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Jan. 10th, 2005
I watched my first Wes Anderson movie in July of 2002 with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vcutag, The Royal Tenenbaums. I rather liked that film, with its quirky story of a troubled family of burned-out child geniuses who burned out early brought together by a manipulative displaced paterfamilias. That film had a unique style, with emotionally deadened protagonists interacting confusedly to produce a worried, alienated, intellectual-minded hilarity visible only to the audience. One wouldn't be too badly wrong if one thought of it as intelligent sitcom humour without the laugh track. Having caught The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou Saturday evening at the Market Square Rainbow Theatre, I can say for a fact that this is Anderson's unique style. I can also say for a fact that The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou is a good film.
Zissou, played by Bill Murray, is a declining Cousteau-type figure. Once rich and famous for his films of adventures in the exploration of the aquatic world, he's now an increasingly impoverished joke. The death of his close friend and colleague, Esteban, in an attack by the mysterious jaguar shark pushes him to go on a quixotic hunt on his converted Second World War minesweeper (the Belafonte) after the creature. This film prominently features Angelica Huston and Owen Wilson, who also appeared in The Royal Tenenbaums, the former as his estranged rich wife Eleanor, the latter as Ned Plimpton, an endearingly hopeful Air Kentucky pilot who believes he may be Zissou's son. Cate Blanchett plays a pregnant and emotionally conflicted reporter seen by Zissou as, alternatively, a source of desperately needed publicity and a poisonous critic. Jeff Goldblum's debonair and successful Alistair Hennessey, a rival of Zissou in romance and in marine exploration, lurks in the background.
Anderson's humour has a dark tone to it, with death and terror (the protracted death of Ned's mother, the attacks of pirates, Zissou's griefs) featuring prominently in the plot. It is a bit of an alienating film, and frankly, I don't think that most people would qualify it as a date film. Even so, it's a worthwhile film, worthy for the strength of its actors and the intensity of its plot and the sly documentary-style cinematography. (The soundtrack, too, with its Portuguese-language covers of 1970s David Bowie hits by Seu Jorge (also an actor in the film), is also rather nice.)
vcutag, The Royal Tenenbaums. I rather liked that film, with its quirky story of a troubled family of burned-out child geniuses who burned out early brought together by a manipulative displaced paterfamilias. That film had a unique style, with emotionally deadened protagonists interacting confusedly to produce a worried, alienated, intellectual-minded hilarity visible only to the audience. One wouldn't be too badly wrong if one thought of it as intelligent sitcom humour without the laugh track. Having caught The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou Saturday evening at the Market Square Rainbow Theatre, I can say for a fact that this is Anderson's unique style. I can also say for a fact that The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou is a good film.Zissou, played by Bill Murray, is a declining Cousteau-type figure. Once rich and famous for his films of adventures in the exploration of the aquatic world, he's now an increasingly impoverished joke. The death of his close friend and colleague, Esteban, in an attack by the mysterious jaguar shark pushes him to go on a quixotic hunt on his converted Second World War minesweeper (the Belafonte) after the creature. This film prominently features Angelica Huston and Owen Wilson, who also appeared in The Royal Tenenbaums, the former as his estranged rich wife Eleanor, the latter as Ned Plimpton, an endearingly hopeful Air Kentucky pilot who believes he may be Zissou's son. Cate Blanchett plays a pregnant and emotionally conflicted reporter seen by Zissou as, alternatively, a source of desperately needed publicity and a poisonous critic. Jeff Goldblum's debonair and successful Alistair Hennessey, a rival of Zissou in romance and in marine exploration, lurks in the background.
Anderson's humour has a dark tone to it, with death and terror (the protracted death of Ned's mother, the attacks of pirates, Zissou's griefs) featuring prominently in the plot. It is a bit of an alienating film, and frankly, I don't think that most people would qualify it as a date film. Even so, it's a worthwhile film, worthy for the strength of its actors and the intensity of its plot and the sly documentary-style cinematography. (The soundtrack, too, with its Portuguese-language covers of 1970s David Bowie hits by Seu Jorge (also an actor in the film), is also rather nice.)
On New Year's Eve, I noted that in Hervé Guibert's To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, the name for the character corresponding to Michel Foucault--a brilliant philosopher, boldly and dangerously experimental in life, was Muzil.
Friday, I inadvertantly learned through a conversation at work about the German-language Austrian author Robert Musil. As Roger Kimball noted in The New Criterion, in examining Musil's magnum opus The Man Without Qualities, Musil was a man strongly concerned with the problems of individualism in the modern scientific age.
Scientific rationality in this sense is not merely disillusioning; it is radically dehumanizing. It replaces the living texture of experience with a skeleton of "causes," "drives," "impulses," and the like. The enormous power over nature that science has brought man, Musil suggests, is only part of its attraction. Psychologically just as important is the power it gives one to dispense with the human claims of experience. How liberating to know that kindness is just another form of egotism! That beauty is merely a matter of fatty tissues being arranged properly! That every inflection of our emotional life is nothing but the entirely predictable result of glandular activity! Just another, merely, nothing but ... How liberating, how dismissive are these instruments of dispensation—but how untrue, finally, to our experience.
Musil presents scientific rationality as a temptation as well as an accomplishment because he sees that inherent in its view of the world is an invitation to forget one’s humanity.
Guibert was a well-educated multilingual European writer. He had to have known of Musil, and The Man Without Qualities, and his view of modernity. It's interesting, then, that he chose to write about his life and that of Muzil/Foucault in such a modern style, to reveal everything that there was to be known. Arnaud Genon, at Fabula, observes in a review of Jean-Pierre Boulé's Hervé Guibert : L’entreprise de l’écriture du moi that the author argues that "Guibert [. . .] inscrit son corps [dans ses textes], le soumet à diverses expérimentations et même si sa volonté de s’écrire au jour le jour est déjà présente, l’auteur oscille encore entre le conte, le récit, le journal, entre la première et la troisième personne."
Friday, I inadvertantly learned through a conversation at work about the German-language Austrian author Robert Musil. As Roger Kimball noted in The New Criterion, in examining Musil's magnum opus The Man Without Qualities, Musil was a man strongly concerned with the problems of individualism in the modern scientific age.
Musil ridicules the Romanticism of characters like Diotima who condemn science for disenchanting the world with "facts." And yet he seems to side with Ulrich when he explains that "knowledge is a mode of conduct, a passion. At bottom, an impermissible mode of conduct: like dipsomania, sex mania, homicidal mania, the compulsion to know forms its own character that is off balance."
In one pivotal chapter, Musil reflects on the "peculiar predilection of scientific thinking for mechanical, statistical, and physical explanations that have, as it were, the heart cut out of them." This is the key passage:
The scientific mind sees kindness only as a special form of egotism; brings emotions into line with glandular secretions; notes that eight or nine tenths of a human being consists of water; explains our celebrated moral freedom as an automatic mental by-product of free trade; reduces beauty to good digestion and the proper distribution of fatty tissue; graphs the annual statistical curves of births and suicides to show that our most intimate personal decisions are programmed behavior; sees a connection between ecstasy and mental disease; equates the anus and the mouth as the rectal and the oral openings at either end of the same tube—such ideas, which expose the trick, as it were, behind the magic of human illusions, can always count on a kind of prejudice in their favor as being impeccably scientific.
Scientific rationality in this sense is not merely disillusioning; it is radically dehumanizing. It replaces the living texture of experience with a skeleton of "causes," "drives," "impulses," and the like. The enormous power over nature that science has brought man, Musil suggests, is only part of its attraction. Psychologically just as important is the power it gives one to dispense with the human claims of experience. How liberating to know that kindness is just another form of egotism! That beauty is merely a matter of fatty tissues being arranged properly! That every inflection of our emotional life is nothing but the entirely predictable result of glandular activity! Just another, merely, nothing but ... How liberating, how dismissive are these instruments of dispensation—but how untrue, finally, to our experience.
Musil presents scientific rationality as a temptation as well as an accomplishment because he sees that inherent in its view of the world is an invitation to forget one’s humanity.
Guibert was a well-educated multilingual European writer. He had to have known of Musil, and The Man Without Qualities, and his view of modernity. It's interesting, then, that he chose to write about his life and that of Muzil/Foucault in such a modern style, to reveal everything that there was to be known. Arnaud Genon, at Fabula, observes in a review of Jean-Pierre Boulé's Hervé Guibert : L’entreprise de l’écriture du moi that the author argues that "Guibert [. . .] inscrit son corps [dans ses textes], le soumet à diverses expérimentations et même si sa volonté de s’écrire au jour le jour est déjà présente, l’auteur oscille encore entre le conte, le récit, le journal, entre la première et la troisième personne."
[NON BLOG] Ambling down the Danforth
Jan. 10th, 2005 06:32 pmI went with bitterlawngnome on a stroll east on Danforth from Broadview station east to Woodbine this afternoon. We passed through the Greek neighbourhood, with its bilingual Greek/English street signs and the abundant of the Hellenes' bright blue, through a largely Muslim South Asian district (including one shop where the sermons of Yusuf Islam were offered for sale, on CD), concluding somewhere on the western fringes of that mysterious territory known as East York.
bitterlawngnome took a picture of me on the northeastern corner of Danforth and Broadview just after noon, available here.
bitterlawngnome on a stroll east on Danforth from Broadview station east to Woodbine this afternoon. We passed through the Greek neighbourhood, with its bilingual Greek/English street signs and the abundant of the Hellenes' bright blue, through a largely Muslim South Asian district (including one shop where the sermons of Yusuf Islam were offered for sale, on CD), concluding somewhere on the western fringes of that mysterious territory known as East York.bitterlawngnome took a picture of me on the northeastern corner of Danforth and Broadview just after noon, available here.When I was 10, I bought Apocalypse 2000: Economic breakdown and the suicide of democracy 1989-2000 in a remaindered books bin, for $C2.99. It was 1990, and the Berlin Wall had already fallen (I had, in fact, bought two concrete chips certified to have come from the wall by the accompanying East German customs documents), and pessimistic books like Apocalypse 2000 no longer made any sense. Fukuyama was right.
Who would imagine that the United States would be marked by growing internal political visions, ill-judged foreign military adventures, religious nationalism, terrorist violence, and disputed presidential elections? Or that Japan would be paralyzed by a stagnant economy and possessed by growing fears about its future place in the world? Or that western Europe could unify behind a xenophobic populist concerned with defending--and expanding--the boundaries of "Europe" as much as possible? Or that Russia was slowly but surely heading for breakdown? Or that the Middle East and Africa would be scarred by pointless but pervasive mass violence?
I wish that I was 10 again.
Who would imagine that the United States would be marked by growing internal political visions, ill-judged foreign military adventures, religious nationalism, terrorist violence, and disputed presidential elections? Or that Japan would be paralyzed by a stagnant economy and possessed by growing fears about its future place in the world? Or that western Europe could unify behind a xenophobic populist concerned with defending--and expanding--the boundaries of "Europe" as much as possible? Or that Russia was slowly but surely heading for breakdown? Or that the Middle East and Africa would be scarred by pointless but pervasive mass violence?
I wish that I was 10 again.