on this darker psychic register.
The K-Punk thing is a little too much in the vein of Slavoj Zizek, who reduces movies to mere examples for his Lacanian theory, but it makes some good points, the main one being, I think, that everything in the film has the quality of a movie set, so that the whole thing looks artificial from start to finish. This gives it an uncanny quality exacerbated by the fact that when we switch from small town America to gangster-land we see one seamless world, but feel like we shouldn't.
Compare the effect to one used by David Lynch in Lost Highway. In that world we cross over from reality into fantasy but don't yet realize it. In the film Pullman kills his wife because he is ashamed he cannot satisfy her in bed. In jail he imagines that he is someone else, someone who has what he lacks; he imagines he is a virile young man and then is released because, in Lynch-logic, if he is someone else then he didn't kill her. But the fantasy cannot last and reality intrudes until the fantasy breaks down and he becomes Pullman again. Lynch obscures where reality begins and ends but you can still find the divide, once you get how Lynch thinks.
A History of Violence, on the other hand is ALL MOVIE, ALL FANTASY but TWO INCONGRUENT ONES. The Norman Rockwell world and the Gangsterland world are both important parts of the American psyche, but they don't go together. Freud writes that in the unconscious, there is no sence of logical contradiction, there is no organization on that level. A History of Violence gives us a genre film -- two genre films -- on this darker psychic register.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Comics Out 9 August 2006
Two things I wanted to read but missed will be out in collections this week: Marvel Zombies and X-Statix: Dead Girl. If anyone has anything to add, comics-wise, this is the place to do it: review stuff, talk about comics news, tell me why I should be getting something. And if you don't want to know about 52 #13 -- the issue that came out August 2nd -- stop reading. I have a few things to add to last week's statement that I am not getting the book anymore.
When I decided not to get the book after issue 13, I had not yet read 13. In the issue Elongated Man (Ralph) attends a ceremony designed to resurrect his wife. He brings Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Metamorpho, and Zauriel, who are undercover as members. The imagery is cultish. The group's crimes are that they tagged a grave, and stole a ring and a dress. Ralph decides he doesn't buy into their story. They smash the fake kryponite, Green Arrow destroys the roof, Green Lantern starts blowing stuff up, Ralph assaults the leader, everyone fights, and the building catches fire.
In an interview on newsarama, the book's editor, Stephen Wacker defends what the "heroes" did: that's what heroes do. But to me -- and to the interviewer, who should be given a raise for confronting the subject head on and not backing off -- it seemed like the equivalent of finding kids playing with a Ouija Board, beating them up and burning their house to the ground. This is what I think happened: any good screenwriting guide will tell you to build your plot around "plot points," major turning points in the story. First you figure out what your plot point is -- say, the ceremony is aborted but what Ralph sees makes him a believer and he clutches his wife's avatar in rubble, nearly insane with regret. Then you then write to reach that point. The problem with this method, basically a good one, is that often times you see writers coming up with bad paths to their plot points, which they are in a hurry to reach. 52 is a great example of a badly told story, in this (and other) respects.
The best part of the interview is when Wacker gets asked if the heroes acting badly is part of a theme of the series -- in a world without Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman heroes lose their moral compass. This is a smart "out" -- they guy is really throwing him a bone here -- but Wacker denies it. No more 52 for me. (Thanks to the Futurist; this post came out of a phone conversation we had).
When I decided not to get the book after issue 13, I had not yet read 13. In the issue Elongated Man (Ralph) attends a ceremony designed to resurrect his wife. He brings Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Metamorpho, and Zauriel, who are undercover as members. The imagery is cultish. The group's crimes are that they tagged a grave, and stole a ring and a dress. Ralph decides he doesn't buy into their story. They smash the fake kryponite, Green Arrow destroys the roof, Green Lantern starts blowing stuff up, Ralph assaults the leader, everyone fights, and the building catches fire.
In an interview on newsarama, the book's editor, Stephen Wacker defends what the "heroes" did: that's what heroes do. But to me -- and to the interviewer, who should be given a raise for confronting the subject head on and not backing off -- it seemed like the equivalent of finding kids playing with a Ouija Board, beating them up and burning their house to the ground. This is what I think happened: any good screenwriting guide will tell you to build your plot around "plot points," major turning points in the story. First you figure out what your plot point is -- say, the ceremony is aborted but what Ralph sees makes him a believer and he clutches his wife's avatar in rubble, nearly insane with regret. Then you then write to reach that point. The problem with this method, basically a good one, is that often times you see writers coming up with bad paths to their plot points, which they are in a hurry to reach. 52 is a great example of a badly told story, in this (and other) respects.
The best part of the interview is when Wacker gets asked if the heroes acting badly is part of a theme of the series -- in a world without Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman heroes lose their moral compass. This is a smart "out" -- they guy is really throwing him a bone here -- but Wacker denies it. No more 52 for me. (Thanks to the Futurist; this post came out of a phone conversation we had).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
