"If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today?"

Lorentzen on Cormac McCarthy

According to Alicia, the love between the siblings is a matter of mutual recognition in a world where neither of them otherwise belongs. ‘I knew that I wasnt supposed to be in Wartburg Tennessee and I thought it possible that Bobby had found where it was that I was supposed to be. Where we were supposed to be.’ She names the mountains of Romania. ‘For how long did you entertain this fantasy?’ Cohen asks. She replies: ‘I entertain it yet.’

Her comment suggests that the motive of her suicide might be to join her brother, whom she has taken for dead, and that the act is something beyond her free will. Bobby’s realisation that he is in love with his sister, when he was a grad student and she was thirteen, is similarly presented as something beyond his conscious reckoning: ‘Watching her that summer evening he knew that he was lost. His heart in his throat. His life no longer his.’ What he is watching is Alicia performing the role of Medea, alone and in costume, on the floor of a quarry, lit by smoky homemade kerosene lamps. It’s a powerful image and one that comes completely out of the blue. There is another temptation for the reader: to connect these children and their behaviour to their father, the bomb maker, to see the bomb as something that emerged from the collective human unconscious, something animals made while tending to their own survival. Alicia tells Cohen that ‘anyone who doesnt understand that the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant events in human history hasnt been paying attention. It’s up there with fire and language ... and it may be number one.’ As for its makers: ‘I think most of the scientists didnt give that much thought to what was going to happen. They were just having a good time. They all said the same thing about the Manhattan Project. That they’d never had so much fun in their lives.’ Some have their fun actually burning down the world, others write novels.

2007 One I haven't repeated, 

Dennett and Determinism, Bill and Buddha Nature: Killers as Heroes (and actors as gods) in the Films of Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino's movies are as politically reactionary as Mel Gibson's, but only one of them gets called for it. Honesty in Kill Bill is the following of one's true self. Clark Kent is the sham persona. Bill reminds Beatrix that she's a killer, and that her daughter is one as well. This is neither moral nor immoral but simple determinism, whether genetic or metaphysical is irrelevant. And Beatrix is both the hero and the victor. The best killer wins.

tags: Mannerism and The Gothic. The Dark Knight and Epic Cinema, Determinism, Kubrick, etc.

We'll meet again, Don't know where, Don't know when, But I know we'll meet again some sunny day

I could add something about Game of Thrones, but that would be obvious.

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Aubade, Philip Larkin

No surprises. Determinism has been a ubiquitous trope in popular culture for 40 years.

Indecisive machines. 

"Build a machine with two separate and competing algorithms, for conditioned response and calculation, and a root level imperative for continued operation: survival. The result will be a neurotic machine, "haunted" by past actions."

Julian Jaynes is most interesting for his fanbase.  Tanya Luhrmann is a fan. The co-writer of the episode—with the writer of this—is Christopher Nolan's brother. He and his wife are listed as co-creators of the show and show-runners. She's the daughter of immigrants, British and Taiwanese, a graduate of Stanford and Harvard Law, who passed the California bar and worked for McKinsey and Company. 

I could have written the first lines myself, but the next, not included above, follow the old stupidity of mixing determinism with the desire to be gods, or the theater of humility performed by Calvinists: "Determinism for thee..." But Ford isn't the hero of the piece, and that's why it's interesting. 

"Determinism for thee..."  A site-search of my blog for that phrase gets most if not all of them.  A web search gets me at Crooked Timber, on conservatism and culture, and at Balkinization on living constitutionalism and judicial review.

So many of the straight shots have no atmosphere; the stage sets were left to do the work. Maybe not his call, and Hollywood wanted to show off their money. The framing is blocky. Like Burton's Batman, which hasn't aged well, though I want to see Batman Returns again for the tragedy of DeVito's Penguin. And there are shots that hold on characters after they speak: Prochnow ends up looking like he doesn't know what to do, when the delay implies he should be like a statue. Lynch obviously wanted it to work as a dream, but then all the central characters need to be flat. Lynch should have followed Herzog and hypnotized the actors. Max von Sydow and Linda Hunt are pros and Siân Phillips and Kenneth McMillan dig deep, but there's a lot of bad acting by good actors, and by bad actors, and by bad actors who were allowed to chew the scenery.

Questions of kitsch, 1980s architectural historicism, Batman, then and now and the Queen's favorite movie (linked before). The shots designed for the camera itself, images that come out of his head, are unforgettable, close to the imagistic romanticism of Herzog but with an Anglo-American sense of materiality: Joseph Cornell. Herzog is more a pure filmmaker, an artist in images in light. Nolan's cinema is in the classic Hollywood mode where the light itself becomes material, the illusion becomes material.

Continuing, not in the manuscript yet.
I should have thought of it a long time ago.  I knew about the film

see also  Technocracy and the individual imagination. Atomization and the desperate need for community. etc.

Titles by Saul Bass


The plot description, from Wikipedia, for his only feature film as a director.

Phase IV

Due to an unknown cosmic event, listed in "phases", ants have undergone rapid evolution and developed a hive mind. A scientific team begins investigating strange towers and geometrically perfect designs that ants have built in the desert. Except for one family, the local human population flees the strangely acting ants. Scientists James Lesko and Ernest Hubbs set up a computerized lab in a sealed dome located in an area of significant ant activity in Arizona. The ant colony and the scientific team, along with the holdout family, fight each other, though the ants are the more effective aggressors.

The narrative uses the scientific team as the main protagonists, but there are also ant protagonists going about their duties in the colony. The ants immunize themselves to the humans' chemical weapons and soon infiltrate their lab. Teams of ants penetrate the computers of the lab and short them out. After Lesko decodes an ant message, Kendra Eldrige (a young woman who has taken refuge with the scientists), becomes convinced that her actions have enraged the ants. Seeking to save the two scientists, she abandons the lab and apparently sacrifices herself.

Hubbs and Lesko begin to have different plans for dealing with the ants. While Lesko thinks he can communicate with the ants by means of messages written in mathematics, Hubbs plans to wipe out a hill he believes to be the ants' central hive. Delirious from a venomous ant sting, Hubbs can barely get his boots on but is determined to attack the hive and kill the ant queen. Instead, Hubbs literally falls into a trap – a deep pit that the ants fill with earth. Helpless to save Hubbs and convinced that the ants will soon move into desert areas where their growth will exceed man's ability to control them, Lesko chooses to follow Hubbs's plan. He sets out to the hive with a canister of poison. Descending into the hive, Lesko hunts for the queen, but instead finds Kendra reaching out from under the sand. The two embrace, and Lesko realizes that far from destroying the human race, the ants' plan is to adapt the human race and make them a part of the ants' world. In voice-over, Lesko states that he does not know what plans the ants have, but he is awaiting instruction.

Zhang Yimou, Andreas Gursky, Laibach, Rodgers and Hammerstein

Technocracy and the individual imagination: atomism and the Bomb; Weber, and Daniel Bell


It started with a glib comment elsewhere about Stella and Murakami, but it makes sense to continue


Spilled Aluminum appliqué.
Zhang Yimou, Gursky, and Kubrick

and Koons

Leiter 

Philosophical expertise is BS.
Now it's official, so let's move along.

From his link

Philosophy: it's junk science. Experiments have shown that people can't tell crime from justice. Now one US philosopher claims that even experts can't judge truth accurately. What's the science behind the taste?

I switched a few words. The post and link are about wine-tasting, but there's no difference.

"I met Mr. Assayas on a yacht flying a flag for Arte"

“It’s a convention, but it’s not dumber than any other convention,”

Once again, the subject turned to blockbusters. “There’s an audience to whom they do say things,” he said, his voice quickening. “In many ways, they are the most coherent representation of the world they live in.” This needs to be respected, and understood. And then Mr. Assayas quoted from Valentine’s defense of the blockbuster: “It’s a convention, but it’s not dumber than any other convention,” which he believes to be “profoundly true.”

yes.
new tag: The Dark Knight and Epic Cinema

"Behind the chiliasm of modern man, is the megalomania of self-infinitization."
Daniel Bell
Isolation and imagined community. Obvious, but why not.

1913 Stravinsky


1951 Pollock

1958 Hitchcock
The beginning of Vertigo renders the infinite of outer space as the infinite of inner space, but the imagery is the same. North by Northwest, 1959, begins with Max Weber via Mies van der Rohe.

More on the title designer Saul Bass, the director of Phase IV, a not unsympathetic portrait of a victorious hive mind

Joseph Kerman on Milton Babbitt 

His writing of the 1950s had developed into a strange amalgam. Conjoined with a fanatical scientism, a search for quasi-logical precision of reference which tortured his syntax into increasingly Jamesian spirals for very un-Jamesian ends, there was an undertone of distress, even rage, erupting into repeated assaults and innuendos directed against various predictable targets. This scarcely contained emotion issued obviously (and openly enough) from the same sense of modernist alienation as was expressed very differently by Schoenberg or, to take an even more extravagant case, Adorno.

"Expressionism in the atomic age is the product of technocracy and the bomb, the emotion escaping the denial of emotion; it's the melodrama behind positivism, from Vienna to Weimar to New York, the relation of Strangelove to von Neumann." 

1961 Ornette Coleman

1965 Coltrane (or better, Ascension from 1966)


1991 My Bloody Valentine

Repeats, again, and again, and again…

Atomization, isolation and the illusion of absolute community. The low buzz and hum -the violence and warmth- of neurological overload.

All of this is obvious. I picked the list from what I had and out of a hat. I could have begun a lot earlier than I did, and I skipped the hippies. I skipped acid and went straight to MDMA. For contemporary megalomania see the back-to-nature fantasies of Avatar; Cameron's hated as a dictator by almost everyone who worked on it. For Detroit and Techno, go here.

2013 A short doc about a DJ, Nina Kraviz


I'm not going to moralize about a decline of culture; forms decay, culture changes. But the fish rots from the motherfucking head, and new life grows in the rot.

updated

Continuing from earlier posts, including repeats.
Atrios

"Wednesday Graphic Novel Blogging
Watchmen was actually really good. I thought the movie was... I dunno. I'd read the book and still had no idea what the movie was about."

In fact the movie "demonstrat[ed] a remarkable, at times almost demented, fidelity to the original."

Back to the arguments in the first link above, on Farrell's dislike of The Dark Knight Rises. Liberals are individualists, debating libertarians because they take them seriously. Conservatives are simply mocked. But libertarians, like fascists, conflate individualism and aristocracy, celebrating heroes over whatever system they claim to defend. Historically at least, conservatives defend systems over individuals. The rule of law is conservative; the ACLU is a conservative organization. (see below)

Watchmen, the book and the movie, are equally reactionary and equally a mess. That the book succeeds where the movie fails is a matter more of art than intellectualism. That contemporary liberals don't understand their own contradictions, prejudices and preferences, is a mark of the decadence of the age.

DB again

Really Bad
Yes this is really horrible and stupid.

But, hey, it's Rahm...

The link is to Glenn Greenwald.

Rahm Emanuel’s dangerous free speech attack.
Should government officials be able to block businesses from opening or expanding due to disagreement with the political views of the business’ executives? Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel evidently believes he should have this power.

From the past, Bertram

The right frame, in my view, is to think of the state as “we, the people” and to ask what conditions need to be in place for the people, and for each citizen, to play their role in effective self-government. Once you look at things like that then various speech restrictions naturally suggest themselves.

From five days ago.

I'd like to be able to have a sophisticated conversation on art and politics, either or both, but it ain't gonna happen.

Greenwald opposes hate speech laws: he's written on them in the past and links here in an update to the ACLU page on Skokie. He's also the only well known blogger linked regularly by members of the white reality based community who has a link to As'ad AbuKhalil on his sidebar.

From 2008

"Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment..." but not steadily.
The moral chaos and narrative confusion of Hong Kong cinema. Both memorable and forgettable, shallow and rich. The shot of The Joker leaning out the car window feeling the wind on his face really is a moment of "pure cinema," of silent, filmic, poetry. The naturalism in the hospital scene of The Joker and Harvey Dent, Two Face, is unnerving: the two characters simultaneously grotesque cartoons and fully human, the rage so obviously specific and personal.

Terminator II was a sort of collective artwork. Hollywood qua Hollywood and America, occasionally produce a kind of one-off epic cinema. The Dark Knight is smaller, intimate by comparison, and stranger. 

 

You could call Heath Ledger's performance "Stuart's Revenge," (compare the voices) but Franken's character is a cartoon. Cartoon villains show no fear until their last moments. Mostly they die cowards. Ledger's Joker is terrified throughout, but conquers fear by running towards it without stopping. To call him "evil" is to make him a cartoon when the film does the reverse. The Joker is played as human in the depths of psychosis and only from there as our dream. Seeing the touches of skin where the makeup is smeared off his forehead makes the terror that much greater. And as at least one critic has noted Aaron Eckhart's Two Face, goes even deeper.

see also here,
and here.

Henry Farrell doesn't like The Dark Knight Rises.

Moreover, it’s a specifically anti-political notion of politics. Max Weber, who thought long and hard about how to resolve an ethic of Nietzschean self-realization with the everyday realities of politics emphasized that the true political vocation lay in the reconciliation of heroic ends with the often sordid realities of political struggle and bargain-making.

And somehow Max Weber's politics is better. The perversity of people who criticize others' politics because they know their own politics are pure.

He links to Jacobin. For discussion of those idiots go here, and here.
The best answer to the shallow hypocritical bourgeois left-liberalism of Jacobin is the equally bourgeois left-liberalism of Jadaliyya.

Henwood: "There's a Marc Jacobs boutique in Ho Chi Minh City??"

In 100 years a group of earnest right-thinking bourgeois left-liberals will start a journal and title it "Hamas".

I haven't seen the new one but The Dark Knight is one of the best films of the last decade, and the first scene is brilliant.


I defend free speech because it keeps us honest. Liberal defenders of the market as a corrective to assumption never seem to imagine themselves capable of the laziness they take for granted in the rest of us. Designers of perfect systems for imperfect people always seem to give themselves the benefit of the doubt. The market is only one model of adversarialism; it requires an equally structural adversary. And Christopher Nolan is a more intelligent more interesting and more honest man than Farrell. A comment on the CT thread: "Why is it that the culture of late capitalism yearns to return to an idealized Middle Ages?”. The author is smart enough to mention Harry Potter but not smart enough to note the general intellectual fixation on fantasy. The writers at Crooked Timber read those books for pleasure. Nolan has a better understanding of the present because he has a better understanding of himself; fantasy isn't only his habit it's his subject. Again recent, so more a reprise than a repeat. And since Henry again declares his fanboy love (perfect timing) I'll repeat my repeats: Klub Kid Kollectivity: I'm alone. I'm everyone. We live in an anti-humanist age.
In for a penny, in for a pound.

For the last few years every time I've read liberals pontificating on the irrationalism of others I've thought of Steven Weinberg and Tyler Cowen, Colin McGinn and G.A. Cohen, etc.

But I've also thought of this


and more recently, and also found through CT, this

Books that Have Influenced Me the Most
1. The Phantom Tollbooth
2. Dune
3. The Dark Knight Returns and The Watchmen
4. A Brief History of Time
5. Atlas Shrugged
6 The Bell Curve
7. Nicomachean Ethics
8. Law Legislation and Liberty
9. Tractatus Logic0-Philosophicus
10. Universals: An Opinionated Introduction
11. In Praise of Commercial Culture [Tyler Cowen linked above]
12. Morals by Agreement
13. A Theory of Justice.

Duncan Black is all for boycotting Arizona, but liberals agree: the Arab citizens of Israel should leave.

Both publics are tired of the conflict; a majority on both sides want peace. Though for the Palestinians peace translates first of all as an end of the occupation and not having to see Israeli soldiers or settlers; while for Israelis, peace translates as security and quiet, an improved quality of life and preferably without seeing Palestinians.

Half the population of those under the authority of the Israel government are not Jewish, and most of them are not Israeli citizens. Zionism being racist in theory and in fact, liberal Zionism is an oxymoron. But still we have discussions among liberal defenders of Israel of the irrationalty of others.

Of course Cohen, Sanchez, and Wilkinson are liberals: they share a liberal fantasy of their own agency; all they would debate is the agency of others. The absurdity of Sanchez' posing and Wilkinson's, in his own "author's portrait" remind me of my comments years ago on Yglesias' adolescent inability to tell the difference between thoughtful arrogance and arrogant thoughtfulness. First comes the air of seriousness.
This is all so easy and so obvious it's just boring. Disgust is almost beyond me at this point.

From the immateriality of ideas, and idées fixes, to the immateriality of light.

Architecture and culture: Batman by Tim Burton and Production designer Anton Furst, and 20 years later by Christopher Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister; Koolhaas, Graves, Stern, to Jean Nouvel; capitalism. The Joker: Jack Nicholson's camp killer clown to Heath Ledger's psychotic deity. All that is solid melts into air and all that is not becomes material. Burton/Furst's Gotham was Gothic Art Deco: overdetermined historicist kitsch—a city by Michael Graves as bad joke—and Nolan's (in The Dark Knight) is modernist post Jacques Tati and Dan Graham and Alphaville/Tokyrama, Hong Kong by Godard, John Woo and Ringo Lam; but also Edward Yang's Taipei. Objects and structures framing windows and mirrors are now less important than the light that passes through or reflects off them.

Yi Yi



expanded, continuing

"Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment..." but not steadily.
The moral chaos and narrative confusion of Hong Kong cinema. Both memorable and forgettable, shallow and rich. The shot of The Joker leaning out the car window feeling the wind on his face really is a moment of "pure cinema," of silent, filmic, poetry. The naturalism in the hospital scene of The Joker and Harvey Dent, Two Face, is unnerving: the two characters simultaneously grotesque cartoons and fully human, the rage so obviously specific and personal.

Terminator II was a sort of collective artwork. Hollywood qua Hollywood and America, occasionally produce a kind of one-off epic cinema. The Dark Knight is smaller, intimate by comparison, and stranger.



You could call Heath Ledger's performance "Stuart's Revenge," (compare the voices) but Franken's character is a cartoon. Cartoon villains show no fear until their last moments. Mostly they die cowards. Ledger's Joker is terrified throughout, but conquers fear by running towards it without stopping. To call him "evil" is to make him a cartoon when the film does the reverse. The Joker is played as human in the depths of psychosis and only from there as our dream. Seeing the touches of skin where the makeup is smeared off his forehead makes the terror that much greater. And as at least one critic has noted Aaron Eckhart's Two Face, goes even deeper.