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Another two films
Feb. 19th, 2012 03:12 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: -5. High today: 2. Another day of melting wet snow.
There was a new groundhog in the backyard yesterday morning. There go my hopes for the chard living through the winter. I wouldn't have believed a year ago that I would be unhappy to have a groundhog show up in my backyard. It is a smaller and redder groundhog than Fred. I have named it Jo(e).
Here's a hell of a thing (linked to by Leiter, again): an op-ed in the New York Times arguing for the superiority of the Chinese "political model" to the American one (complete with a bald two-sentence defense of Tiananmen). Don't that take you back, now.
This week's installment of Film & Philosophy featured Bad Boy Bubby, a film which in retrospect somehow seems less unpleasant than its description sounds and than it actually was to watch. I ain't got much to say about the film, though. What's more interesting to me, again, is the whole Film & Philosophy thing, or, really, more than that, my relation to it. For probably the first half hour that people were talking about the film (or, rather, saying what the film prompted them to think of in Philosophy, sometimes flatly misremembering parts of the film to fit what they wanted to say Philosophically, sometimes getting their Philosophy flatly wrong), I was near-desperately wishing I wasn't there. Eventually I was the only person in the room, apparently, not participating in the discussion. Then the regular-faculty sponsor of this group--it's almost entirely undergrads--said something about the film that I thought was importantly mistaken, and I couldn't help saying so, and from that point on I was part of the group. There's a bunch of things that are interesting to me about this. One is that my distance from what the kids generally grow up thinking of as philosophy--all this taking of positions, arguing for and against them (my heart sinks when I hear someone start a sentence with "one might argue that")--is increasing or becoming more apparent or both. Another is that if I had never jumped into the conversation, which very easily could've happened, I would've left thinking the whole thing was horrible, I probably never would've gone to another one, and I would've suspected that some people (including the regular-faculty sponsor) would've wondered what was up with me coming to these things to just sit there and scowl. Instead I probably will go to the next one, and I may end up picking the film for the one after that. This seems verging on embarrassingly trivial, but when you're as much hanging on to the outside of things as I have been for years now, it's important. So much hangs on such small things. The way a crow shook down on me the dust of snow from a hemlock tree.... (I always remember that as "cherry tree"--because of my waxwings poem?)
The other film I went to see this week was Tree of Life, again. When we came out of the theatre, my friend J. said, "I can see why you like that film." Which was funny in part because I hadn't said I liked it, and also because I wouldn't necessarily have said I liked it. But I think I fell half in love with it this time, and if it ever shows up on a big screen around here again, I'll probably go see it again. (It felt more coherent on a second viewing. I came to a different hypothesis about the frame of the film--I feel like it would degrade the film to say it, though. It needs to be left open. Which is, again, the basic problem with Film & Philosophy. Like I said before, there's stuff you can say about Tree of Life that isn't necessarily wrong or stupid, but I don't know that that holds for the most important stuff.)
One film I might be able to bring myself to subject to the Film & Philosophy treatment, if it were actually available (but it is amazingly unavailable), is The Music of Chance. I finally picked up the book a couple of weeks ago, finished reading it this morning. It's surprisingly pulp-y in style, given that it is something you might call an existentialist parable. A lot of off-putting wise-cracking dialogue, a lot of "wolfing down" steaks and things like that that kids think you're supposed to write in novels, which I found kind of disappointing, until I came to this: The days passed, and even though there was rarely a moment when they were not together, he continued to say nothing about what truly concerned him--nothing about the struggle to put his life together again, nothing about how he saw the wall as a chance to redeem himself in his own eyes, nothing about how he welcomed the hardships of the meadow as a way to atone for his recklessness and self-pity--for once he got started, he knew that all the wrong words would come tumbling from his mouth.... The point was to keep him in good spirits, to get him through the fifty days as painlessly as possible. Much better to speak of things only in the most superficial terms ... and to bluster along with funny remarks and ironic shrugs of the shoulders.
There was a new groundhog in the backyard yesterday morning. There go my hopes for the chard living through the winter. I wouldn't have believed a year ago that I would be unhappy to have a groundhog show up in my backyard. It is a smaller and redder groundhog than Fred. I have named it Jo(e).
Here's a hell of a thing (linked to by Leiter, again): an op-ed in the New York Times arguing for the superiority of the Chinese "political model" to the American one (complete with a bald two-sentence defense of Tiananmen). Don't that take you back, now.
This week's installment of Film & Philosophy featured Bad Boy Bubby, a film which in retrospect somehow seems less unpleasant than its description sounds and than it actually was to watch. I ain't got much to say about the film, though. What's more interesting to me, again, is the whole Film & Philosophy thing, or, really, more than that, my relation to it. For probably the first half hour that people were talking about the film (or, rather, saying what the film prompted them to think of in Philosophy, sometimes flatly misremembering parts of the film to fit what they wanted to say Philosophically, sometimes getting their Philosophy flatly wrong), I was near-desperately wishing I wasn't there. Eventually I was the only person in the room, apparently, not participating in the discussion. Then the regular-faculty sponsor of this group--it's almost entirely undergrads--said something about the film that I thought was importantly mistaken, and I couldn't help saying so, and from that point on I was part of the group. There's a bunch of things that are interesting to me about this. One is that my distance from what the kids generally grow up thinking of as philosophy--all this taking of positions, arguing for and against them (my heart sinks when I hear someone start a sentence with "one might argue that")--is increasing or becoming more apparent or both. Another is that if I had never jumped into the conversation, which very easily could've happened, I would've left thinking the whole thing was horrible, I probably never would've gone to another one, and I would've suspected that some people (including the regular-faculty sponsor) would've wondered what was up with me coming to these things to just sit there and scowl. Instead I probably will go to the next one, and I may end up picking the film for the one after that. This seems verging on embarrassingly trivial, but when you're as much hanging on to the outside of things as I have been for years now, it's important. So much hangs on such small things. The way a crow shook down on me the dust of snow from a hemlock tree.... (I always remember that as "cherry tree"--because of my waxwings poem?)
The other film I went to see this week was Tree of Life, again. When we came out of the theatre, my friend J. said, "I can see why you like that film." Which was funny in part because I hadn't said I liked it, and also because I wouldn't necessarily have said I liked it. But I think I fell half in love with it this time, and if it ever shows up on a big screen around here again, I'll probably go see it again. (It felt more coherent on a second viewing. I came to a different hypothesis about the frame of the film--I feel like it would degrade the film to say it, though. It needs to be left open. Which is, again, the basic problem with Film & Philosophy. Like I said before, there's stuff you can say about Tree of Life that isn't necessarily wrong or stupid, but I don't know that that holds for the most important stuff.)
One film I might be able to bring myself to subject to the Film & Philosophy treatment, if it were actually available (but it is amazingly unavailable), is The Music of Chance. I finally picked up the book a couple of weeks ago, finished reading it this morning. It's surprisingly pulp-y in style, given that it is something you might call an existentialist parable. A lot of off-putting wise-cracking dialogue, a lot of "wolfing down" steaks and things like that that kids think you're supposed to write in novels, which I found kind of disappointing, until I came to this: The days passed, and even though there was rarely a moment when they were not together, he continued to say nothing about what truly concerned him--nothing about the struggle to put his life together again, nothing about how he saw the wall as a chance to redeem himself in his own eyes, nothing about how he welcomed the hardships of the meadow as a way to atone for his recklessness and self-pity--for once he got started, he knew that all the wrong words would come tumbling from his mouth.... The point was to keep him in good spirits, to get him through the fifty days as painlessly as possible. Much better to speak of things only in the most superficial terms ... and to bluster along with funny remarks and ironic shrugs of the shoulders.
