Ok listen. We're going to premise this blog post with the fact that I thought The Departed's only flaw (besides Mark Wahlberg's performance) was its ending. Saying that I can relate to this article by Currie is the understatement of the century. I am so excited about this it's absurd.
Currie is addressing two questions, the second of which is far more interesting to me: how are the desires engendered in an audience by film dangerous? (Answer: they make you throw things when Scorsese wins the Oscar.)
So Currie makes these multiple distinctions between real and fiction and character and narrative and desire and emotion, but the only pertinent one to this discussion is this: we have desires for a film to be a coherent narrative (narrative desires), and we have desires for certain characters (character desires). This is entirely true: I wanted Matt Damon to die, but I also really wanted the movie to not suck like a Hoover. Currie's argument is that we have some sort of understanding that narrative desires take a kind of precedence over character desires: his example is Casablanca, and the movie would have made no sense if Bogey got the girl. He's right. I agree with this. And there's examples of this in the negative; I can't think of any right now because my hatred for The Departed is currently focused like a laser beam, but there's definitely movies that sacrifice quality for a happy ending by pulling stuff out of thin air. Into every life a little rain must fall, and we agree that into many very good films a little tragedy might be necessary to make a good story.
After this, Currie goes off the reservation. He says that our desire that a narrative be a good, unified one can be satisfied if that is the case. However, he claims that because characters are fictional, our desires for them to "flourish" (i.e., that Leonardo DiCaprio not freaking die) cannot be satisfied. This is ridiculous. If our desire is for a fictional character, if those desires are satisfied in a fictional setting, then our desires are satisfied, end of story, I walk out of the theater without demanding my money back. I think there are even cases where we would even rather that characters get their comeuppance than have a "necessary" ending: I would certainly rather that No Country for Old Men had ended differently, namely that Javier Bardem die, rather than just have a nasty broken arm, and the story would have been just as good (possibly).
Just to end on a further contrary note, I think this point that he makes about our narrative fictional desires possibly maybe almost kind of carrying over to real life is a load of wasted space. There's no support for this, and just because we've read Othello doesn't mean we're going to start treating our girlfriends terribly for errant handkerchiefs.
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It is not that narrative desires take precedence over character desires, but that they pertain to qualitatively different things. He thinks that we cannot have the same kinds of desires for fictional or imaginary things as for real thing.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I'm not sure that he thinks that hoping that a narrative doesn't suck constitutes a narrative desire. I think that narratives desires are that the narrative does such and such. Arguably, that might constitute a narrative desire. But I don't know.
On your last point, I assumed that he would agree with you. And I disagree with both of you. It seems so clear to me that films engender certain types of practices and these practices are then performed within the world. So I think thinking this issue in terms of desires misses the point.