Esther Press

Savage Grace, directed by Tom Kalin. Starring Julianne Moore, Stephen Dillane, and Eddie Redmayne. 2007.

After a string of incredibly mediocre films at the manse here in Chico, gold was struck with this beauty. This film follows the personal lives of the heirs of Leo Hendrik Baekeland, of Bakelite plastic fame. Leo invented the first true plastic, and became incredibly wealthy. The casting is excellent. The photography is excellent. The dialog is raw, urbane, and powerful. The narrative is mysterious, sexual, poetic, and direct. Julianne Moore, as the mother, Barbara Baekeland, goes to some aggressive lengths to "cure" her homosexual son. Tom Kalin previously directed Swoon, many years ago.

In the above video, you will witness a scripted speech meant to give the sense of unscriptedness. There's a shoehorned looseness within, a desire to make a privately scripted speech seem publicly casual. It is the reverse of what usually happens. But, here, we get both.

Apart from the queasiness one has watching two people play at being casual, with all of the scripted--yet still dull--jokes, in public, we are also treated to a numbing restatement of a sentiment most children understand. And, yes, even the adult speakers here understand it as well. When this usually happens, the speakers realize that there is nothing new being said, and they then usually will stop there. Most people do this. But, here, remarkably, the commonplace sentiment continues unabated, including a tone that suggests there is some outstretched risk in doing so.

In addition, there is the hammering of the "use your words" philosophy. As stated in the speech, there is a belief that our emotions can be articulated by language. This is not even disputed by the speakers. Emotions can be captured, displayed, placed in logical sentences, and then expressed. In this mode—with syntax, grammar, and diction—we carry our burdensome feelings directly to the sentence structure and watch as our mingling, conflicting emotions disappear into linear sense, presto chango—birthed by language. It’s a magic act.

Beneath all of this Age of Reason simplicity, we are really witnessing, like always, a dualism of presumptions, with one presumption taken as the protagonist—the driving presumption, let’s say—and the other taking the role of the antagonist—what the speakers don’t want. This is an argument about values.

In this speech, articulated emotions and thoughts, through the sense-making capacity of language, is the protagonist. This is what is desired.

However, this desire comes freighted with unending tonnage of bad faith.

It’s believed that through the sound logic of sense-making language that there will be, ipso facto, no rocks thrown in the world. Rocks are thrown, you see, when inarticulate monkeys cannot manage themselves to fully assess the confusion of the outer reality and one’s inner pinball game of thoughts and feelings and all the contradictions that move between.

It’s not mentioned here that the most learned and intelligent men and women, speaking in full, complete sentences, full of sense, are the ones who usually do cause the most strategic rock throwing. That is to say, that it takes an enormously complicated mind to rationally pursue and articulate the making of an atomic bomb. (That’s just a tossed off for instance. Am I being too casual?)

The antagonist in this is simply the sign for wildness, thoughtlessness, unbridled, raw paroxysms of guiltless abandon. This is what leads to wars, we learn. This unchecked randomness, this conflicted, unlocateable, unpronounceable, unexplainable interiority is what we must worry most about, we learn.

It’s not the systemic machines, the precise blueprints, or the purposeful uniformity of military identities that must be feared. We must worry about the stray cat. The mysterious house. The unknown feelings.

One would hope that given the enormity of a chance of speaking at the White House, two published authors might be able to think these things through a little better than what’s replicating here. This is a cliché of a speech passed off as profundity—and what’s worse, the authors actually admit to it. They know it is. They know it’s a cliché. And if they had spent any time at all looking deeper into the pivot places that the argument is moving from, upon, against, they would also know, on top of it all, that the cliché is also a lie.

Includes eye-to-eye reading of SPD's Worst Postmodern Lyric, "Scepter, Of the Autodidact (Recalcitrant Mode).

YUKO NASU

In a current strain of poetics, I'm absolutely flabbergasted by the lazy categorization of "how men think," who 'they' are, and then the breezy pivoting from these unmarked speculations into formulations of a philosophy! Never mind that, as a man, I wouldn't even begin to posit "how men think" or "who 'we' are": I can barely figure out who I am, who I are--a person with half of "his" chromosomes coming from a female. To set all men inside a handy little glass beaker to pick up and look at comfortably is simply the standard base of broad comedy, and/or the mark of a disinterest in social complexity and how that complexity is generated. Never mind that these entire digressions into this are another form of keeping the eyes off of the real prize: class and class control. The upper classes love to see the working classes and bourgeoisie occupying themselves with such engrossing topics as male violence on television shows and the image of Wonder Woman in critical theory. As long as the class structure is not threatened.

Richard Widmark, Night and the City.


RECENT MOVIES SEEN, WITH COMMENTARY


The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke, directed by Darren Aronofsky (2008).

--Eh.

Un conte de Noël/A Christmas Tale, starring Catherine Deneuve and Mathieu Amalric, directed by Arnaud Desplechin (2008).

--Eh.

Quid Pro Quo, starring Vera Farmiga, directed by Carlos Brooks (2008).

--Eh.

Where the Sidewalk Ends, starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, directed by Otto Preminger (1950).

--Eh.

Night and the City, starring Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney, directed by Jules Dassin (1950).

--Not bad.

In which Peaches confesses, "Some people don't like my crotch":



"Kick it," Peaches (featuring Iggy Pop), from the album Fatherfucker, 2003.

[The posts from April 30th to May 10th are on loan and part of a travelling exhibition on the western coast of the United States of America. Also, no one likes you.]