Steven Shaviro – Page 47 – The Pinocchio Theory

Broken Flowers

Jim Jarmusch’s latest movie, Broken Flowers, starring Bill Murray, is absolutely lovely, and perhaps my favorite thing Jarmusch has ever done. A big part of the reason is Bill Murray. I feel like I could watch Murray for hours, just sitting on the living room couch as he often does in this film. It’s hard to describe, or do full justice to, the persona Murray has evolved in his recent work for Wes Anderson, and especially for Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation), and now Jarmusch. He’s moody and melancholic, in contrast to the manic comedy that first made him famous. But of course there was already a kind of silent, intense yearning behind the frantic hysteria of Murray’s characters in films like the great What About Bob?. In Broken Flowers, a kind of mournful passivity is all that’s left of this yearning; Murray’s Don Johnston is (as the character’s name suggests) a sort of Don Juan, who has found no lasting satisfaction in any of his erotic conquests, and now, in a financially comfortable middle age, has no ambitions and nothing to look forward to. To call Murray’s acting style here minimalist and deadpan would be accurate, but inadequate. Don Johnston isn’t really a blank slate; he’s weary but goes on anyway; he understates all his emotional reactions, but he is far from affectless. Murray’s pauses are eloquent in their suggestiveness; he fully expresses feelings and responses with the tiniest, slowest gestures and facial tics. But that’s not quite an accurate description either; it isn’t that Murray suggests and expresses a lot with a little; it’s rather that this “little” is what he is expressing, quite accurately and fully proportionally. Don Johnston is somebody who has found life to be disappointing; but he doesn’t feel betrayed or outraged by this disappointment, he merely takes it in stride, because he knows that it is all that anyone can reasonably expect — or better, that it is all that anyone will ever get, no matter what they expect). It’s a kind of weary, melancholy stoicism that is nonetheless as far from despair as it is from exhilaration and joie de vivre. I’m reminded of Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas, or of Ozu’s Tokyo Story.

(I should add also that the long-ago lovers whom Don Johnston contacts 20 years later, in a vain attempt to discover whether he has a son, are wonderfully acted also, especially the performances of Sharon Stone and Jessica Lange. There’s also the great manic supporting peformance of the always-brilliant — and always underrated — Jeffrey Wright).

All this makes Murray a perfect leading man for Jim Jarmusch, whose films are always about missed connections, disappointments and misunderstandings, and (excuse the metaphor) pregnant pauses that end only in miscarriages. At his worst, Jarmusch can be snide, irritatingly self-congratulatory, and quite sappy beneath all the hipster posturing. At his best, however, as here, he is very nearly sublime. I admired Jarmusch’s last two real features, the deconstructed Western Dead Man, with Johnny Depp, and the colder-than-ice gangster/samurai Ghost Dog, with Forest Whitaker, both of which made brilliant use of their leading men; but I think that in Broken Flowers, and with Murray, Jarmusch has outdone himself. His visual style, with long pauses, elliptical cuts, and an emphasis on journeys rather than destinations, is perfectly pitched for this inconclusive story about a man who sort-of confronts his past, but has no epiphanies, revelations, or moments of Proustian recollection. Jarmusch’s films are slow, but their tempo is never simply drawn-out or undifferentiated; Broken Flowers is perfectly paced in its evocation of reluctant retrospection. Jarmusch has always juxtaposed moments of (understated, but genuine) feeling with moments of absurdist deadpan humor; in some films, the effect is deliberately jarring and deconstructive, but here there’s an almost seamless blending of these modes, so that nearly all the incidents in the film seem ludicrous and touching at the same time. All in all, Broken Flowers is a very nearly impalpable film, slipping through one’s grasp, but leaving the ghosts of decayed emotions behind to haunt you.

Magic for Beginners

Kelly Link‘s new short story collection, Magic for Beginners, leaves me as much at a loss for words as her previous collection did. Stories at once mundane (a New York family moves out to the suburbs; the husband is scarcely ever home, with his long commute and well-over-40-hours corporate job) and fantastic (the suburban house is oddly haunted; rabbits ridden by tiny people, armed with spears, throng on the front lawn) continually metamorphose, implode, or fall into dizzyingly self-referential mise-en-abime loops. One moment a bunch of middle-age guys, all failures in life, are sitting around a table drinking beer and playing poker; the next, a cheerleader is in a closet with the devil, experiencing her life flow backwards, and telling the devil a story about one of the guys sitting around the table… Then there’s the one about the TV series that unfolds entirely in an enormous library, with all sorts of supernatural happenings, and different actors play the same character each episode, only it seems the people who watch this series are also characters inside it, unless it is rather that the TV fiction somehow leaks into the “real” world… only there’s also all the stuff about teen awkwardness about sex, and wedding chapels in Las Vegas, and going on to the roof at night and looking at the stars…

Link’s stories have the dizzying ontological dislocations of Borges, but they also seem bizarrely, unreasonably cheerful (even when they are describing deeply troubling things), which is mostly because of the narrating voice, who remains bouncy like a fairytale storyteller, and yet remains matter-of-fact, no matter how outrageous what is being said. You can see this in the openings of her stories: “There once was a man whose wife was dead. She was dead when he fell in love with her, and she was dead for the twelve years they lived together….” Or again: “Fox is a television character, and she isn’t dead yet. But she will be, soon. She’s a character on a television show called The Library. You’ve never seen The Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had.” The more convoluted and crazy the narrative line becomes, the more blithely the narrator tells us about it, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. It is impossible to describe what these stories are like (in precisely the way that, according to certain philosophers, it would be impossible for a human being to experience what it is like to be a bat. And yet the stories do somehow convey this alien sensibility, that cannot be positively described).

The stories in Magic for Beginners are vertiginously weightless: they have an excessive clarity, I want to say, that makes them impossible to summarize or pin down. Nothing could be more postmodern, in the way the stories have no center, in the way all their affects are free-floating and highly mutable, in the way even their anxieties and terrors seem strangely objective or ambient, strangely devoid of any interiority. And yet they are also devoid of the cartoony hyperrealism, the flippant irony, the ultra-commodification, and the obsessive allusiveness, that we usually consider markers of the “postmodern.” (They are also too slippery, and too free of any programmatic transgressiveness, to be properly called “surrealist”). I want to say (though I am unable, for now, to say it at all convincingly; and though even to suggest it makes me seem, oxymoronically, like a monstrously upbeat and cheerful Adorno) that Kelly Link’s writing presupposes, and is only conceivable within, a world like ours that has been entirely colonized and subsumed by global capital; and yet, this writing proposes and enacts a sort of singular aestheticism that is utterly irreducible to this global totality.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

I’ve been a fan of Miranda July for some time now: I have heard her CDs, and seen several of her multimedia performances. Her work always (what is the best way to say this?) obsesses me, but in a mild way: her oblique stories/comments/pictures and words/impersonations draw me in and make me want to figure out more, since they seem meaningful and not merely nonsensical, and since they continually imply depths that they resolutely refuse to articulate. July’s work is very “postmodern”, in that it is (in a sense) all about surfaces; but some of the surfaces are folded and dark and inaccessible, which makes me want to unfold them somehow, but I can’t. It is hard to describe them more specifically than this: I’d say that everything July does is affectively charged (with a certain degree of pain and awkwardness “behind” what seems “quirky” and “cute”), but (as my use of quotation marks indicates) it is impossible to pin down just what the affects are. Defensiveness? disappointment? embarrassment? shyness? an oxymoronically low-key hysteria? disillusionment? rejection? mild satisfaction?

July’s new film, her first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, is (as reviews and interviews have suggested) more “accessible” than her earlier work in other media, but this doesn’t mean that it waters down or compromises any of the qualities of her previous work. In genre terms, Me and You is a romantic comedy; but it’s so continually surprising and original that the genre marker doesn’t really say very much. It’s a film about the tentative, fragile, and often mishandled and misunderstood connections between people: romantic connections, sexual connections, family connections, friendship connections. The ages of the characters range (literally) from 7 to 70, although the main characters (played by July herself and by John Hawkes, whom I didn’t know before but who is apparently best known for his role in the TV series “Deadwood,” which I still unfortunately haven’t seen) are single or divorced 30-somethings. The awkwardness with regards to sexuality of the under-the-age-of-consent characters is beautifully portrayed (actually I am surprised that, in these puritanical times, July hasn’t gotten more flak for this), but so is the awkwardness, when it comes to expressing feelings (or even recognizing feelings in oneself) of the adult characters. I really don’t know how to describe the changing moods of the film, from humor to despair, without negatives: it’s so off-kilter that its gloom and fatalism is never morbid or even sentimental; so wry and dry and deadpan that its fundamental sweetness often passes by barely perceived; it walks a line between outrageousness and silliness so deftly that it is never in the least bit transgressive (not even when the 7-year-old boy is exchanging fantasies about poop with another screen persona who turns out to be an uptight woman in her 40s, and not even when the subject of teenage fellatio comes up, as it does several times) — but not transgressive precisely because there is never anything the least bit normative in the film, hence nothing against which one could transgress.

Me and You and Everyone We Know also abounds with images that are lovely and ridiculous at the same time. I think of an almost-excrucating sequence involving a goldfish in a bag of water precariously perched on the roof of a car weaving through traffic; of a pair of pink shoes that comes up several times; of the 7-year-old using cut and paste to overcome the problem of his uncertain spelling as he writes in a chat room; of a bird on a branch at the start of the film that is transformed at the end to a hokey painting of a bird stuck in some bushes. Me and You and Everyone We Know is a film of small moments that are (again, how do I say this?) utterly everyday, and at the same time transformative — but only slightly, tentatively transformative. It’s appropriate, perhaps, that a film so beautifully undemonstrative and undeclarative should leave me tongue-tied as I endeavor to describe it.

Creationism

In the wake of Bush’s statement endorsing the teaching of “intelligent design” theory alongside Darwinian evolutionary theory in the schools, I saw a debate on CNN between somebody from the Discovery Institute (the foundation behind the recent push for “intelligent design”) and Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine. I was appalled. The Discovery Institute guy sounded open-minded and reasonable, with all his talk about new research and intellectual flexibility — though of course everything he said was pure garbage. On the other hand, Shermer was pompous and overbearing, the condescending voice of Authority, lecturing the public about the importance of peer-reviewed articles in prestigious journals, and actually saying at one point that only allowing the expression of ideas that have been properly peer-reviewed is “how we do things in a free society.” (He also kept on referring to “the marketplace of ideas,” evidently not realizing that the “marketplace of ideas,” like any other marketplace, has no concern for the truth or rationality he was otherwise trumpeting).

If you didn’t know anything about the subject, whom would you believe? Shermer’s performance justified everything Isabelle Stengers has said about the imperialist arrogance of official spokespeople for Big Science. Though ostensibly he was talking about the importance of rationality and of the objective gathering and weighing of empirical evidence, his affect was one of argument from authority, as if to say: “how dare you contest what we, the enlightened elite, have determined to be the case!” (Not to mention that, as an academic myself, I have ample experience with “peer review,” and I know how corrupt and dishonest it is). With supporters like this, Darwin doesn’t need enemies. Shermer, just like the Democratic Party, almost seems to go out of his way to justify all the sterotypes the Republicans and fundamentalists have been promulgating for years now about “liberal elitism” and liberals’ contempt for the common person. After hearing advocates for Science like Shermer, most Americans will find Bush to be speaking plausibly when he says that “intelligent design” ought to be taught alongside evolution because “part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.”

In reality, of course, teaching “intelligent design” is an historical falsification. It is equivalent to teaching the theories of people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened, and of people who say that blacks were treated kindly and humanely under slavery. I doubt that even Bush would endorse Holocaust denial as a benevolent example of exposing people to different schools of thought. But the argument is never made along these lines, not in the courts, and not in the statements of any of the scientists who oppose creationism.

Of course, giving any legitimacy at all to “intelligent design” is actually a form of religio-political indoctrination; but recognizing this forces us, too, to recognize the unpleasant fact that no form of education is entirely devoid of indoctrination. (I am referring not only to formal education in the schools, but also to things like teaching my 3-year-old daughter to use the potty and to be polite and show consideration for other people). There’s no easy way out of this dilemma; it brings us to the limits of secular humanism/liberalism, which is the dogma I prefer over all others, except for the fact that it refuses to admit that it is one dogma among others, and which (like all dogmas) can only establish itself by vanquishing others.

I have no conclusions here, no suggestions as to how we can better defend historical truth against imposture (to give the whole question a more 18th century turn of phrase than perhaps it merits in these postmodern times). Currently science is losing the battle to religious fanaticism, and to a large extent this is science’s own fault (just as all the recent Republican victories are the Democrats’ own fault). Which probably just means that we are doomed (as I already said after Bush’s re-election).

Joseph Schumpeter

Joseph Schumpeter sees the process of “creative destruction” as the essential dynamic of capitalism. Entrepreneurs turn the market upside-down with their innovations, forcing the adoption of new patterns of production and consumption. Schumpeter, in contrast to the orthodox neoclassical economists, has little use for the idealizations of “perfect competition,” or for the putative rationality of the free market. He ridicules the notion of market equilibrium, and sees little value in the efficiency that results when firms selling similar products compete on the basis of price, performance, and marginal advantage. Schumpeter prefers monopolies and oligopolies, with their ability to realize economies of scale, to standardize production, and to take advantage of their control of the market in order to nurture innovations that might not be immediately profitable.

Schumpeter is the only right-wing, pro-capitalist economist of note to give Marx his due as a thinker. His theory of “creative destruction” is an expansion of Marx’s insight that capitalism can only work by continually revolutionizing the relations of production. For Schumpeter, the competition that really matters –- in contrast to mere price competition –- is that which a given product faces “from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization.” Even monopolies can collapse overnight when faced with this sort of unexpected shift. The “ever-present threat” of innovation from outside compels monopolies and oligopolies to stay on full alert and seek to expand their business, rather than simply raising prices and restricting supply. The neoclassical notion of equilibrium is nonsense, because capitalism is “an evolutionary process. . . [that] not only never is but never can be stationary.” Schumpeter clearly means “evolutionary” here in a Darwinian sense. Capitalism, he writes, is a “process of industrial mutation – if I may use that biological term – that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.”

There’s an irony here that needs unpacking. The neo-Darwinian synthesis in contemporary biology is grounded in a vision of harsh competition under conditions of scarcity. Yet it emphasizes stability and continuity rather than revolution and destruction. It assumes that organisms are basically conservative. It tends to regard the organism’s external environment (or the “fitness landscape” defined by that environment) as essentially stable; it underestimates both the mutability of the environment, and the self-reflexive feedback effects that organisms have on their own environments. Instead, it calculates Evolutionarily Stable Strategies, using equilibrium models that are borrowed from neoclassical economics, and ultimately from 19th-century, pre-quantum and pre-complexity, physics. Schumpeter’s biological analogy, to the contrary, involves catastrophic destructions and dislocations. Stability is only a relative and temporary condition, a lull in between moments of radical mutation. Schumpeter even seems to anticipate the Eldredge-Gould theory of punctuated equilibrium: “these revolutions are not strictly incessant; they occur in discrete rushes that are separated from each other by spans of comparative quiet. The process as a whole works incessantly, however, in the sense that there always is either revolution or absorption of the results of revolution, both together forming what are known as business cycles.” In biology, it can at least be argued that punctuated equilibrium does not really contradict Darwinian gradualism, and can be folded into the neo-Darwinian synthesis. But in Schumpeter’s case, no such reconciliation with the neoclassical model is possible. The irony is that, during the Internet bubble of the late 1990s, Schumpeter’s celebration of entrepreneurship and “creative destruction” became popular right alongside the neoliberal faith in perfectly rational and efficient markets –- despite the radical incompatibility of these viewpoints.

Schumpeter refuses to minimize the dislocations and inequities caused by the process of creative destruction: “any pro-capitalist argument must rest on long-term considerations. In the short run, it is profits and inefficiencies that dominate the picture. In order to accept his lot, the leveler or the chartist of old would have had to comfort himself with hopes for his great-grandchildren. In order to identify himself with the capitalist system, the unemployed of today would have completely to forget his personal fate and the politician of today his personal ambition.” This argument is remarkably bracing and contrarian, especially in contrast to the usual neoliberal paeans to the perfection of the market. Schumpeter is indeed arguing that “trickle- down” economics works, that a rising tide ultimately lifts all boats, and that the immiseration of the British working class noted by Engels in 1844 was in the long run not a bad thing, because it led to a somewhat higher standard of living for British workers a hundred years later. But at least he doesn’t tell me – as Thomas Friedman does – that I myself will be made happier by living in a world without any social guarantees, and that I ought to feel grateful for the opportunity to raise my productivity by working longer hours for less pay.

There is reason to wonder, of course, whether the distant future that Schumpeter promises to my great-grandchildren will ever actually arrive. For if capitalism survives, the cycles of creative destruction will still be going on then too, and the promise of prosperity for all will continue to be deferred indefinitely. If, however, as Schumpeter fears, capitalism itself were to “become atrophic” and disappear, then there would no longer be any innovation or material progress at all: “human energy would turn away from business. Other than economic pursuits would attract the brains and provide the adventure.” I must say that such a prospect seems quite delightful to me; but Schumpeter regards it with unqualified disgust. Indeed, he scarcely distinguishes between the inertia of bureaucratic socialism, which he loathes, and the actual fulfillment of capitalism’s long-deferred promises of abundance. Nothing seems worse to him than “a state of satiety” in which “the wants of humanity might some day be so completely satisfied that little motive would be left to push productive effort still further ahead.” And the only thing that can rescue us from such a state, he adds, is the infinite restlessness of desire itself: “as higher standards of life are attained, these wants automatically expand and new wants emerge or are created. . . particularly if we include leisure among consumers’ goods” (131). This is again a remarkable piece of contrarianism. Usually, social critics (like Stuart Ewen) attack capitalism for colonizing leisure, and for soliciting artificial desires; while defenders of capitalism (like Virginia Postrel) indignantly reject these charges, and insist that the market gives us everything we truly want. But Schumpeter has the perversity to celebrate capitalism precisely for its creation of artificial “new wants,” and for its commodification of leisure time.

All this suggests that Schumpeter values the process of creative destruction itself, more than he does any long-term prosperity that might arise therefrom. Indeed, one might wonder whether he cares about prosperity at all. His glorification of capitalism centers on the heroic image of the entrepreneur; and this image, like the idea of “creative destruction” itself, owes far more to Nietzsche than it does to Adam Smith. Schumpeter’s entrepreneur is a charismatic figure, whose injection of new energy rescues the capitalist system from its otherwise fatal entropic tendencies (I’ve benefitted for this point from some suggestions by Douglas Collins). His deeds “lie outside of the routine tasks which everybody understands.” The entrepreneur, like the man of Nietzsche’s fantasized master race, acts spontaneously, without reflection or resentment. “The function of entrepreneurs,” Schumpeter says, “is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production”: this function “does not essentially consist in either inventing anything or otherwise creating the conditions which the enterprise exploits. It consists in getting things done” despite massive opposition. In all these ways, Schumpeter’s entrepreneur is not really a bourgeois figure at all, but a mythical aristocratic one.

Conversely, Schumpeter’s picture of the “state of satiety,” of a socialist world without entrepreneurs to shake things up, is just like Nietzsche’s vision of the Last Man: “One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion. . . We have invented happiness, say the last men, and they blink.” Schumpeter as for Nietzsche, socialism is basically bourgeois conformism and complacency writ large. Schumpeter’s analysis of the dynamics of capitalism traces the way that the very success of heroic entrepreneurship leads to the creation of an atmosphere in which entrepreneurship is no longer valued, and in which modishly left-wing intellectuals come to increasing prominence. By “intellectuals,” Schumpeter means people like me: “people who wield the power of the spoken and written word. . . [in] the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs,” and who therefore have the leisure to despise capitalist values despite (or because of) the fact that they are themselves the beneficiaries –- and indeed the product –- of those very values.

Schumpeter holds intellectuals in contempt, because they make judgments, and seek to legislate for society at large, without being accountable for the practical consequences of these judgments. In other words, the intellectuals’ judgments are contemplative, disinterested, and therefore –- in Kantian terms –- aesthetic. Schumpeter, no less than many Marxists, equates aestheticism with passive consumption, detached from any involvement in the actual processes of production. Schumpeter’s intellectual, like Nietzsche’s Last Man, is a mere consumer: someone who lives under the rule of universal equivalence, who lacks even the desire to make a difference. Who lacks desire altogether, in short, and who is incapable of an act of creative destruction.

But the impasse of Schumpeter’s own thought is a mirror image of the malady he diagnoses in his enemies. Creative destruction comes to grief over the fact that its outcome is just more commodities, more fodder for the regime of universal equivalence. All charisma is quickly routinized. The heroic individualism that Schumpeter glorifies is dissolved by its very success. Nobody is going to confuse Sam Walton, or Bill Gates, with the Übermensch. If Schumpeter’s bitter prophecy of capitalism’s decline has not come to pass, this is because such a “decline” is in fact the normative state of actually existing, and fully triumphant, capitalism.

The Cookbook

Some scattered remarks on Missy Elliott’s latest, The Cookbook (iTunes).

Missy really is the best. Hip hop is largely a boy’s/man’s game; women are usually more successful in (and more identified with) r&b. Although there were successful women hip hop artists who preceded Missy (Roxannne Shante; Queen Latifah; Salt ‘n’ Pepa; Lil’ Kim; etc.; for that matter, I still love Sha-Rock of the Funky Four Plus One) none of them have been so successful for so long as Missy has. And I’m talking power and authority and artistic success, not just sales figures. In The Cookbook, once again, Missy (seemingly effortlessly) beats the boys at their own game.
Snap, crackle, and pop. Even though there are only two Timbaland tracks this time, nearly every cut in The Cookbook is bursting at the seams with rhythmic vitality. The Neptunes outdo themselves in “On and On,” with its monster bass and its dynamic burbling/gurgling. Rich Harrison surpasses anything he’s done for Amerie with “Can’t Stop.” Missy herself produces some killer tracks, especially “Lose Control” with its transversal Juan Atkins sample.
Missy insists on the links between hip hop and r&b. It isn’t just a matter of putting a rapper’s guest verse inside an r&b song, or of having an r&b chorus in a rap; but of mixing and matching the genres, and of moving fluidly back and forth between them. Mixing and matching the genres also means mixing and matching the genders. Missy insists on this fluidity by the way she orchestrates the guest appearances on the album: having Ciara sing a bar a capella in the middle of “Lose Control”; having Mary G. Blige rap instead of sing; and (moving beyond r&b to dance hall and I’m not sure what) uniting Vybez Cartel and M.I.A. on the album’s final cut. The r&b slow jams in The Cookbook, by the way, are gorgeous.
Missy’s own voice needs more recognition than it has hitherto received. There are endless nuances to her tone and delivery: both between songs (compare the slyly seductive boasting of “On and On” to the hard-edged aggressiveness of “Mommy,” the song in which Missy announces that “in 2005, the industry will be pussywhipped”), and from line to line within individual songs. The beauty of Missy’s inflections is even greater than the beauty of her innuendoes.
For that matter, Missy’s lyrics repay attention more than you might think. On the surface, they seem straightforward and banal: either she’s boasting about how great she is, or she’s repeating the familiar r&b themes about love and sex (the latter in moods that range from tender to raunchy). But listen closer: beneath the familiar framework, these lyrics are as filled with wordplay and dense allusions and self-reflexivity as Bob Dylan’s lyrics are. No doubt many people will find this assertion outrageous; but I think that banal obviousness plays precisely the same role in Missy’s words as willful obscurantism plays in Dylan’s: in both cases the question of meaning (all-too-clear in the one case and all-too-unclear in the other) is a red herring, a sleight-of-hand to distract us from (and thereby make us all the more vulnerable to) the real life of the songs, which takes place on a level before meaning, a level of infra-meanings and emotional feints and jabs and fluctuations.
Nonetheless, I simply don’t believe the love songs on this album. Missy is just too butch for me to find the oh-I’m-so-deeply-in-love sentiments in cuts like “Irresistible Delicious” and especially “My Man” to be at all credible. As for the hymn to fellatio that is “Meltdown” — “bet it tastes like candy” — let’s just say that her ode to sex toys on This Is Not A Test fit better with her persona, as do the songs here about female sexual satisfaction, about the woman being in control (like the already-mentioned “Can’t Stop” and “Mommy”.
I loathed the three “skits” interspersed into the album. The opening Latina monologue is pointless at best, and I wondered about why the accent; the one with the Asian manicurist is racist and offensive; the closing phone message is just inane and stupid.
If — in spite of all I’ve said so far — I have an overall objection to, or sense of disappointment with The Cookbook, it has to do with a sense that Missy is just coasting, rather than pushing boundaries or pushing herself. Of course, from a commercial point of view, that is probably the right calculation; but I can’t help wishing/hoping/thinking that Missy has a strong enough position in the industry that she could eat her cake and have it too. The first few listens, I was inclined to agree with Julianne Shepherd that somehow the album seemed less than the sum of its parts, great in theory but not transporting the listener (Julianne or me) in practice. Now that I’ve listened a number of more times, I find that even the lesser cuts on the album tend to grow on me. But I still can’t entirely shake the sense that the whole album is too calculated, too willed, too much this-is-a-commodity-and-nothing-more. (Which is not to imply romantically that there is a category of supreme music that isn’t calculated, willed, commodified-from-the-start; it’s the “and-nothing-more” part that bothers me. There’s a certain wildness, or ecstasy, that’s missing; not that I can think of anything else released in recent months that has it…)

Some scattered remarks on Missy Elliott’s latest, The Cookbook (iTunes).

Missy really is the best. Hip hop is largely a boy’s/man’s game; women are usually more successful in (and more identified with) r&b. Although there were successful women hip hop artists who preceded Missy (Roxannne Shante; Queen Latifah; Salt ‘n’ Pepa; Lil’ Kim; etc.; for that matter, I still love Sha-Rock of the Funky Four Plus One) none of them have been so successful for so long as Missy has. And I’m talking power and authority and artistic success, not just sales figures. In The Cookbook, once again, Missy (seemingly effortlessly) beats the boys at their own game.
Snap, crackle, and pop. Even though there are only two Timbaland tracks this time, nearly every cut in The Cookbook is bursting at the seams with rhythmic vitality. The Neptunes outdo themselves in “On and On,” with its monster bass and its dynamic burbling/gurgling. Rich Harrison surpasses anything he’s done for Amerie with “Can’t Stop.” Missy herself produces some killer tracks, especially “Lose Control” with its transversal Juan Atkins sample.
Missy insists on the links between hip hop and r&b. It isn’t just a matter of putting a rapper’s guest verse inside an r&b song, or of having an r&b chorus in a rap; but of mixing and matching the genres, and of moving fluidly back and forth between them. Mixing and matching the genres also means mixing and matching the genders. Missy insists on this fluidity by the way she orchestrates the guest appearances on the album: having Ciara sing a bar a capella in the middle of “Lose Control”; having Mary G. Blige rap instead of sing; and (moving beyond r&b to dance hall and I’m not sure what) uniting Vybez Cartel and M.I.A. on the album’s final cut. The r&b slow jams in The Cookbook, by the way, are gorgeous.
Missy’s own voice needs more recognition than it has hitherto received. There are endless nuances to her tone and delivery: both between songs (compare the slyly seductive boasting of “On and On” to the hard-edged aggressiveness of “Mommy,” the song in which Missy announces that “in 2005, the industry will be pussywhipped”), and from line to line within individual songs. The beauty of Missy’s inflections is even greater than the beauty of her innuendoes.
For that matter, Missy’s lyrics repay attention more than you might think. On the surface, they seem straightforward and banal: either she’s boasting about how great she is, or she’s repeating the familiar r&b themes about love and sex (the latter in moods that range from tender to raunchy). But listen closer: beneath the familiar framework, these lyrics are as filled with wordplay and dense allusions and self-reflexivity as Bob Dylan’s lyrics are. No doubt many people will find this assertion outrageous; but I think that banal obviousness plays precisely the same role in Missy’s words as willful obscurantism plays in Dylan’s: in both cases the question of meaning (all-too-clear in the one case and all-too-unclear in the other) is a red herring, a sleight-of-hand to distract us from (and thereby make us all the more vulnerable to) the real life of the songs, which takes place on a level before meaning, a level of infra-meanings and emotional feints and jabs and fluctuations.
Nonetheless, I simply don’t believe the love songs on this album. Missy is just too butch for me to find the oh-I’m-so-deeply-in-love sentiments in cuts like “Irresistible Delicious” and especially “My Man” to be at all credible. As for the hymn to fellatio that is “Meltdown” — “bet it tastes like candy” — let’s just say that her ode to sex toys on This Is Not A Test fit better with her persona, as do the songs here about female sexual satisfaction, about the woman being in control (like the already-mentioned “Can’t Stop” and “Mommy”.
I loathed the three “skits” interspersed into the album. The opening Latina monologue is pointless at best, and I wondered about why the accent; the one with the Asian manicurist is racist and offensive; the closing phone message is just inane and stupid.
If — in spite of all I’ve said so far — I have an overall objection to, or sense of disappointment with The Cookbook, it has to do with a sense that Missy is just coasting, rather than pushing boundaries or pushing herself. Of course, from a commercial point of view, that is probably the right calculation; but I can’t help wishing/hoping/thinking that Missy has a strong enough position in the industry that she could eat her cake and have it too. The first few listens, I was inclined to agree with Julianne Shepherd that somehow the album seemed less than the sum of its parts, great in theory but not transporting the listener (Julianne or me) in practice. Now that I’ve listened a number of more times, I find that even the lesser cuts on the album tend to grow on me. But I still can’t entirely shake the sense that the whole album is too calculated, too willed, too much this-is-a-commodity-and-nothing-more. (Which is not to imply romantically that there is a category of supreme music that isn’t calculated, willed, commodified-from-the-start; it’s the “and-nothing-more” part that bothers me. There’s a certain wildness, or ecstasy, that’s missing; not that I can think of anything else released in recent months that has it…)

Master Morality and Slave Morality

It just struck me: when Nietzsche (in the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 11) evokes his fantasmatic master race, writing of “triumphant monsters who perhaps emerge from a disgusting procession of murder, arson, rape, and torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of soul, as if it were no more than a students’ prank,” he is in fact giving a perfect, precisely literal description of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. Though I can’t help thinking that Nietzsche would have been sorely disappointed and disillusioned if he had actually encountered such men, and realized that they were the living embodiments of his ideal.

No Country For Old Men

I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy‘s latest novel, No Country For Old Men. I think it’s McCarthy’s best book since Blood Meridian twenty years ago, which is to say that I liked it better than any of the “Border trilogy” novels that made McCarthy famous.

No Country For Old Men is spare and lean, McCarthy at his most minimal. It’s also set in 1980, which makes it the closest to present-time of any of McCarthy’s books. It’s set in the same southwestern desert territory as all his books since Blood Meridian. But there’s much less sublime description of nature than in the earlier books; instead, a lot of the action plays out in anonymous motel rooms in small West Texas towns. There are no accounts, either, to match the descriptions of wolves and wild dogs and horses in the earlier books. At the start of No Country For Old Men, one of the protagonists, Llwellyn Moss, is hunting antelope; but when he stumbles across a heroin deal gone bad, with lots of dead bodies and a suitcase containing $2.4 million — when he decides to pick up the suitcase — nature and hunting disappear from the novel, never to return. No Country For Old Men is the story of Moss’ doomed attempt to make off with the money, and of Chigurh, the ruthless killer who wants to recover the suitcase, and of Bell, the sheriff who wants to solve the murders and make sense of all the violence.

In its spareness, the novel plays out like a very taut thriller; though contrary to genre expectations, certain crucial aspects of the plot are elided or decentered, and others are never fully explained. The first half of the novel — except for Bell’s monologues, which I will get to in a moment — are almost pure action; as the novel progresses, however, we finally get some of the metaphysics of which McCarthy’s earlier novels are full. However, there are no dense Faulknerian/Melvillean passages such as were found in the earlier books; here, the sense of fatality is all the more intense for coming only in the clipped and understated conversations of the characters, brief and plain statements punctuated by long pauses. The vision of life offered us in rare glimpses is almost unbearably bleak: god is absent, evil rules the world, fate cannot be averted. Of course such a bald summary does a great injustice both to the poetry with which McCarthy expresses these ideas, and to the extremity of his gnosticism (I refer the reader to my old friend Leo Daugherty’s article on the gnostic subtext of Blood Meridian, available here).

No Country For Old Men is a lesser work than Blood Meridian: but this is scarcely a criticism, considering that, in my humble opinion, Blood Meridian is the greatest American novel of the 20th century. In many ways, the new book is structurally similar to Blood Meridian, and can be seen as a less ambitious update into the near-present of the earlier book. In both novels, the landscape of the American Southwest is drenched in blood: the effect is existentially chilling, but the novels also go beyond the existential in that they comment on American history and society more generally. In Blood Meridian, set just after the Mexican War of 1848, America as the land of Manifest Destiny is at stake, especially with regards to the Anglos’ relations to Mexicans and Indians. The novel is a revisionist Western with strong cinematic echoes, though it is more lacerating and more fundamentally savage and negative than anything ever done in Hollywood movies. In No Country For Old Men, the historical field is more restricted: it is sort of about America after the 1960s and Vietnam, in a form that reflects the nihilistic crime genre more than the Western — though references to the latter genre, and historical continuities with earlier times, are also present.

There’s a fascinating figure of pure evil at the heart of both books; though Chigurh, for all his coldblooded singlemindedness, and seeming ability to inhabit Fate and become its agent (instead of just passively suffering it like everybody else does), still is ultimately human-all-too-human, in contrast to the superhuman ferocity and perversity and mythic perseverance of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. Chigurh is recognizable as the samurai-esque gangster familiar from a lot of recent movies; though McCarthy radically demystifies this figure, in a way that Tarantino and others never do. Both books also turn on the figure of a witness: a (relatively) innocent character who observes — but is never able to really comprehend — the central figure of evil, and the monstrous actions all around him. In Blood Meridian, the witness is a young man (15 or 16 years old) who is never named but only called “the kid.” In No Country For Old Men, the structurally identical role is played by Sheriff Bell, who must be in his mid-fifties but feels (and sounds) much older.

Bell’s monologues are spaced throughout the book, offering a counterpoint to the third-person omniscient narration of the rest of the text. Some idiots have claimed that Bell provides a “moral compass” for the novel (I won’t link to them here, but if you are curious you can find them through Google). The fact is that, far from providing any sort of definitive judgment on Chigurh’s actions and the events of the novel, Bell always finds himself outside them, behind them, too late to do anything about them, unable even to contextualize them in any way he finds satisfactory. He’s a decent guy, and probably a Bush/Reagan voter (he complains lamely about kids with punk hairstyles, and at one point suggests that, with abortion legal, enforced euthanasia of annoying elderly relatives can’t be too far behind); but even if these are also McCarthy’s personal views (I have no idea), they don’t define the metaphysical perspective of the novel. Bell spends a bit of time lamenting how morals have decayed since the good old days — a notion of which he would have easily been disabused, if he had ever read any of McCarthy’s novels set in earlier times. But in the long run Bell admits that such idealizations are untenable; violence and evil are inscribed in the land, in our history, and probably too in our very nature as limited, imperfect and selfish selves (in what is the hyperbolic gnostic version of Original Sin). Bell never captures Chigurh, or saves Moss’ wife as he hopes to, or indeed arrests anybody, or even saves a man he believes is innocent from receiving the death penalty; at the end of the novel, he harshly judges himself a failure, feels that he has been defeated (which he is, and has been, but no more so than any other human being). (Perhaps because he gives up and retires, in acknowledged defeat, he is not murdered by the novel’s evil figure, the way the kid finally is).

The figure of the witness is necessary, in both Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men, because he is the only one who can experience the pathos, the affect, the tragedy of McCarthy’s vision. The new novel’s flatness (as I’ve already said) suggests a diminishment in comparison to Blood Meridian‘s utter sublimity (which is of Melvillean and Biblical dimensions). But in both novels it is only through the witness figure that the inhuman coldness of the universe (of McCarthy’s vision of the Universe) can be felt and registered, can itself be spelled out in humanly recognizable terms. No Country For Old Men has a sadness to it, striking a new tone in McCarthy’s fiction; and what’s most remarkable about the book, perhaps, is how this new tone overlays, but does not mitigate or sublimate, the unsparing, nihilistic ferocity of McCarthy’s overall vision. I felt that in the Border trilogy, as well as in his play The Stonemason, McCarthy was to a certain extent fleeing away from, and looking for some sort of comfort against, the extremity of his own vision in Blood Meridian. No Country For Old Men cannot be accused of such a withdrawal; he has indeed stepped back once again from the abyss, but only in a way that continues fully to acknowledge it.

Talk on Whitehead

A quicktime movie of “Without Criteria,” a talk on Alfred North Whitehead that I delivered at the Sense Lab of Concordia University, in November 2004, is now available online here.

In My Skin

Last week I had some essential dental work done — something that I had been putting off for years. In the aftermath, the new bridge that covers the spot where teeth are missing or defective is fine. But my gums are awfully sore, even today, a week later. The pain is slight in amplitude, just barely above the threshold of awareness — which is just enough to be annoying. I’m taking acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and naproxen (not simultaneously, but one after the other) to dull the pain. But I also have this incessant compulsion to probe the sore spots, with my tongue and with my fingers. Doing so actually makes the gums hurt more; but I can’t get rid of the feeling that this constant probing is also in some sort of way a cure, or a solution, as if stimulating the pain in this manner was a way to make the feeling active instead of passive, to claim it for myself, to incorporate it, so it would no longer be something that’s just happening to me, no longer something from which I suffer.

It is through this experience — and others like it in the past — that I relate to Marina de Van’s extraordinary film In My Skin. A thirty-something woman (played by de Van, who stars in the film as well as being the director and screenwriter) injures herself at a party: she goes out to the back lawn for some fresh air, and in the dark she stumbles over some sort of tool (we never get to see it) that tears up her leg, leaving some ugly gashes. Although she is bleeding, she goes back to the party as if nothing had happened, and doesn’t bring herself to go to the emergency room until hours later. In the days to come, she develops a fascination with her wound, tearing off the bandages so she can feel and trace the cuts, and then cutting herself to extend the network of bloody lines. As the film proceeds, she grows more and more obsessive. All this plays out against the background of her life as a Parisian yuppie, moving up the corporate ladder as an advertising consultant, and alternately arguing with and making up with her boyfriend (who’s a self-centered asshole). At one point, during a dinner meeting with a client, she hallucinates that her left arm has been replaced by a prosthesis and has started to act in alien ways, out of her control; she starts furtively cutting it under the table, with a steak knife. Later that evening, she fakes an auto accident so that her boyfriend won’t know that the wounds were deliberately self-inflicted. And it escalates from there: she eventually holes up in a hotel room, lying in fetal position while she cuts off rectangles of her skin, licking up the blood and putting the skin fragments aside for later preservation via tanning.

What’s remarkable about In My Skin is not just the presentation of an obsession, but the affective tone and mode of presentation. Though the film is definitely visceral in impact, it’s also psychologically muted — which makes it all the more intense. No explanation, either psychological or sociological, is ever given for the main character’s obsession. It’s just a brute fact of her being, something that defines and dominates her very existence. At the same time, though we see some of the cutting, the cutting scenes are dominated by close-ups of her face. This leads us to identify with her emotional reactions, which range from dread to blankness to nearly orgasmic bliss — without our being able to ground these emotions, because (in the absence of any causal explanation) we cannot relate them intelligibly to what she is actually doing to her body. The result is a ferocious intensity that is at the same time very nearly abstract. Towards the end of the film, instead of these facial shots de Van splits the screen and gives us two different angles, both in extreme close-up, on the same few inches of skin, knife, and surrounding objects: the effect, again, is one of visceralness and abstraction at the same time. The more intimately the film reduces its focus to just the consciousness of its protagonist, the more oddly impersonal it becomes. (I can’t help thinking, at this point, of Maurice Blanchot, the author who — aside from Proust — has demonstrated most profoundly how intimacy is tied to impersonality: for the deeper you go, the more you explore interiority and the precognitive desires and feelings that drive us, the more everything that we know as “personality” and “psychology” falls away, and the more we discover an impersonality that is tied to otherness, to the Outside).

The emotional tone of In My Skin, to the extent that it can be pinned down at all, is closer to horror than to any other genre. I was reminded a bit of Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day. Except that in Monique de Van’s film, the vampire/cannibal and the victim are the same person. Monstrosity cannot be projected outward; it becomes a sort of auto-affection, and thereby an of self-love, a way of fashioning and relating to oneself. (As Foucault taught us, it’s precisely because the “self” doesn’t exist a priori, because there is no pregiven phenomenological subject, because “the given” is prepersonal or impersonal, that “care of the self” or “self-fashioning” becomes the most crucial existential and political issue).

In vampire stories, the vampire’s insatiable desire often wins our sympathy: because of the allure of shadows; or because the vampire suffers and endures more than his victims; or because such infinite longing can never be resolved in satisfaction; or because the inextricable intermingling of life and death is something we cannot conceive and yet know in our hearts; or because such desire, however cruel, seems more authentic (more alive, ironically) than the repression and coldness of the society in which the vampire’s victims live. In My Skin goes further than any other vampire story in exploring these dimensions, and in excavating the strange, impersonal intimacy at the heart of vampiric terror. In other words, In My Skin is the tenderest of all horror films.