The Bumpy Ride (Part 1)

• Ahh, the Oscars…The Statuette that dreams are made of …Well, as could be expected the resident members of the Copacabana School of Criticism, playwrights John Steppling and Guy Zimmerman, are not impressed with this bizarre farandula, this veritable orgy of self-adulation that descends on our consciousness every year…so they’ve been busy pointing the chinks in these inflated egos’ armor, their labors interrupted only by an unexpected technical catastrophe that suspended all blog activity until recently. Now the dialog resumes. Just in time to file more spot on commentary on the approaching awards…
  

January 31st, 2007

John,

Ethan Edwards is an Indian killer. Ford opens The Searchers at the point in Edwards life where the “blowback” begins. Edwards has returned home, and he brings the violence home with him and it destroys everything he loves. Blowback is a hot topic in America today, which may explain why this film seems so worth thinking about right now. Just this morning, I read a long piece on the Talking Points Memo blog about Chalmers Johnson’s new book “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.” It’s all about blowback, the repercussions we are just beginning to feel for all the violence we have covertly unleashed abroad over the last 60 years. As we have discovered, the rest of the world is not quite as helpless relative to us as the Indians were. If Chalmers and Hobsbawm et. al. are correct, we Americans are in for a bumpy ride over the next few decades. Still, old habits die hard. Until very recently the American public was willing to give power to a see-through whelp like George W. Bush, providing he’s the one most willing to pray at the altar of Ethan Edwards.

The average American is as oblivious about the violence done in their name as the homesteaders in The Searchers are about exactly what Ethan has been doing out in the majestic vastness beyond. Ethan doesn’t talk about it either, but we still know it by what it has done to Ethan, how it has shaped his view of things. He is not at all an introspective man, but the abduction of the girl thrusts him into a “searching” mode - instead of more indiscriminate killing he must locate one specific Indian chief, his nemesis and also his double, and this search requires patience and waiting, and Ethan comes to know himself a little. As the years pass we watch his harsh and narrow gaze widen and soften just a little, and this little thaw allows us to gauge where he has come from, psychically. I think the great subject of the film is the violent man confronting the actual effects of his violence, and being sufficiently humbled by this ordeal to finally break the pattern, but just barely. As you note, it’s not clear what Ethan has in mind when he lifts the girl up in his arms. In any event, this may seem like a straight-laced or moralistic reading of the film, but I think it basically rings true.

Reading your comments I found myself pondering how myths relate to the issue of the gods. By “gods” I refer to primal and archaic emotional states that are overwhelming in their power and that rise up in us, triggered by this or that, and hold us in their sway, determining our actions, what we do and say. Each day we may be held in thrall by any number of gods - the god of war, of love, the god of jealousy, etc., and we learn to impose on the chaos and helplessness a facade of sanity and order, and we hope no one notices the contradictions in our behavior or the loose threads of the costume that holds it all together. As children of the Enlightenment, we look down on polytheism, though a case could be made that polytheism actually offers a fairly sophisticated picture of experience. Our disdain is actually just a sign of how strongly we are gripped by the myth of progress.

In any event, if we’re gonna worship Ethan Edwards, we ought to have the good sense to worship who he has become at the close of the film rather than who he is at the start.

Guy Zimmerman

WEST OF NOWHERE

January 31st, 2007

I have limited time today, and I want to think a bit about your last remarks. I suspect you’re mostly right…about the real subject of film and theatre, and yet…

Let me rewind a bit here and address this question of myth; a word or idea that gets used rather generally (by myself too). Myths are stories or narratives that have some origin in history, and over time acquire symbolic status. This is acquired through usage and repetition. They, then, are of a different order than historical narrative. They are reduced, for one thing. They are formalized and the images or characters in them become iconic. The mythic in art is very complex and hard to describe. It also becomes a part of the evolution of language, and helps shape the society from which it springs.

Ok, so in the “West”…. which we examine in a film like The Searchers, we have something of what almost all Americans have internalized as an idealized vision of American character and spirit. What makes Ford’s film so profound is that is subverts these accepted notions while still using them. There are other westerns that do the same; One Eyed Jacks or Man of the West. The myth of the west, of the frontier, of cowboys and Indians, and manifest destiny is a deeply rooted notion in the US. But myth is also about the bigger forces out there, about that which cannot be contained in conventional storytelling. Here is where things get complicated.

As Slotkin says, myth does not argue its ideology, it exemplifies it. Yes, but that myth comes from its own set of assumptions, too. The origin of any particular myth didn’t come from an historical vacuum. The myth of the West came out of specific historical and material conditions. It’s interpreted according to need….in a sense, anyway. The genocide of Native Americans is such a deep and everlasting scar on the the American consciousness that some sort of rationale was in order. That justification is used to guide later generations in their behaviour, and to help reinforce belief systems or at least salve later atrocities.

Iraq today, and Abu Ghraib, are redolent with the cowboy/Indian metaphor. That isn’t exactly mythic because it’s too reductive and the discourse too simplistic. The Searchers touches something else; and it’s that something else that creates its own myth while using the established myths (in this case, of the frontier).

The conquest of the West, as it were, is a huge topic, but its mythic abstract is much easier to digest (good guys, savages, nature, etc). Here we arrive at some of what I wanted to mention regards Badiou (and probably Adorno, too)…but I will wait for that. I will only add that the ideological dimension of myth is much debated and argued these days. It strikes me that today’s usage of even ‘frontier mythology’ has been further reduced. The ways cops refer to alleged criminals as “the bad guys” is the best and most obvious example. As if humans were one-dimensional cyborgs.

Ahh…and my use of the word cyborg suggests the myth of science and rationality. In any event, The Searchers transcends its own inherited myths, and becomes mythic (I’m inventing this shit as I go along, mind)…and for me, *mythic* is not the generalized reduction of history too easy to use cartoon figures and tropes — but is that which finds itself actualizing the sense of both the specific historical origins of characters and situation, and the sense of history itself….by which I mean that human recognition of mortality. The mythic is a touchstone for one’s own mortality.

I do want to return to your remarks on theatre and film being the subject of theatre and film. I feel this to be true, but something is nagging at me about this.

Must think….or try to.

John Steppling

FIGURE AND GROUND…

January 30th, 2007

John,

Well, it’s fun to write about The Searchers, even though so much has been written about it already. Wayne is great in the film, moving with that feline grace that Mitchum had a bit of too, and maybe Brando when he was young. But with Wayne this quality was exaggerated to a Kabuki-like degree. The film plays like a treatise on Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and how the double bind Freud describes plays out in the saga of the American West. Kubrick was also influenced by the film, not directly but I think it taught him how rich that thematic material was, and he mined it in film after film. Kubrick is, of course, a very different cup of tea, but it’s interesting to ponder the connection.

A friend and I went through a phase recently where we watched a lot of classic Westerns - Mann and Budd Boetticher, and re-watched Shane, for example. Delmer Daves’ film 3:10 to Yuma with Glenn Ford in possibly his best role, and I think Elmore Leonard wrote the script. 3:10 to Yuma is late in the day for a Western, but watching the earlier films it struck me how the inherently cinematic qualities of the Western - lone figure riding against a simplified, barren landscape - resemble what’s always so great about the stage when the lights first come up and nobody speaks. Already there’s so much to unpack, simply in what’s already given. It struck me the other day that theater itself is really the only proper subject for theater, and that’s the feeling I get from the basic figure/ground imagery of the Western - the proper subject for cinema is cinema itself.

Just lob that up there….

Guy Zimmerman

“I WISH UNCLE ETHAN WERE HERE…”

January 30th, 2007

Your remarks on Ford’s The Searchers are quite correct. I return to the near last scene of Wayne lifting up Natalie Wood….where we aren’t totally sure if he wants to crush her skull against the rocks or not….and he lifts her very high over his head. And then he holds here there for several beats longer than seems right. It’s a disturbing and eloquent moment.

Early on, as the Commanche are about to raid the homestead, the little boy turns to his mother and says; “I wish Uncle Ethan were here”. Understandable.

Ethan is the avenging angel….and he is also Ahab. He also takes a journey….it’s not just Jeffrey Hunter’s character that grows, but Ethan does too. But at the very end he must turn away from the farmhouse and walk toward the wild. A beautiful scene. The film overall is majestic and I agree totally that one cannot understand America or Americans without reading Moby Dick, Blood Meridian, and watching The Searchers (and actually, maybe, The Hustler).

Ethan is he whom one must confront to be able to learn. However, he is also a walking nightmare, a force of destruction. Such characters — as I’ve said, fascinate me. A note on Wayne himself. His performance is magical, it’s immense and mythic and singular. Few other actors could have done it. One might laugh at my saying that, but try to imagine anyone else as Ethan Edwards.

Which brings me to my first nominations for Placebo Actor of the new century: Tim Roth, Edward Norton, or……..??? Everyone knows Tom Cruise sucks, but somehow Roth and Norton have finetuned their PR machine to sell themselves as *serious*. To watch Norton struggle through the insufferable “Illusionist” is to know what I mean.

And I think you’re spot on regarding Cheney. Fucking Wyoming rube, a man of intense focus and greed. The greed, however, comes out of his diseased soul. His countenance is deeply unsettling, it’s like an open sore or a swollen sphincter. Energetically, one cannot imagine a Cheney capable of good, or of compassion or love.

I want — maybe tomorrow, to go over some thoughts of Badiou on art. But this little addition is only a valentine to John Ford and his enduring masterpiece, The Searchers.

John Steppling

Cormac McCarthy and the Moby Dick of Armageddon

January 30th, 2007

The Searchers is actually a film I know fairly well. It is famously of-the-canon and deserves to be. There’s the gorgeous low-angle shot of Ethan arriving back at the burned out homestead on horseback, unsheathing his rifle and riding to confront the murdered and violated body of the woman he couldn’t protect, and whose death he in fact has caused by the simple act of coming to see her - the anguish contained in that shot alone earns the film everything. The only other single shot that can compete with it is the shot in 7 Samurai where the great swordsman, whose name I don’t recall, is felled by a bullet in the rain. [The noble character’s name is Kyuzo. —CJO Eds.]

The Searchers, of course, is about violence and America. It’s impossible to understand American film without it. Taxi Driver, Strange Encounters, Unforgiven - all the big films seem to echo it, directly or indirectly. What we are willing to become in our search for perfect happiness is the subject matter, and the film seems to address the two great karmic debts that are choking us today - slavery and the genocide of the Indians. This issue of violence and its justification - the sense that happiness would be ours if only certain obstacles were destroyed - this is the pathway to endless hell. The Buddhists say you must locate in yourself that voice that justifies anger and ruthlessly uproot it. It’s good advice. Today we have Dick Cheney acting out Ethan Edwards psychotic break in the scene where he slaughters the buffaloes, trying to destroy the evil double who will remain, by definition, forever out of reach. He’s also, obviously Ahab in pursuit of the whale, cabled to it and taking the rest of us down with him.

I want to point out that Bush is interesting relative to one’s taste in aberrant psychology; Cheney is more compelling to me. The secret truth about Cheney is that he’s a boot-licker. The flinty-CEO act is meant to earn him a place at the boardroom table where he still feels inadequate. You must remember that Cheney was almost rejected from Yale. Just another rube from the sticks, Cheney had to get down on his knees in front of some blueblood who then paved the way for him. Inside he remains the insecure arriviste desperate to prove his mettle, and arrivistes are always too preoccupied with inner doubts to worry too much about posterity or what they are actually doing. True Oligarchs are more cynical, but also less destructive. But it’s chilling because, in his attempt to compensate for his own sense of inner lack, Cheney has stampeded the country toward a future only Cormac McCarthy has seen with sufficient clarity. I’m not talking about Blood Meridian, through which the spirit of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards rides. I’m talking about his recent The Road, wherein a father and son wander South through a post-apocalyptic America.

Guy Zimmerman

WELCOME TO THE BEHEADING

January 30th, 2007

Guy….

Well, you introduce a very big topic when you bring up violence. I think I will wait and tackle that more on the other thread (though blogging is giving me a bit of vertigo I have to confess). In regards to Del Toro’s film; I think you make good points. At Camerimage, the festival here in Lodz, which is where I saw it, it ended up winning the golden kielbasa or whateverthefuckever the award is called. I was pleased with this I have to say, because it beat out films like Flags of Our Fathers, Ritt’s dreadful Even Money (get Kim Bassinger a real job, ok) and Black Dahlia (among the very worst films of the decade or maybe ever).

People were polarized about it and I think this is a good sign. It was disturbing. And the Unamuno-like tragic sense of life was felt by everyone, and this was disorienting to many. I would love for you to re-watch Ford’s The Searchers sometime soon. I saw it again a while back and return to it constantly in my thoughts. For many reasons. Do you know Slotkin’s books on the American West? Worth looking at in light of The Searchers. I bring this up because of Pan’s Labyrinth and the sense of resistance that one sees, which we know was futile in one respect. Still, the journey of the girl is also one from childhood into adulthood. She must die to be reborn. Lose her childhood and mother to become ready for her own life of mothering and nurturing. It’s a fairy tale for certain. She journeys down to confront her own demons and then returns regenerated through the……uh……violence (?). Now, what is interesting about this film is that it operates on several levels. The Jungian/Bettleheim-ian level, and the political historical level. She also is shot by the fascist. End of journey to motherhood on any level.

The reading of film can be tricky…..and I was thinking of Black Dahlia here…..where you imitate film noir and get it totally wrong. A noir film where the protagonists are cops should be a first clue. German expressionism was the reaction to a country that had been humiliated by WW1, and was an internalizing of Freud. The enemy is us. So the evil masterminds are always experts in mind control (Caligari or Dr Mabuse) and the sense of dislocation is seen in the slanted angular sets and the opaque mise en scene. Those same directors, or those who learned under them, ended up in Hollywood and gave us the great noir films of the forties. To watch Out of the Past or File on Thelma Jordan, Detour, or even Lady from Shanghai (Welles was well tutored by German expressionism) is to see this legacy quite clearly. I suspect that Pan’s Labyrinth might be seen as a kind of reaction. It’s obviously not about Franco so much as it’s about Blair and Bush (meaning global capital) and their enablers. It’s about the seduction of violence and about resistance.

As for the Oscars. I love your image of a beheading. Saddam’s lynching comes to mind…the envelope please. And the winner is, Saddam Hussein. The fake sentiment of the awards speeches, the teary eyes and maudlin quality to the whole thing is sort of a cross between Oprah and….well, a beheading. Artists, as Ive said before, are marginalized as soon as they ask for or apply for a grant. ‘Oh, you need grant money?’ Ok, well, here you go. And this chump change is thrown down and the artists scramble around on all fours sucking it up with their tongue. In a sense, your right, that the Oscars is headed that way…..because, again as you suggest, the spectacle seems to need that reinforcement. The coverage of the Oscars is what is actually even more revealing. Much like FOX-News covering the lynching of Saddam. Breathless, nervous, and wet. But then this is a world where weapons are the number one industry and pornography number two.

John Steppling

I TAKE IT BACK…

January 30th, 2007

Violence ratifies an unreal world, and this is what’s wrong with violence. Violence creates false limitations and then hardens them. It provides a sense that we are something, that we have the potential to survive and that our emotional needs might finally be met, if certain obstacles could be eradicated or overcome. Violence leads to delusion, in other words, because none of these things are true. The truth is we will not survive…we will never be anybody…and our emotional needs will never, in fact, be met. Violence leads to delusion and creates an addiction to ever more delusion, and pretty soon we find ourselves on the brink of destruction, our actual fate in the hands of Republicans (at least the modern Bushista variety) and other madmen. These are some of the thoughts that occurred to me as a result of watching Guillermo Del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth for a second time.

The film begins with the sound of a girl laboring for breath as she dies. The camera settles on her face. “Do not hurt me,” the face implores, evoking the essential vulnerability with which we confront each other. “The face is always naked,” is the haunting phrase Emmanuel Levinas used to describe this vulnerability, which suffuses Del Toro’s film. Arrayed against the soft eyes of the girl are bullets and the fist of a fascist patriarch. There will be no victory for her. All she has on her side is imagination. And yet on another level - and Pan’s Labyrinth is a film of levels - it is enough because imagination, and its close cousin compassion, is what links her to us, watching the film in our parallel world. The blood of an innocent…the sacrificial victim…mythic forces are in play.

When the lights came up I was glad to see the theater half full of people, many of them young. It was good to know the film had re-acquainted them to the horrors of torture and sadism. We all need to be reminded today, since torture is being committed daily in our name, and openly defended by the American fascists who seem to spring up everywhere one looks. I heard today some misguided speechwriter from the Reagan administration imploring the faithful to send their children to film schools and journalism schools, because that’s where the “battle needs to be won.” “Pan’s Labyrinth” illustrates why this is a fool’s errand. Imagination is the great antidote to the violence of the fascist soul, which stumbles bellowing around the labyrinth of human history.

This is to say, John, I forgive the Academy all the transgressions you have enumerated in gratitude for Pan’s Labyrinth being nominated for this year’s Award. May it win and may everyone applaud Guillermo Del Toro as he steps up on the podium in his monkey suit. I’ll applaud too, wherever I am when I read about it later.

Guy Zimmerman

YEAH, BUT…

January 29th, 2007

Yeah, but John, how do you REALLY feel? I mean about the Academy Awards?

I have to confess I have never watched the broadcast and somehow succeeded in blocking the whole thing out. Ditto Sundance, actually. You take it to heart more than I do. It’s heroic of you. And, at this point in time, it’s even more heroic of you to insist on linking what takes place at the Academy Awards with anything relating to artistic merit. It’s pagentry, spectacle and those who submit are no more or less likely to do work of lasting value than anyone else. Be interesting to hear a zeitgeist read on this year’s event, but only mildly interesting.

There’s something about awards ceremonies that fill me with dread. It strikes me now, in fact, that award ceremonies are the sine-qua-non of placebo culture, which I suppose means I really ought to watch this year’s Academy Awards just to stay abreast of what I’m rejecting. It seems, for example, that the Academy Awards Ceremony takes on ever more importance as American films themselves become ever more irrelevant to the culture at large, ever more inert as a cultural form. We forget what movies are, how they are made, why they were worth spending time watching or talking about. The fresco as an art form arose and passed away in 150 years or so as the technology and the sociology changed, and I think the same is happening with cinema. In the end, movies will be produced for the SOLE purpose of furnishing a reason to hold the annual Academy Awards ceremony, which we’ll all be forced to watch endlessly, at all times, via chip implant.

But seriously, artists are reduced as soon as they step up to accept the trophy, and the sight of it always reminds me vaguely of an execution. The autonomy of the artist as an expressive being is destroyed, and it occurs to me now that the whole ordeal is about a kind of dominance. The artist bows to his public. Gets his bone. Probably what he or she really wants is more freedom and support, maybe a healthier culture in which to operate in. Instead, the monkey suit and the mic, the applause from people he would rather ignore or talk to one on one. The artist commodified and dressed up like a grandee, pegged into a social hierarchy that is by definition deaf to him.

Participating in the transaction of celebrity is like chain-smoking - it’s definitely bad for you in fundamental and concrete ways. There’s that Walker Percy story (I think it’s Walker Percy) from the 50s about someone encountering William Holden on the street, and the luminosity of the encounter, and how this luminosity seemed to stay with the person for the rest of the day and then slowly, painfully drains away…I heard a story on the news today about women in Tokyo who have begun to frequent “Host” bars where handsome men come and sit with them and say nice things about how beautiful their eyes are. It’s chaste and also irresistible, and there are women, apparently, who have gone bankrupt through an addiction to these Host bars. The NPR reporter was non-plussed - it’s entertaining. They get what they pay for. It’s like men going to stripper bars. They know it’s a dream, but it’s an entertaining dream. Like cows and sheep in the pasture we like our tepid entertainments and are resigned to our lot. The ramp will come and the slippery floor and the bolt through the forehead will come, but right now we know what we like and we don’t see the point in making a big deal about it all. Better to dream that the person who leans toward us holding the skull-gun has a smile as alluringly vacant as Scarlett or Selma.

Oh, and I agree with your comments about “The Last King of Scotland” and “Blood Diamond,” both of which were pretty good flicks.

Guy Zimmerman

…AND THE WINNER IS…?

January 29th, 2007

Well, the annual spectacle of the Oscars is upon us….or the nominations at least. Brace yourself for the near endless flurry of pontifications (this is a contest, a horse race, after all). The arm chair real politik is always amusing……the analysis…….the realist critique of why Scorsese might get one, or Clint, or fucking Helen Mirren.

Let’s remember that Chaplin never won an award…..(unless he got one of those liftetime achievement things…..I don’t recall) and Welles was hardly rewarded…..and now with Rocky 27 out let’s remember that the original Rocky beat out Taxi Driver for best film. The absurdities abound and it’s beneath us to catalog them, frankly. A film like The Hustleronly won editing as I recall (or set design, too) but Newman didn’t win, nor Scott, nor Rossen.

The modern cultural mentality laps up this shit. And then the big day….and we can watch a Scarlett Johansonn exude stupidity, and watch which designer gown is worn by whom. Or watch cleavage meters or whatever, as Selma Hayek appears. So, what is the allure of this event? It’s an aspect of media consolidation — of the failure of an alternative press or point of view, to exist anymore.

We read little in the way of real critique in terms of Cuba, or the Balkans, or Iraq. And in terms of culture we get even less, in a sense. Show me where a discussion of Bruno Dumont exists? Or where Eastwood might to be compared to an Anthony Mann or Raoul Walsh? No, art is kept hidden away, and when, if ever, it accidentally surfaces it is made fun of. Movie critics mostly write about film as if it were a restaurant review. ‘If you like chocolate pudding, then this cafe is for you’ and ‘if you want romance, don’t miss….’ yada yada yada. Or they talk about opening weekend profits.

Of course the spectacle is viewed *cynically* by a large number of people. But such faux post modern irony is simply part of the joke, and those tuning in or attending Oscar parties, are the dupes of this mirage. You can’t make fun of what has already made fun of itself. The self gratulation that is the “Oscars” is vaguely nauseating (last time I checked….and I’ve only seen part of two shows over the last twenty years) but reflective of the self important mentality of Hollywood (Clooney at the UN…..cruise missile liberal). Hollywood is a symptom, its endless formulaic tripe is simply an aspect of the obsessional dimension of modern consciousness. But it is toxic……the coverage is so extensive that winners and losers and gowns and jokes appear the next day and will be discussed around water coolers, no matter what. It’s what Burroughs called a virus.

Someone said making movies is not about making movies, it’s about making money.

And so it is. Period. Now, within that frame, some serious work appears…..but not often anymore. If one does a quick check of the demographics of the protagonists in this year’s nominated films, I think what you find is the ruling class, or upper upper middle class, or folks in uniform. And if not in uniform then at least they must sort of be connected to those in uniform (The Departed). Sadly one sees (per our earlier discussion) that Pan’s Labyrinth is ignored while Babel embraced. Why do you think?

That United 93 is nominated for anything is enough to put you off your feed. But there you are, the spectacle must reproduce itself and its myths.

No surprise The Queen is such a hit. Films like Blood Diamonds or Last King of Scotland, get a pass because they deal with “Africa” and this is the new feel-good subject for the post colonial west. “Serious” works on “Africa” tend to still show lots of smiling black children and the only film I can think of to really avoid this was the documentary “Darwin’s NIghtmare”. One can applaud Constant Gardner up to a point, but to really dig into a Hotel Rwanda or Syriana is be taken on the fairytale cruiseship of amnesia.

A final note on the new cartoon semblance phenomenon that is The Queen. Wherein lies the appeal. It’s precedents include Ali, The Doors, I Walk the Line, Ray, etc, etc, etc … and I find this to be quite fascinating. It’s not acting, it’s impersonating. A Joaquin Phoenix certainly got Johnny down pat. Kind of amazing in a sense. And yet, to what end? I can go to youtube and catch a lot of the real Cash. But I suspect there is a strange appeal in this mimicry. I can’t say I understand it, but I am highly suspicious of it.

So, the envelope please. And who gives a fuck.

John Steppling

FEAR VS. ANXIETY II

January 25th, 2007

John - It’s unsettling, this shift to blog-mode. One difference is that now subsequent posts are added at the top rather than tacked onto the bottom of the thread. A small change, but interesting too, in its implications.

You’ve raised many issues. I agree with your comments about theater and cinema. What I find intriguing on so many levels is a certain kind of theater, tragic drama, really. Melodrama and most comedies seems to me like very inconvenient television and I have never been interested in musical theater at all. That’s not to denigrate it - people like all sorts of things and more power to them. But that little sliver of theater that we practice I only find more and more interesting. Your point that theater is also a means of storytelling is worth underscoring. There’s perhaps a point of dynamic balance between the play-as-ritual on the one hand and the play-as-representation-of-imagined-events on the other. What I love about Pinter, for example, is how much tension he’s able to maintain between those two poles.

Art is about transformation. Transformation is difficult to measure because it’s an organic process, and because we’re talking about the kind of attitudinal transformation that’s inherently resistant to any kind of measurement. This is still a scientific culture, and science is only interested in what can be measured, and likes to pretend that nothing else is worth thinking about…”What did Beckett transform?” you could ask. Well, little directly, perhaps, but you need to view his work as a seed that then grew out through all those other writers (and artists) influenced by his ground-zero approach to literature. In our first dialogue I pointed out, for example, how Hamm from End Game became Max in Pinter’s Homecoming…and how Max then became the misanthropic Steptoe in the British TV series Steptoe and Son…and Steptoe then became Archie Bunker and, through him, all the other regrettable sitcom patriarchs down through Homer Simpson and beyond. What was the transformation here? An undercutting of patriarchy? Certainly. Can it be measured? Not really. Is it therefore unreal? Not at all.

Fear is an emotional state, but anxiety is actually a crucial part of the dynamic by which the self seizes hold of how we experience the world. You could even say that the self is an expression of anxiety. Specifically, the sense of self arises from the anxiety that’s generated when we first encounter the Other in the world. The sheer being of the Other underscores the tenuousness of our claims to existence. The Other brings with him (or her) knowledge of our own mortality. The Other is a mortal threat and brings death. The stage is perhaps the best place to watch this process take place. It’s instantly obvious when a actor on stage is affected when a second actor enters. The space between them is highly charged always and something has also collapsed and the space between us and them has also been altered. Nothing like this can really happen in film, I don’t think. Technology creates a safety that doesn’t exist in the flesh. I’m not sure catharsis is really possible in cinema, though I share your love of film, certainly.

It’s possible to view technology as a neutral set of tools that extend our power to do good or evil, and that amplify the effects of our actions positive and negative. But technology is also an expression of anxiety to some degree. We want to be rid of death, understandably enough. But this effort most often entails tons of denial, and nothing good can come from that, really. Nothing balanced. We are tremendously imbalanced in the West. I see this imbalance play itself out in the attitude of scientists, most of whom arrived at their vocation because they felt a powerful love of CERTAINTY that is entirely emotional at root. This love of certainty amounts to an existential stance. A lot of good has come from that – scientific method is a powerful practice – but it’s also imbalanced. The flip side of a love of certainty is an inability to tolerate the anxiety of not-knowing, but not-knowing is the precursor to wisdom. Much about this has been written, but the halls of science are still surrounded by moats of denial. The aggression that will not be looked at simply grows in power. I remember reading about biolabs in which people had gene-spliced the Ebola virus with the smallpox virus and this act of astonishing violence was presented as just another exercise in the dispassionate pursuit of knowledge. When the planet has been reduced to a smoking cinder there will still be scientists ready to denounce any discussion of, for example, unconscious impulses.

Back to you, as they say on the networks…

Guy

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MEMORIA OBSTINADA Do you remember which classic film packs this memorable speech? : “The people, Eddie, the people! Don’t tell me about the people, Eddie. The people sit in front of their little TVs with their bellies full of beer and fall asleep. What do the people know, Eddie? Don’t tell me about the people, Eddie!”- Nick Benko (Hint: Rod Steiger). We are certain that many an American politico has banked on precisely this notion to move his fortunes (literally) forward…it’s one helluva a country alright.