A Place So Foreign, Cory Doctorow‘s new collection of short stories, is always charming, and sometimes profound. In these stories as in his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (which I blogged previously), Doctorow achieves a breezy and low-affect style that nonetheless turns out to be sneakily incisive, making points or suggesting emotional implications which almost sneak by you before you notice them. Some of the stories are simply entertainments, but several of them have real power. My favorites were: “Return to Pleasure Island,” which combines Doctorow’s Disney/theme park obsession with a strange updating of Pinocchio in a way that was both creepily disturbing and rather moving; “To Market, To Market:,” a satricial piece in which 11-year-olds, have marketing strategies and use branding and product endorsements to secure their status in the school playground; and “0wnz0red,” which takes the privatization of “intellectual property” to its logical conclusion. I also had a warm spot for “The Super Man and the Bugout,” which imagines a somewhat hapless Jewish Superman with left-wing sympathies.
A Place So Foreign, Cory Doctorow‘s new collection of short stories, is always charming, and sometimes profound. In these stories as in his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (which I blogged previously), Doctorow achieves a breezy and low-affect style that nonetheless turns out to be sneakily incisive, making points or suggesting emotional implications which almost sneak by you before you notice them. Some of the stories are simply entertainments, but several of them have real power. My favorites were: “Return to Pleasure Island,” which combines Doctorow’s Disney/theme park obsession with a strange updating of Pinocchio in a way that was both creepily disturbing and rather moving; “To Market, To Market:,” a satricial piece in which 11-year-olds, have marketing strategies and use branding and product endorsements to secure their status in the school playground; and “0wnz0red,” which takes the privatization of “intellectual property” to its logical conclusion. I also had a warm spot for “The Super Man and the Bugout,” which imagines a somewhat hapless Jewish Superman with left-wing sympathies.
Tonight, at the Little Theater, I saw two reels of Andy Warhol “Screen Tests” from the mid-1960s. Each reel had ten Screen Tests; the subjects included Lou Reed, Mama Cass, Baby Jane Holzer, Salvador Dali, Susan Sontag, and Nico, as well as many people I hadn’t heard of.
The idea behind the screen tests was simple. Everyone who visited Warhol’s factory was asked to sit still in front of a silent, black and white film camera for three minutes, the time of a single reel. (The reels were then supposed to be screened at silent speed, 18fps instead of 24fps; unfortunately they were unable to do this tonight).
It’s hard to sit still for three minutes, doing nothing. Some of the subjects try their best to sit still (though they fail). Others make faces, or otherwise mug for the camera. Baby Jane brushes her teeth. Dali is suspended upside down. Nico is subjected to flash cuts and unmotivated zooms (such as one finds in Warhol movies of 1966 or so, such as Chelsea Girls, which she was also in); whereas for everyone else, the camera is stationary, one continuous shot.
Watching the screen tests is a strange experience. It’s hard to watch a face for three minutes, in silence, without any action taking place on the screen. No matter how hard you concentrate, your attention wanders (unless, I suppose, you have trained yourself through Buddhist meditation to avoid this wandering). It’s almost like, the more rapt your attention, the more you catch yourself drifting away. The faces on screen invite such rapt attention, because they promise everything, but give so little away. What do outsides tell us about insides? These “portraits” never show us enough. We keep on thinking that we will penetrate to the essence of the person on screen, but all we get is vacancy: an emptiness that is equivalent to the emptiness of the subjective experience of sitting in front of a camera for three minutes, doing nothing, expressing nothing. Everyone is the same, in a certain sense: there’s a lot of self-conscious, self-reflexive posing in awareness of the camera, and this is oddly impersonal, identical from one person to the next. What’s different from one person to the next, on the contrary, is unconscious, or perhaps absent altogether. All of the subjects of these Screen Tests are empty, but everyone’s emptiness is unique. Your emptiness, not your positive identity, is what makes you singular in the world. An identity isn’t singular; everybody has one. But modes of absence cannot be replicated from one person to the next, or even in the same person from one moment to the next.
Tonight, at the Little Theater, I saw two reels of Andy Warhol “Screen Tests” from the mid-1960s. Each reel had ten Screen Tests; the subjects included Lou Reed, Mama Cass, Baby Jane Holzer, Salvador Dali, Susan Sontag, and Nico, as well as many people I hadn’t heard of.
The idea behind the screen tests was simple. Everyone who visited Warhol’s factory was asked to sit still in front of a silent, black and white film camera for three minutes, the time of a single reel. (The reels were then supposed to be screened at silent speed, 18fps instead of 24fps; unfortunately they were unable to do this tonight).
It’s hard to sit still for three minutes, doing nothing. Some of the subjects try their best to sit still (though they fail). Others make faces, or otherwise mug for the camera. Baby Jane brushes her teeth. Dali is suspended upside down. Nico is subjected to flash cuts and unmotivated zooms (such as one finds in Warhol movies of 1966 or so, such as Chelsea Girls, which she was also in); whereas for everyone else, the camera is stationary, one continuous shot.
Watching the screen tests is a strange experience. It’s hard to watch a face for three minutes, in silence, without any action taking place on the screen. No matter how hard you concentrate, your attention wanders (unless, I suppose, you have trained yourself through Buddhist meditation to avoid this wandering). It’s almost like, the more rapt your attention, the more you catch yourself drifting away. The faces on screen invite such rapt attention, because they promise everything, but give so little away. What do outsides tell us about insides? These “portraits” never show us enough. We keep on thinking that we will penetrate to the essence of the person on screen, but all we get is vacancy: an emptiness that is equivalent to the emptiness of the subjective experience of sitting in front of a camera for three minutes, doing nothing, expressing nothing. Everyone is the same, in a certain sense: there’s a lot of self-conscious, self-reflexive posing in awareness of the camera, and this is oddly impersonal, identical from one person to the next. What’s different from one person to the next, on the contrary, is unconscious, or perhaps absent altogether. All of the subjects of these Screen Tests are empty, but everyone’s emptiness is unique. Your emptiness, not your positive identity, is what makes you singular in the world. An identity isn’t singular; everybody has one. But modes of absence cannot be replicated from one person to the next, or even in the same person from one moment to the next.
From an article by Daniel Akst in the business section of today’s New York Times:
Internet music sharing represents a profound assault on the very idea of intellectual property. Today it’s music, but tomorrow it will be movies and then books, and the justifications will be the same. The implications should be obvious to producers of intellectual property, but the outcry has been muffled in part because universities have come to own and operate so much of the nation’s intellectual life.
I am inclined to say, this is precisely the point. The notion of “intellectual property” is an egregiously bad one, and needs to be overturned. Congress will never, on its own, overturn the laws that define and govern “intellectual property”, because they get too many contributions from the industries that “own” such “intellectual property.” The widespread public feeling that there is nothing wrong with file sharing, and a public outcry at the spectacle of grandmothers and 12 year olds being sued by the RIAA, is the one thing that might cause a change in the laws.
Copyrighted material is not private property. The assimilation of copyright to property is itself deplorable; but the Supreme Court ruled, as recently as 1985, that copyright infringement and theft are two completely separate things, as I have already noted in these pages.
The whole notion of “intellectual property” is an extension of this false claim that copyrighted material is private property. Indeed, it represents a massive privatization of what used to be a common good. As such, it is anti-democratic, anti-freedom, and benefiting big corporations rather than the great mass of people.
The notion of “intellectual property” is incompatible with the freedom of ideas.
Limited copyright – which emphatically does not mean property ownership – was originally instituted in order to encourage innovation, by giving creators financial rewards for such innovation. But the virtually unlimited copyright laws of today in fact stifle innovation, since they prevent the reuse of previously existing cultural material.
Akst notes (correctly) that “If you live on an academic paycheck – instead of royalties – then the free electronic distribution of your scholarly works is probably preferable to having a university press print 500 copies bound directly for the deepest library stacks.” This is indeed my own situation, which of course could explain why my own self-interest is not tied up with preserving draconian notions of copyright.
But when Akst says that copyright is ” the legal concept that is essential to freedom and prosperity in the information age,” he is just engaging in doublespeak.
He ends his article with a terrifyingly totalitarian view of how to manage the Internet: “Sooner or later we will need to know who everyone on the Internet is, and who confirmed their identities. Internet access providers who admit unauthenticated users will have to be shut out, even if that means shutting out whole countries.”
Preserving “freedom” for corporations (who have benefited for a century from the inane legal fiction that they are “individuals”) means denying freedom to all those individuals who don’t happen to be wealthy corporations.
From an article by Daniel Akst in the business section of today’s New York Times:
Internet music sharing represents a profound assault on the very idea of intellectual property. Today it’s music, but tomorrow it will be movies and then books, and the justifications will be the same. The implications should be obvious to producers of intellectual property, but the outcry has been muffled in part because universities have come to own and operate so much of the nation’s intellectual life.
I am inclined to say, this is precisely the point. The notion of “intellectual property” is an egregiously bad one, and needs to be overturned. Congress will never, on its own, overturn the laws that define and govern “intellectual property”, because they get too many contributions from the industries that “own” such “intellectual property.” The widespread public feeling that there is nothing wrong with file sharing, and a public outcry at the spectacle of grandmothers and 12 year olds being sued by the RIAA, is the one thing that might cause a change in the laws.
Copyrighted material is not private property. The assimilation of copyright to property is itself deplorable; but the Supreme Court ruled, as recently as 1985, that copyright infringement and theft are two completely separate things, as I have already noted in these pages.
The whole notion of “intellectual property” is an extension of this false claim that copyrighted material is private property. Indeed, it represents a massive privatization of what used to be a common good. As such, it is anti-democratic, anti-freedom, and benefiting big corporations rather than the great mass of people.
The notion of “intellectual property” is incompatible with the freedom of ideas.
Limited copyright – which emphatically does not mean property ownership – was originally instituted in order to encourage innovation, by giving creators financial rewards for such innovation. But the virtually unlimited copyright laws of today in fact stifle innovation, since they prevent the reuse of previously existing cultural material.
Akst notes (correctly) that “If you live on an academic paycheck – instead of royalties – then the free electronic distribution of your scholarly works is probably preferable to having a university press print 500 copies bound directly for the deepest library stacks.” This is indeed my own situation, which of course could explain why my own self-interest is not tied up with preserving draconian notions of copyright.
But when Akst says that copyright is ” the legal concept that is essential to freedom and prosperity in the information age,” he is just engaging in doublespeak.
He ends his article with a terrifyingly totalitarian view of how to manage the Internet: “Sooner or later we will need to know who everyone on the Internet is, and who confirmed their identities. Internet access providers who admit unauthenticated users will have to be shut out, even if that means shutting out whole countries.”
Preserving “freedom” for corporations (who have benefited for a century from the inane legal fiction that they are “individuals”) means denying freedom to all those individuals who don’t happen to be wealthy corporations.
Sometimes my tastes do coincide with popular opinion. I think that the new Outkast double CD is sensational. Outkast has always been eclectic in the best sense of the term: they mix hiphop with earlier strains of black music (soul, r&b) as well as with (both black and white) rock ‘n’ roll. Their last album before this one, Stankonia, was something of a peak – as close as popular music gets to a perfect rush. The new album doesn’t try to outdo Stankonia, but instead pushes onto new paths. Well, Big Boi’s disc, Speakerboxx, sounds to me like more of the same (not that there’s anything wrong with that). But Andre’s CD, The Love Below, is wildly experimental and strange – and yet, for all its risks, a complete success. Musically, it explodes in all sorts of directions – from lite jazz to hard rock to a sort of drum ‘n’ bass (!) stylization of Coltrane’s stylization of My Favorite Things. And it’s something of a concept album as well, being all about love. It moves from Dre’s conversation with God (who turns out to be a woman!) about how he just wants someone to love, through mounting excitement, and lust, the morning after, love, disappointment, terror at the prospect of giving one’s self away to another. Along the way, there are love songs, lust songs, seduction songs, out-of-love songs, hate songs, let’s-make-up-and-get-back-together songs, masturbation songs, even sort of a rap confessional. I’m not sure what more to say… It’s one of those rare albums that escapes, or squirms outside of, all the categories that I am usually so ready to tag nearly anything I listen to with – and thereby reduces me to incoherent babbling.
Sometimes my tastes do coincide with popular opinion. I think that the new Outkast double CD is sensational. Outkast has always been eclectic in the best sense of the term: they mix hiphop with earlier strains of black music (soul, r&b) as well as with (both black and white) rock ‘n’ roll. Their last album before this one, Stankonia, was something of a peak – as close as popular music gets to a perfect rush. The new album doesn’t try to outdo Stankonia, but instead pushes onto new paths. Well, Big Boi’s disc, Speakerboxx, sounds to me like more of the same (not that there’s anything wrong with that – and the album is full of wonderful little details, like the female chorus of “Ghettomusick” that doesn’t come in until several verses into the song; and see clap clap blog for a fabulous discussion of “The Rooster” that really gets inside the song in the way a non-musician like myself never could). But Andre’s CD, The Love Below, is wildly experimental and strange – and yet, for all its risks, a complete success. Musically, it explodes in all sorts of directions – from lite jazz to hard rock to a sort of drum ‘n’ bass (!) stylization of Coltrane’s stylization of My Favorite Things. And it’s something of a concept album as well, being all about love. It moves from Dre’s conversation with God (who turns out to be a woman!) about how he just wants someone to love, through mounting excitement, and lust, the morning after, love, disappointment, terror at the prospect of giving one’s self away to another. Along the way, there are love songs, lust songs, seduction songs, out-of-love songs, hate songs, let’s-make-up-and-get-back-together-songs, masturbation songs, even sort of a rap confessional. I’m not sure what more to say… It’s one of those rare albums that escapes, or squirms outside of, all the categories that I am usually so ready to tag nearly anything I listen to with – and thereby reduces me to incoherent babbling.
Actually, it could be argued that “outing” a CIA agent is, relatively, a meritorious act: the outed agent is no longer able to work in the field and perpetrate all sorts of nefarious (and generally illegal and unethical) acts. But even if you don’t accept this reasoning, still the Bush Administration has done far more heinous things on an almost daily basis (like all the lies about the Iraq war, and the suspensions of civil liberties at home) than giving out the name of one former agent.
Still, since the agent’s outing does seem to be the issue du jour,I’d like to make a “modest proposal” (in the spirit of Jonathan Swift). I hereby propose that Bob Novak (who revealed the agent’s identity to the public) be arrested under the Patriot Act (which would mean that habeas corpus and other civil liberties guaranteed under the Bill of Rights would be denied him), tortured until he reveals the name of the White House official who leaked the information to him (again, the Patriot Act would allow us to suspend the usual rule of law according to which information so obtained would not be admissible in court), and then, together with the person who so informed him, put to death for treason. How could John Ashcroft object to such a process, even if Carl Rove, or Ashcroft himself, turned out to be the other guilty party?
Actually, it could be argued that “outing” a CIA agent is, relatively, a meritorious act: the outed agent is no longer able to work in the field and perpetrate all sorts of nefarious (and generally illegal and unethical) acts. But even if you don’t accept this reasoning, still the Bush Administration has done far more heinous things on an almost daily basis (like all the lies about the Iraq war, and the suspensions of civil liberties at home) than giving out the name of one former agent.
Still, since the agent’s outing does seem to be the issue du jour,I’d like to make a “modest proposal” (in the spirit of Jonathan Swift). I hereby propose that Bob Novak (who revealed the agent’s identity to the public) be arrested under the Patriot Act (which would mean that habeas corpus and other civil liberties guaranteed under the Bill of Rights would be denied him), tortured until he reveals the name of the White House official who leaked the information to him (again, the Patriot Act would allow us to suspend the usual rule of law according to which information so obtained would not be admissible in court), and then, together with the person who so informed him, put to death for treason. How could John Ashcroft object to such a process, even if Carl Rove, or Ashcroft himself, turned out to be the other guilty party?
“The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 was a brave attempt to free America from the 20th Century.” In his new novel Millennium People (available in the UK only), J. G. Ballard continues his provocative exploration of the pathologies of late capitalism. Ballard has been publishing fiction for over forty years, and in all this time he has remained consistent in his vision of the violence and willful perversity that underly normative consumer culture. (Violence and psychopathology are not really transgressive in Ballard’s fiction; they always end up reinforcing the very order whose laws they seem to contest). There’s scarcely any writer alive who seems so stuck inside his own head, so trapped in his own peculiar and utterly private obsessions as Ballard is; yet there’s also scarcely any writer alive whose vision resonates so powerfully with the larger social and economic forces that are shaping the planet today. This is the mysterious key to Ballard’s greatness as a writer (and, I would add, as a social theorist). All his books are in certain ways precisely the same: they all feature the same clinical prose, the same detached fascination with destruction, the same focus on creepy charismatic figures. Yet Ballard’s writing has also changed radically in certain ways, as the society around him has changed; his last two novels before this one, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes were among his best ever, as he explored the sacrificial logic of the 1990s economic boom (which is something very different from the visions of entropy and detritus that dominated many of Ballard’s earlier books).
Millennium People veers off in another direction, yet again, as it tells the story of two failed “revolutions.” The first one is a revolt of the normally orderly and obedient British middle class, “a small revolution… so modest and well behaved that almost no one had noticed,” as we are told on the book’s first page. The other is a more sinister rebellion, indulging in meaningless violence for its own sake, a violence that its (equally middle-class) proponents see as redemptive precisely to the extent that it has no meanings or motivations, and accomplishes nothing. “Violence… should always be gratuitous, and no serious revolution should ever achieve its aims.” A complex irony is at work here. The novel’s professional-class rebels see themselves as the “new proletariat,” exploited because their substantial disposable income is eaten away in condo fees and bills for their children’s private schools. They rebel against consumer society, by trashing their own cars and houses, and vandalizing video stores and art galleries. But of course these people cannot really give up their Range Rovers and cappuccinos, so the rebellion fizzles out and bourgeois propriety is restored. Meanwhile, under cover of this mild disorder, a smaller, more serious group of nihilists is bombing airport lounges and murdering random minor celebrities. They seem to take seriously Andre Breton’s dictum that the ultimate surrealist act is to shoot a revolver into a crowd (Breton himself, of course, did not take his own dictum seriously; for all his radical rhetoric, he never fired a gun into a crowd, and in fact is the last person one could ever imagine doing so). But this second rebellion also ends up a failure, though it partly seduces the novel’s stolid narrator. Meaninglessness and surrealist nonsense fail to prove themselves redemptive, and instead are all too easily reabsorbed, like everything else, within the fabric of bourgeois life. Ballard himself seems to wistfully admire the idea of nihilistic violence and directionless rebellion, even as he slyly suggests that such romantic revolt is itself part of what seduces us into accepting consumer society with its relentless fetishes of status and comfort.
“The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 was a brave attempt to free America from the 20th Century.” In his new novel Millennium People (available in the UK only), J. G. Ballard continues his provocative exploration of the pathologies of late capitalism. Ballard has been publishing fiction for over forty years, and in all this time he has remained consistent in his vision of the violence and willful perversity that underly normative consumer culture. (Violence and psychopathology are not really transgressive in Ballard’s fiction; they always end up reinforcing the very order whose laws they seem to contest). There’s scarcely any writer alive who seems so stuck inside his own head, so trapped in his own peculiar and utterly private obsessions as Ballard is; yet there’s also scarcely any writer alive whose vision resonates so powerfully with the larger social and economic forces that are shaping the planet today. This is the mysterious key to Ballard’s greatness as a writer (and, I would add, as a social theorist). All his books are in certain ways precisely the same: they all feature the same clinical prose, the same detached fascination with destruction, the same focus on creepy charismatic figures. Yet Ballard’s writing has also changed radically in certain ways, as the society around him has changed; his last two novels before this one, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes were among his best ever, as he explored the sacrificial logic of the 1990s economic boom (which is something very different from the visions of entropy and detritus that dominated many of Ballard’s earlier books).
Millennium People veers off in another direction, yet again, as it tells the story of two failed “revolutions.” The first one is a revolt of the normally orderly and obedient British middle class, “a small revolution… so modest and well behaved that almost no one had noticed,” as we are told on the book’s first page. The other is a more sinister rebellion, indulging in meaningless violence for its own sake, a violence that its (equally middle-class) proponents see as redemptive precisely to the extent that it has no meanings or motivations, and accomplishes nothing. “Violence… should always be gratuitous, and no serious revolution should ever achieve its aims.” A complex irony is at work here. The novel’s professional-class rebels see themselves as the “new proletariat,” exploited because their substantial disposable income is eaten away in condo fees and bills for their children’s private schools. They rebel against consumer society, by trashing their own cars and houses, and vandalizing video stores and art galleries. But of course these people cannot really give up their Range Rovers and cappuccinos, so the rebellion fizzles out and bourgeois propriety is restored. Meanwhile, under cover of this mild disorder, a smaller, more serious group of nihilists is bombing airport lounges and murdering random minor celebrities. They seem to take seriously Andre Breton’s dictum that the ultimate surrealist act is to shoot a revolver into a crowd (Breton himself, of course, did not take his own dictum seriously; for all his radical rhetoric, he never fired a gun into a crowd, and in fact is the last person one could ever imagine doing so). But this second rebellion also ends up a failure, though it partly seduces the novel’s stolid narrator. Meaninglessness and surrealist nonsense fail to prove themselves redemptive, and instead are all too easily reabsorbed, like everything else, within the fabric of bourgeois life. Ballard himself seems to wistfully admire the idea of nihilistic violence and directionless rebellion, even as he slyly suggests that such romantic revolt is itself part of what seduces us into accepting consumer society with its relentless fetishes of status and comfort.
Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a dreamy, drifting film, as befits the state of mind of its protagonists. The characters played by Bill Murray (in what I am tempted to call his best performance ever, building on but transcending his role in Rushmore) and Scarlett Johanson are far apart in age, but they are both Americans adrift in Tokyo, not understanding the language or many aspects of the culture, insomniac from jet lag, semi-estranged from their spouses, not having much to do, and essentially alone, even in the midst of company. My friend Billy writes aptly in his blog of the movie’s “strange and lucid and indifferent spell” (actually, I am not sure if he means the spell of the movie, the spell of jet lag and insomnia, or the spell of sublimated sexual desire; but I suppose all three are accurate). The movie has no real direction, it doesn’t really build to anything like a climax: Murray and Johansen meet, spend time together, are tender with one another, don’t have sex, and then separate again. Indeed, the movie suggests – as William Gibson does in a very different way in Pattern Recognition – that jet lag is the quintessential postmodern condition, and it makes a strange and beautiful poetry of the consequent dislocation of its protagonists. Lost in Translation is lyrical without being sappy; and it conveys a sense of the alienness (from an American point of view) of Japan, without turning this into the usual essentializing, orientalizing portrait of the Mysterious Other (something of which even Gibson is perhaps guilty). For there is no exoticism here. Exoticism requires a grounding sense of familiarity and being-at-home in order to emphasize the difference of the Other; but here that reference to being-at-home is precisely what gets dissolved. The Situationists celebrated urban drift, or what they called derive, as a form of exploration, as a radical reconfiguration of the real by means of defamiliarization. But Lost in Translation presents a blank, neutral, oddly impersonal form of derive, in comparison to which the Situationist project seems merely a wishful idealization. When I say blank and neutral, I don’t mean anomie or alienation, but an ontologically primary condition, deeper than either grounding or estrangement. And I don’t mean affectlessness, but rather a kind of impersonal intensity, in which things are distant, and yet that very distance is powerfully present and powerfully affecting (I think this is part of what Billy means by “lucid”). Lost in Translation is both funny and sad, at times, but its lyricism is too precise, and too wryly observant, to be characterized as either nostalgic or wistful. The film has the force of a revelation, even though (or maybe precisely because) it is telling us that there is nothing to be revealed.
Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a dreamy, drifting film, as befits the state of mind of its protagonists. The characters played by Bill Murray (in what I am tempted to call his best performance ever, building on but transcending his role in Rushmore) and Scarlett Johanson are far apart in age, but they are both Americans adrift in Tokyo, not understanding the language or many aspects of the culture, insomniac from jet lag, semi-estranged from their spouses, not having much to do, and essentially alone, even in the midst of company. My friend Billy writes aptly in his blog of the movie’s “strange and lucid and indifferent spell” (actually, I am not sure if he means the spell of the movie, the spell of jet lag and insomnia, or the spell of sublimated sexual desire; but I suppose all three are accurate). The movie has no real direction, it doesn’t really build to anything like a climax: Murray and Johansen meet, spend time together, are tender with one another, don’t have sex, and then separate again. Indeed, the movie suggests – as William Gibson does in a very different way in Pattern Recognition – that jet lag is the quintessential postmodern condition, and it makes a strange and beautiful poetry of the consequent dislocation of its protagonists. Lost in Translation is lyrical without being sappy; and it conveys a sense of the alienness (from an American point of view) of Japan, without turning this into the usual essentializing, orientalizing portrait of the Mysterious Other (something of which even Gibson is perhaps guilty). For there is no exoticism here. Exoticism requires a grounding sense of familiarity and being-at-home in order to emphasize the difference of the Other; but here that reference to being-at-home is precisely what gets dissolved. The Situationists celebrated urban drift, or what they called derive, as a form of exploration, as a radical reconfiguration of the real by means of defamiliarization. But Lost in Translation presents a blank, neutral, oddly impersonal form of derive, in comparison to which the Situationist project seems merely a wishful idealization. When I say blank and neutral, I don’t mean anomie or alienation, but an ontologically primary condition, deeper than either grounding or estrangement. And I don’t mean affectlessness, but rather a kind of impersonal intensity, in which things are distant, and yet that very distance is powerfully present and powerfully affecting (I think this is part of what Billy means by “lucid”). Lost in Translation is both funny and sad, at times, but its lyricism is too precise, and too wryly observant, to be characterized as either nostalgic or wistful. The film has the force of a revelation, even though (or maybe precisely because) it is telling us that there is nothing to be revealed.
PS: soundtrack music to die for, by Kevin Shields (!!!)
I had a great email exchange with Kimberly McColl about Shelly Jackson’s Skin, which I blogged here previously. Kimberly and I have very different views of Jackson’s project, but our conversation about it clarified ideas on both sides. With Kimberly’s permission, I am posting here excerpts from our correspondence…
I had a great email exchange with Kimberly McColl about Shelly Jackson’s Skin, which I blogged here previously. Kimberly and I have very different views of Jackson’s project, but our conversation about it clarified ideas on both sides. With Kimberly’s permission, I am posting here excerpts from our correspondence…
Continue reading “more on Shelly Jackson’s Skin”