The Cult of Personality

Creedy: Die! Die! Why won't you die?... Why won't you die?
V: Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof.
For Benjamin, the film actor’s performance is split into the aura, or the intrinsic uniqueness of a piece of art, and the reproducible. The aura is only really experienced on the movie set, in the moment. The reproducible, (the dvd for example) is the image of this uniqueness. The reproducible leads to the cult of personality which is the commoditized personality. The personality which is the result of the illusion rather than the aura. The fact that the audience’s experience of a performer is controlled and airbrushed and edited in a certain way, leads to the desire for the audience, too to become reproducible. This is the modern phenomena of being famous for being famous. The allure of celebrity is the thrill within the illusion of being reproducible. We hear in pop songs the desire for “everyone to know my name” or to have “my face on every billboard.”
“With the increasing extension of the press… an increasing number of readers became writers.” This same phenomena of popularizing a medium by reducing technological barriers has been taking place in film for the past decade, only in film. Obviously, a quick glance at youtube will show you a mix of good and bad “amateur” video. It’s true that “the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.” Youtube has fully satisfied the need to be reproducible, and is starting to make people realize, I think, that the uniqueness of a piece may be an area to work on – so you can get more hits, of course.
I think V for Vendetta shows Benjamins’ distinction between the unique and the reproducible. You can kill V, the copy, the man, but you cannot kill the idea, the aura. When we view films, we can view the copy, but we cannot view the unique performance, which was creating by putting together hundreds of splices of movement. The unique performance is bulletproof, protected from our penetrating gaze.

not exactly your grandmother's beach reading.

First and foremost, the premise of the Benjamin excerpt is one that I find very engaging and decidedly relevant. I have no interest in this standpoint he's apparently taking against commentaries on proletariat art, but rather the substance of it, which seems to consist in establishing what constitutes art when it can sort of spring into being in a rather perfunctory and cold way (think Thomas Kinkade galleries and T-Pain's auto-tune albums, if you'll forgive the pop culture reference). In pursuit of all this, he goes about explaining exactly what the various facets of art are, including their contextual relevance and origins.

Of these explanations, I thought the most interesting was XIV, "One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later." Obviously, since I'm nothing if not contrary, I immediately took issue with this. What's he saying here? A truly great piece of art is merely a foundation for other art? How unsatisfying and disrespectful. Then I realized how stupid that sounded and a) that wasn't what Benjamin was saying and b) this was merely one part of what he thinks contributes to what makes art "art." After reading the footnote (which I thought was actually clearer than the body of the argument), this point actually makes a lot of sense.

I can't really relate to Benjamin's example of Dadaism here, nor to its apparent successor in Charlie Chaplin, so for our purposes we'll use Star Wars (the original three, not the new ones. I'm talking A New Hope style here).

My parents and brother remember when the Star Wars trilogy was released, and the thing they raved about the most was the special effects and how incredibly impressive they were. Of course, when I saw the movie at 9, I was already jaded and couldn't figure out what they were talking about. But anyways, I think that special effects sort of get maligned fairly often because in some films they tend to take center stage over acting and plot development, but in all honesty I think they play a pretty crucial part in creating an engaging and appealing film, which can be considered a work of art; Star Wars and other films like maybe Blade Runner or Waltz with Bashir (which used a different sort of special effect) would probably widely be considered "art" despite some impressive looking stuff on screen. But the great thing about Star Wars was that I think it really sort of marked this incredible turning point. It was pretty advanced for 1977, but one of the reasons it's so great is that we now have all these films that push special effects to create the sort of cinematic atmosphere that Star Wars was going for in its incredibly epic way. Just like George Lucas was influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey, James Cameron can trace his roots back to A New Hope, and with him we have arguably the dawn of the age of 3-D cinema, something that will probably be regarded in the future as akin to the transition from silent film to "talkies." In fact, they're even talking about re-releasing the original Star Wars films in 3-D. But the important thing is that none of these films are derivatives of one another: they seem like natural evolutions. Benjamin writes that art will carry beyond its goal, and that is absolutely what Star Wars did, not just in the indirect spawning of other great films but because it lead to the creation of this entirely new medium, 3-D technology, that's a kind of technology and this new kind of cinematic art.

Sex is Violence: Rear Window

The film is not about whether or not Thorwald murdered his wife. That is actually a subtext. Rather, the film is about the relationship between Jeff and Lisa. This is the primary concern of the film. It begins with concerns about this relationship and it ends with them unresolved. But in between, it stages a fantasy for the sake of illustrating the tensions that perturb that relationship.

Despite appearances, Lisa is a battle-axe, dominating unhelpfully her besieged beau. He prefers to photograph objects--that is, keep them at a distance for the sake of his dominion over them. The lesson of this film is, objects are ours to the degree that they remain within our gaze and at a distance. Whenever this distance is not respected, people get hurt. Hence, Jeff's poor broken leg; hence, Lisa's encounter with Thorwald; hence, Thorwald's encounter with Jeff.

When bodies encounter one another, bodies that are not reduced to images, they have a violent damaging impact. Nothing passes without suffering in exchange.

Jeff fears these encounters of bodies. He knows that marriage is the institution that sanctifies the act of body encounters. Otherwise, these encounters are forbidden by cultural, religious, even zoning laws (Jeff must inform his landlord if he is going to have a visitor overnight). He fears losing his freedom, signified by the possibility of encounters in strange lands and the multiplicity of choices, which his rear window/television offers him. With marriage, he can no longer remain a "window shopper," as Stella (his nurse) scornfully calls him. And he opens himself up to the violence that Lisa poses.

She wants marriage, but perhaps as much she wants sex. One night when they are enjoying each other's company, and she is sitting on his lap and his hard cast, he says that he has a problem. And she says that she has a problem. He asks her why a salesman would leave and come back many times the same night. Because he likes the way his wife welcomes him home. Why would he spend the entire day at home? He wants to do "home work." Why hasn't he gone into his wife's bedroom all day? I wouldn't dare answer that.

Anything to get his attention, but everything fails, because Jeff is not interested in sex. It draws a suspicion, which is, to Lisa, "something too frightful to utter."

Yet there is a unique and fascinating symmetry here: Jeff fears sex and he fears marriage. As a palliative, he spies a murder out his window, dramatizing one resolution of the torture promised by marriage. His investigation of this murder is a vicarious enjoyment of the deed itself. Yet his investigation is also horror at the deed, just like his horror of sexuality. Thorwald's wife had, presumably, chosen not to "give it up," and for this reason, her husband murdered her. Would Lisa also murder him, this similarly ill and infirmed individual in the power of a pushy and demanding member of the opposite sex?

And if Jeff's motivation for his murder fantasy is the terrorizing anticipation of sexuality, then what becomes Lisa's motivation for her murder fantasy? Eventually she overcomes her initial disgust at this act of voyeurism and accepts the murder fantasy as her own. But Lisa too is troubled by the failure of her efforts to attract his attention. She is in love with a man that does not want her, just as Thorwald is in a relationship with a woman that does not want him. His murder of his wife is an imaginative response to the immediate tension of her not-yet-domestic relationship.

But the fantasies of Jeff and Lisa—the collision that their bodies anticipate, just like the one that Stella used to describe, metaphorically we hope, how she met her husband (two taxis running into one another)—do not remain fantasies. Each gets a chance to submit the other to violence. First, Lisa climbs into Thorwald's apartment to recover the wedding ring, the evidence of the murder. Jeff can call her out at any time by ringing the phone, but he does not do so, unwittingly, until Thorwald returns and finds Lisa and ... turns the lights out .... The police intervene, thankfully.

They were called by Jeff on the tip that a woman was being beaten in an apartment. This hadn't happened yet: Jeff had imagined it. But when the police arrive and Lisa has on her finger the wedding ring, which will prove that Thorwald's wife is not out of town but in fact dead. She does not tell the police. Instead, she shows the ring to Jeff, across the courtyard, in a gesture that also is revealed to Thorwald. She had shown Thorwald where Jeff was, and then she went quietly with the police. Leaving Thorwald there, alone. Thorwald goes to Jeff's apartment. The lights, anticipating him, are already out.
Sexuality is violence: the invisible, yet driving identity throughout this entire drama. Sex takes place behind the shades of the newlyweds' windows. There, he is being submitted to her insatiable appetite. Murder takes place in the dark of the Thorwalds' apartment. No one sees it, but it is what everyone is looking for.

And after Thorwald has been blinded (the only weapon that Jeff wields--the capacity to blind others, to disrupt the gaze), Jeff managed to put off the violence for only a few minutes and it didn't save him the trouble of another broken leg. He reenters his cocoon. While he sleeps in his wheelchair, at a safe distance from the bed, Lisa lies on the bed, in jeans (having visibly assumed the guise of masculinity), reading a book of encounters in strange lands (the Himalayas--there's a phonetic joke there). When she notices he is asleep, she pulls out her copy of Vogue. It was all an image.

OMG another opportunity for me to bitch about The Departed.

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.

there is a man, a certain man...

I'm a huge White Stripes fan and their song "The Union Forever" makes a whole lot more sense now. Jack White: 1. Jenna: 0.

In a weird way, I honestly thought the most striking part of this film was the way the reporter, Mr. Thompson, was portrayed. When you consider that he was really the conduit for the entire story and thus crucial in some small way, his deliberately minimal status is rather surprising. His face was barely shown, and even then, never in direct light. In almost every scene he appeared in, he was in the foreground, yet not the focus of the shot. In contrast, Kane is the more powerful figure even when he is in reality dead and present only in the recounted stories of his friends and associates, dominating every single scene he appears in, to the best effect when he is finishing Jed’s review: Kane’s head in the foreground is larger than the entire figure of a standing Jed. I agree with Prof. Vaught that this movie was an absolute triumph of style: every single shot seemed effortlessly perfect, although the amount of effort that must have gone in to Orson Welles' debut film must have been considerable indeed. The incredible impression of a sheer vastness (*cough* Deleuze *cough*) that Welles managed to create in multiple shots was impressive, to say the least: Xanadu and its grounds seemed endless, the halls in the building itself limitless, and the collection of art and statues after Kane’s death stretched on for apparent miles. Yet I never got the impression that Kane was ever dwarfed by any of this; on the contrary, it made his persona seem all the larger for the space.

I think I already knew that "Rosebud" was his childhood sled due to the massive number of Internet "100 Best Films of All Time" lists that put Citizen Kane as number one, and then spoil the ending, and I almost wish that Orson Welles had pulled a page out of Quentin Tarantino's book, Pulp Fiction briefcase style and not ever told us what Rosebud was (had Kiss Me Deadly come out before Citizen Kane?). Thompson's lines about a single word being an inadequate description for one man's life would have seemed a lot weightier that way without some kind of homage to simpler boyhood days in the snow that I think seems a tad heavy-handed in its attempts to stamp a final message on the picture...rather like the rat on the balcony at the end of The Departed (yeah, I said it). As it stands, I’m not entirely sure if a coherent meaning really coalesced out of the film.

Comedy is Beautiful, Aristotle!

The comedies about which Aristotle writes must be very different from what we call comedies today. This point is clear from the way Aristotle describes comedy, and subsequently imposes many limitations on comedy which I don’t think hold true today. His description of comedy reflects the quality of comedy as art during his time, but I think dramatic changes have been made which make comedy an art form which can reflect beauty.
Aristotle is correct in asserting that comedy is related to the ridiculous. However, his next point that ridiculousness implies ugliness seems harder to support without Aristotle’s teleological view. In class, we discussed possible distinctions between the absurd and the ridiculous. We said that the absurd reflects objects or situations which are impossible or improbable. The ridiculous reflects objects or situations which have useless eccentricity. If comedic material is said to be ridiculous or absurd, in either case this doesn’t necessarily entail ugliness. For Aristotle, beauty has a certain order to it. When people laugh at the ugly, distorted masks on stage, they are laughing as a means of distancing themselves from the ugliness and affirming the values of beauty and order. Modern comedy, however, specifically long-form improvisation has beauty because it includes many of the qualities Aristotle identifies as art, and seeks a combination of order and disorder.
There are many styles of long-form improvisation, but one style begins with an audience interview, then has performers spontaneously create scenes based off the anecdotes given in the interview. These scenes are often related to each other only tangentially, or not at all, but eventually weave together to make a coherent world in the end. The point is, the interview often produces anecdotes which are everyday occurrences, not necessarily disordered or unusual experiences, but it is the attempt to imitate these experiences and create a coherent ordered world which comes off as absurd.
Improv uses plot and narrative in each scene, strives for wholeness in the end, and its length also depends on audience and performer memory. A good performer remembers things from the earlier scenes and includes them in later scenes. Aristotle says the length of a piece of art should be long enough to be held by the audience’s memory. Today, the length of the piece is actually determined by memory. Improv strives for wholeness because it is trying to create a world which holds absurdities. An order which holds disorder. In this sense then, modern comedy can be beautiful.

On Deleuze: Still vs. Moving images

In The Movement-Image, Gilles Deleuze comments on Bergson’s third thesis concerning movement and change. His analysis of Bergson’s thesis states that “not only is the instant an immobile section of movement, but movement is a mobile section of duration, that is, of the Whole, or of a whole” (p. 8). This idea seems to suggest that a moving image provides greater context and understanding than a still image. As I understand it the whole that Deleuze refers to seems to be the entirety of reality. The implications of this are vast indeed. If moving images come closer to the whole or the full truth of a situation, then are they a superior medium than still images? I would say that this must be debated with an additional factor in mind: the human observer. While it may be true that moving images objectively provide more information, this may not translate to increased understanding. The value of a certain medium must also be considered from a subjective perspective. What is its effect on the observer? Mediums are useless unless they evoke a reaction in the mind of the observer. Therefore, I propose that a more relevant factor in considering what medium more closely approaches the whole would be which medium allows the observer to more closely embrace the whole. On the one hand, the moving image moves at its own pace. It does not wait for the observer. It is preprogrammed independent of the needs of the observer. It demands that the observer work more intensely to absorb its content. On the other hand, the still image allows the observer to move at her own pace. When observing a still image, the observer is not constantly bombarded with new information. Rather, the observer is free to study the image at his leisure. The observer has a greater opportunity to project herself into the image. If one were to view a moving image of a horse running, one would have a good understanding of what a horse looks like when it runs. If, on the other hand, one were to view a still image of a horse running, one would be able to project himself into the horse. One could more fully imagine the sense of speed and freedom the horse would feel. I would argue that the observer would have a greater emotional or visceral understanding of what running means to the horse. It may be that this is the greater truth, and closer to the Whole.