Get Over Liking Things, Already
As many of the comments note, this post on “10 Movies Hipsters Need to Get Over” is stupid, but it’s also more than a little weird. It’s one thing to say such-and-such a movie is overrated; it’s another to say, as the author, Judy Berman, does over and over, that a film is actually really good but that you should still stop liking it. And for no other reason than you happen to like it. Is there even a word for somebody who tells you to stop liking something, and for no other reason than that you like it? “Sadist” doesn’t really cover it, as a sadist takes pleasure in the pain of another, not in another’s … what? In their absence of liking something? I guess “mean-spirited” is the closest the English language comes, but the post itself isn’t extraordinarily mean, at least by internet standards. It just kind of tells you to stop liking something. Why? Because it’s tired of you liking it.
And here’s another weird thing: normally I would say, well this is just part of the general assault on the hipster strawman, that wan, shadowy figure whose only defining quality is that he likes things hipsters like. But, again, usually the assault on the hipster strawman is an assault on a certain kind of movie, band, article of clothing and on a kind of person who professes to like those things not out of a genuine affection for them, but out of some kind of pretentious posing. Berman is assaulting the feeling of genuinely liking something, which is just the kind of thing (“Oh, you still like that movie?”) you would expect the most obnoxious piece of hipster trash to say.
Ok. Done.
Wait, one more thing. No French New Wave? No Italian Neo-Realism? No Charlie Kaufman? Berman misses most of the staples in the hipster film diet. Perhaps she had trouble viewing the hipster in its natural habitat, or maybe, Sasquatchian in its elusiveness, it skittered away before she could accurately assess its tastes. Either way, if you’re going to indulge in cliché, do it right.
The Bostonians
I’ve spent the last few weeks reading Henry James’s 1880’s novels, and I’m in the middle of The Bostonians right now. I’m only about a third of the way into it, but clearly this novel marks the moment where James begins to recognize himself as a stylist. No coincidence, then, that this is the period where he produces “The Art of Fiction.” William James seems to have though The Bostonians could have clocked in at about 100 pages and lost nearly nothing, and on the one hand he’s right. There’s a lot of writing in circles here, and of a sort that lacks the minute but luminous repositionings of the late novels. Reading the sentences in The Bostonians, it’s as though we’re watching James revise his notion of what constitutes a sentence, a thought, the relation between the two of them.
The White Ribbon
Spoilers below, sort of.
Michael Haneke is probably one of my favorite working filmmakers, though I find him one of the most difficult to talk about precisely because terms like “favorite” seem slightly askew when discussing his work. To watch a Michael Haneke film is to implicate yourself in complex, nearly ineffable communities bound together by buried or unspoken acts violence and guilty complicity, and so the language of “pleasure” and personal gratification seems ill-suited to describe the experience of watching one. Can one say that one “enjoyed” Caché or Benny’s Video or (especially) Funny Games? Not quite. Plenty of reviewers, hostile and friendly, discuss Haneke’s themes, all of them bound up with postwar and postcolonial Europe as well as the violence of American mass culture, though few of them discuss the difficulty of discussing them.
The White Ribbon is no different in the manner in which it baffles the language of personal reaction, and it’s perhaps Haneke’s best film to date. In terms of its construction, it’s certainly the most ingenious. It’s a marker of Haneke’s growth as a filmmaker that he’s grown so adept at turning away from the depiction of acts of violence and toward the enigma of their aftermath. The chilling thing about The White Ribbon, though, is that we know that the film’s violence is merely a prelude.
In his New York Times review, A.O. Scott writes:
Forget about Weimar inflation and the Treaty of Versailles and whatever else you may have learned in school: Nazism was caused by child abuse. Or maybe by the intrinsic sinfulness of human beings. “The White Ribbon” is a whodunit that offers a philosophically and aesthetically unsatisfying answer: everyone. Which is also to say: no one.
I don’t think this is quite right. To say that “everyone” is responsible is not to say “no one” is responsible; it’s to say everyone is responsible. One of the things the film does so well is question what we mean by “everyone” – Haneke seems to always take the term to its extreme. Everyone is everyone present, everyone who makes films about it, everyone who watches films about, everyone who knows about it. Hence, in the film’s climactic scene, the pastor’s anger when the school teacher tries to speak the truth about the acts of violence in the village. Silence both allows the perpetuation of violence and binds the community together; it’s a perpetually maintained blood oath.
I think that’s part of what makes talking about the experience of watching Haneke films so hard. In general, as good old T.W. Adorno noted in his speech “What Does Coming To Terms With The Past Mean?,” we’re not good at talking about collective guilt. In some way, any kind of emotional reaction to The White Ribbon implies a relationship to that guilt, and that’s not the kind of talk people usually want to have when they ask you how the movie was.
New Atheism and Rhetoric
Here’s a sort of semi-back-and-forth re: God between Karen Armstrong and Sam Harris in Foreign Policy. Armstrong finds Harris insufficiently “Socratic,” by which she seems to mean that he’s not interested in an “enriched” mutual understanding. I guess she comes out sounding more adult, but she either misses or ignores the foundational assumptions of the “New Atheists”: they’re not looking for common ground. They explicitly don’t want common ground, at least when the other guy’s ground is even remotely close to the holy land. Hence Hitchens’s “How Religion Poisons Everything” subtitle. Dawkins and Harris seem to agree with Hitch on this point, and if you really literally think that religion poisons everything, you’re probably not looking to find any kind of common ground with the poisoner; like, hey, maybe you should only poison some things?
And Hitch apparently does take his subtitle literally, as his Bloggingheads debate with Bob Wright clearly shows. Even a self-proclaimed materialist and non-believer like Wright comes in for some hellfire, so you can imagine where someone like Armstrong stands.
This inflexibility is one of the more frustrating features of New Atheist-type arguments, but also one of the things that makes them most compelling to sympathetic readers. And I think “sympathetic” is the right word here – if you’re a secular humanist / atheist type, there’s something really comforting about the unyielding materialism of the New Atheist position. But of course that’s the thing that also makes it seemingly uninterested in or unable to actually win over anyone who possesses even the most modest religious faith. For that reason, I’ve never been quite sure about the goals of New Atheists. One of them is public relations; they’ve done a good job providing a set of clearly delineated political and scientific arguments for Atheism. But if what they’re really trying to do is influence policy and weed out fundamentalist interests from the places where they can influence policy, it’s not clear that New Atheist goals are achievable, given their inflexible positions and the curious (but characteristic) mixture of geniality and bile on display in the Hitchens/Wright diavlog.
Before this post gets out of control, I’ll end by suggesting that, if what we see in the New Atheism v. Religion debate is, as the New Atheist’s claim, really a clash of two essentially irreconcilable world-views, two mutually poisonous epistemological, cultural, and religious positions, then you might ask how any of them can gain any rhetorical purchase. First of all, it’s essentially a one-sided debate. Though Harris may find Armstrong’s objections to New Atheist claims annoying, she’s not the real target. Rather she, and even Wright, are gnats that need swatting, whereas radical fundamentalism (in its Evangelical Christian, Jihadist Muslim, and Zionist Jewish iterations) is the infestation. Yet, fundamentalism need not respond – why should it, if it knows the only power it ever really has to answer to? Second, as Wright points out, New Atheist moral arguments are a bit shaky because they lack the divine authoritarian legitimation that underpins religious moral arguments. This is not to say that morality is impossible without religion (and to be clear, I’m much more sympathetic to the New Atheists’ position than anyone else’s, except for maybe Wright’s), but they have more trouble grounding the authority for their arguments in anything other than things like the Geneva Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Which are of course very admirable, but also are the product of internationalist political efforts which, at least outside of already-sympathetic liberal circles, have never had much of a foothold in the US.
One last thing, and that’s that I think the problem of moral grounding is also compounded by Hitchen’s peculiar personal and political history. Not to sound too old-school, but to me the best of the Marxist-inspired enlightenment critiques (like, say, Dialectic of Enlightenment) of the postwar era do raise serious problems for any notion of morality using the history of humanism and enlightenment thought as its basis. That is (and perhaps this is just the overly-contemplative academic wonk in me), treating, oh say, the Holocaust or Hiroshima and Nagasaki as aberrations rather than consequences of the intellectual and moral tradition so important to this project ignores the heart of the critique that fundamentalists frequently level at science, which is that its essential (and necessary) amorality has profound moral consequences. This is the issue that requires a rhetorical (and public relations) strategy with a bit of a lighter touch than the New Atheists seem ready to offer. I have more to say about all of this, but my blogging could also use a lighter touch, so I’ll leave off for now.
In Defense of Avatar? Weird.
I’ve been reading some of the flak surrounding Avatar. Most of it is pretty unsurprising. That some left-leaning critics, like Annalee Newitz, would find the film ridden with familiar primitivist white liberal guilt tripping is expected (Dances with Wolves in Space sums up to the basic thrust of these criticisms). Given that Newitz is a pretty astute writer, I’ll refrain from wondering too long about whether asking (facetiously?) when “white people will stop making films like Avatar” is the best way to frame the question she’s trying to ask. (That is, should you level your accusations of racism within a racial frame? Doesn’t this absolve you of thinking through the ways in which the film’s ostensible racism reacts to, interacts with, is inextricable from its other more praiseworthy aspects?) Basically, most left-leaning responses to the film run the gamut from “totally racist” to “yes, racist, but racist in a particularly American kind of way.”
Which leads me to ask: can you have a “left” reading of Avatar that doesn’t find it to be racist? If you don’t think Avatar is racist, or if you aren’t willing to just come out and say it, is your reading of the film ipso facto not-leftist? After all, one could easily imagine a conservative (but maybe not “right-wing”) reading of the film that emphasized its racism, highlighting the inextricability of the film’s condescension to the “primitive” Na’vi from its environmentalist, anti-Blackwater/Xe, anti-imperialist politics, and therefore delegitimizing those latter positions as racist-by-association. Or something.
Maybe it wouldn’t be the best reading, but you could imagine it.
I’m not all that interested in following through on that logic. And in fact I’m just sort of wondering lackadaisically about the relationship between politics and reading, and more generally about the relationship between positionality and reading. Does your position define the political thrust of your reading, or does the governing logic of the reading govern your political position. That’s something like the difference between a film a film that says racist things and a racist film. If you think there’s no difference between the former and the latter (given that “says” means “means,” not “has some obviously stupid or evil character say”), then for you the film’s politics is the product of the logic that gave rise to the utterance in the film in the first place (e.g. “Avatar is a racist film because, no matter what it says it thinks, the attitude it takes towards its native characters infects every aspect of the film, governs the decisions every character makes, governs the decisions the writers and directors make”).
On the other hand, if you think that a film can say racist things but not be racist, then you’re doing a different sort of reading. That is, one might say, yes, the fantasy of the Western imperial soldier using his Western rationality to master a native people he has helped to oppress, only to use his superior fusion of Western rationality and primitive animism to lead the native to triumph over his Western oppressors is the product of the racist assumptions undergirding this particular white liberal fantasy. BUT such a position does not necessarily result in the rest of the film’s political positions, does not master and infect, for instance, the very explicit anti-imperialism, the very explicit environmentalism, etc., then what you’ve got is a more complicated, more messy analysis on your hands. I’m not quite sure about the implications of such a methodological assumption – it would require a longer, more complicated, messier analysis than I really feel like presenting here.
The other thing it would do, though, is free you up to talk about pleasure, which, to my mind, Avatar is simply full of. Normally I simply loathe flashy, over-CGI’d bullshit – it almost always looks terrible. We can marvel at how advanced the technology is, but in terms of an amazing-looking piece of stagecraft, it does nothing for me. But Avatar looks amazing. Maybe you have to shell out the cash to see it on an IMAX screen, as I did, but I don’t know how you can say, as some have, that it doesn’t look substantially better than any previous CGI 3-D flick. Not only is fully integrated (none of that cheesy “Whoa that axe looks like it’s coming right at me!”), but you actually forget it’s there. But it is there, just being awesome.