The Borders of Things

Next They'll Discover Ancient Gmail Accounts

Those crazy Greeks. They thought of everything.

When in Doubt

One probably rushes forward. I'm sitting here slightly insomniac because of the end of the quarter blitz, finishing some work, and watching a rerun of Frazier on late night television. One of the things that amazes me about late night TV is the regularity of adverts for "single" connection phone services. It's like two a commercial break after midnight. Would've thought that myspace would have made such things almost entirely obsolete.

What never gets obsolete, tho, is snow in Seattle, and walking to a meeting tonight I watched some of the largest flakes I've ever seen coming down hard, like miniature snowballs in some earth/sky battle, and the kids come out and play in the snow for the sheer pleasure of it. The varities of the planet never get old, I suppose, only lost.

50 Years of Howl

This month in 1956, City Lights Books published Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems. If you don't have a copy, anniversaries are a good reason to buy one.

Comedy and Critique

Let me admit right here that I have not yet seen the Borat film, tho I have seen a number of Borat interviews/encounters on, for instance, you tube. So I can't speak authoritatively about the film.

I would, however, like to take issue with Christopher Hitchen's back-handed complement of the American hospitality capitalized upon by Cohen. Hitchens claims that the fact that Americans go to such aims to put up with the sexist, racist, scatological "Kazakh" says that American's "are almost pedantic in their hospitality and politesse" and "the only people who are flat-out rude and patronizing to our curious foreigner are the stone-faced liberal Amazons of the Veteran Feminists of America." At most, "it's that attitude of painfully maintained open-mindedness and multiculturalism that is really being unmasked and satirized" not the racism and homophobia some people claim is being divulged.

In other words, while dissing multiculturalism, Hitchens seems to be giving a plug for general American decency, the very thing that allows a guy like Borat to get away with his shenanigans. But Hitchens fails to see that the very problem, the painful and real folly Cohen is putting his finger on, is the substitution of justice for decency. In other words, the danger of a culture of hospitality is that it can use politeness as a cover for real and deep-seated racism, sexism, homophobia, what-have-you. If you're generally a nice fella, and everyone around you thinks you are, then what does it matter if you hate black people? What does it matter if you're institutional structures systemically exclude minorities? To be sure, a society without decency is very hard to live in, and at their core decency and justice spring from the same motivation. But hospitality is no substitute for equality.

Satire, at its best, does not simply reveal the vices and follies of a particular society; instead, it reveals how those vices and follies are covered up, hidden, escape recognition for being what they are. It seems to me that what is offensive about someone like Borat is not that he is showing that there is racism in America, but that there is racism in decent people like us.

Don't Lose Your Head

On Saturday night I saw Sophia Coppola's third film, Marie Antoinette. I think I was quite taken with it, but I don't know if that necessarily makes it a good film. Here's what I thought about as I was walking home:

I couldn't watch this film without considering Immanuel Kant. Kant, who was writing these massive and famously impossible philosophical tomes around the time of the French Revolution, had this particular (and most would say peculiar) idea about the sensation of beauty, or the aesthetic judgment. To radically oversimplify (the only way I understand anything), Kant said that the sensation of beauty relied on a certain "purposiveness without purpose," a "disinterestedness" which resulted in a "free play" of the cognitive faculties. One implication of this is that beauty was not something attached to a particular idea, concept, value, etc.--otherwise, the very sensation would disappear, and one would be stuck with a good old unbeautiful cognition. Another way of saying it was that Kant saw the aesthetic judgment as a type of "thinking in general" which could not, by definition, be a thinking about a particular thing.

Thus, one interpretation of this focuses on two famous examples of things Kant saw as beautiful: flowers and wallpaper. Wallpaper: small, insignificant ornamentation. Beauty here is not sensuality (which Kant called "pleasure"), nor a "great idea" or "profound thought"; instead, beauty was best described as the emotion one gets from superflous designs.

Marie Antoinette is chock full of wallpaper. Lots of it: gilded, painted, elaborate and utterly meaningless apart from its aesthetic value. And the human version of wallpaper: extravagent dresses, piled hairpieces accentuated by fake birds, lots and lots of shoes. And flowers, flowers everywhere.

Thus, not only does the film (presumably) take place in the heyday of Kantian aesthetics, it is very much a Kantian film, the kind of thing that Coppola does extremely well. Like her last film, Lost in Translation, MA is full of these fine lovely mood-producing shots, and the material of pre-Revolution French royalty gives Coppola endless opportunities for such work. Any attempts to critique this movie for its historical laxity misses the point--the time and place is simply an excuse for the film equivalent of wallpaper and flowers.

However, there's more to it than that. Because if any drama whatsoever exists in this picture, it is centered around the fact that the king and queen take a long time to reproduce an heir to the throne, to the concern of all involved. The mechanics and motivation of copulation is on everyone's mind, and thus Marie's role is much more complex than simply eye-candy. She is not merely the best wallpaper design in the court; she's the royal brood mare, and all are waiting to make sure that those ovaries pump out not only a child, but one with a penis. Thus, wrapped in this bubblegum Kantian playground is a story of bloody, messy, hormonal sexual politics, the raw mechanism of reproduction which would probably have given the German philosopher fainting spells.

As a result, Coppola subtly plays with an alternative definition of beauty, one equally powerful and pervasive in modern thinking about art: that lust and beauty are the same thing, that objects of art are simply objects of desire, and that all those wigs and dresses are simply draparies for Kirstin Dunst's sexy little body. (In the words of Georges Bataille, a premier philosopher of this definition of beauty, the whole thing can be understood by recognizing that ""Even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their centre by hairy sexual organs.") This idea is particularly significant for Coppola's medium, film, which has always had a tortured relationship with the pornographic; the notion of "camera as phallus" voyeurism is a critical concept that has been around for a long time (I'm forgetting which male director said something to the effect of "the history of film is the history of boys taking pictures of girls"). Indeed, Coppola's significance comes from the fact that she disrupts this (a friend once aptly described Lost in Translation as "vaginal"), making movies that don't take the voyeuristic role, or, more accurately, move closely toward it without going all the way.

The complaint about the aesthetic in general, whether Kant's or Bataille's, is that it is an apolitical phenomenon, either meaningless fluff or hedonistic pleasure-seeking, only relevant for those divorced from the material conditions of labor and production. Marie Antoinette ends in an attempt, all be it a bit fumbling, to take that critique into account. Coppola is much less sure of herself here, and Anthony Lane's criticism that the movie, in this respect, demonstrates a failure of nerve, bailing out of the superficial to try to cope with History, is largely correct. That said, even where she can't quite pull it off Coppola gives Marx a nod: we see the king and queen attempting to continue the ritual of their evening meal to the epic roar of the mob outside.

A Kantian must always listen to the sounds of class struggle, eventually. Whether that only results in a broken and routed fantasy, or whether art, like cinema, can use Kant, Bataille, and Marx for something utterly different, is the resounding question, never fully asked and thus not completely answered, with which the movie leaves us.