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Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Reality and the Movies
While we’re on about Virginia Woolf, I’ll just mention that I start my first "Philosophy and Film" lecture with a close reading of a thing she wrote in between Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. A 1926 piece for The New Republic, "The Movies and Reality":
People say that the savage no longer exists in us, that we are at the fag-end of civilization, that everything has been said already, and that it is too late to be ambitious. But these philosophers have presumably forgotten the movies. They have never seen the savages of the twentieth century watching the pictures. They have never sat themselves in front of the screen and thought how, for all the clothes on their backs and the carpets at their feet, no great distance separates them from those bright-eyed, naked men who knocked two bars of iron together in that clangor a foretaste of the music of Mozart.
The bars in this case, of course, are so highly wrought and so covered over with accretions of alien matter that it is extremely difficult to hear anything distinctly. All is hubble-bubble, swarm and chaos. We are peering over the edge of a cauldron in which fragments of all shapes and savors seem to simmer; now and again some vast form heaves itself up, and seems about to haul itself out of chaos.
Obviously I show some apes clanging things stuff together in 2001: A Space Odyssey; I explain how Kubrick, too, evidently appreciated that clangor can be a foretaste of more refined stuff; I hum da-da-da-da-da-dum-dum-dum-dum, show the classic bone-into-space ship sequence; and then we are on to the unfortunate Kane, peering over the edge of the cauldron of an Alien egg. Something nasty seems about to heave itself up, no?
One of the main points I emphasize about Woolf’s piece, overall, is its transvaluation of the values implied by the Platonic Cave Myth. (It’s quite impossible to teach a philosophy and film class without talking about caves.) The implication is that the greatest task set for the philosopher is to understand the troglodyte’s nature - in which there resides some rationally obscure value.
Then, reading on:
Yet, at first sight, the art of the cinema seems simple, even stupid ... The eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think. For the ordinary eye, the English unaesthetic eye, is a simple mechanism, which takes care that the body does not fall down coal-holes, provides the brain with toys and sweetmeats to keep it quiet, and can be trusted to go on behaving like a competent nursemaid until the brain comes to the conclusion that it is time to wake up. What is its surprise, then, to be roused suddenly in the midst of its agreeable somnolence and asked for help? The eye is in difficulties. The eye wants help. The eye says to the brain, "Something is happening which I do not in the least understand. You are needed."
Show Neo eyeing the Woman In Red. Then the "Wake Up, Neo ..." screen. Then a whole bunch of eyes from all kinds of films. Some judicious riffing on science fiction vs. speculative fiction - theory and theater. More discussion of how comprehensively several of our semester’s films invert Plato’s values. In a sense, of course, the likes of Neo and John Murdoch (in Dark City) are the clear candidates for Platonic heroic status. Then again, Agent Smith and Dark City‘s Strangers have some claim to that status. Maybe I’ll take it up again tomorrow, and finish reading the Woolf.
Comments
I hate movies. I hate how movies are called “films” by professors. It reminds me of those kids from high school who thought they were more intelligent when they called a trunk “a boot” or when they said “bloody” rather than “fucking.”
Anymore, I’m struck by how bad even the so-called classic movies are. So many moments of clunky acting, boring plot movement, ridiculous dialogue, wasted opportunities for image, overexploited opportunities for image. Only clothes and pop music date faster than movies. But were last season’s trousers and dance songs become next season’s pastiche, movies simply come off as stuck in their time, irredeemable.
Amardeep’s post about Woolf and Joyce makes me wonder if we’ll ever have a movie anywhere near the consistent quality of *To the Lighthouse* or *Ulysses*. Too many cooks spoil the soup, and movies always have too many cooks. (Except for the indies, but they’re too pretentious to stomach, let alone take seriously.)
The only movies I can stand are those that haven’t the slightest desire to be taken seriously. *Pretty in Pink*. *The Philadelphia Story*. *Billy Madison*. *Citizen Kane* makes me puke.
I haven’t seen “Billy Madison”, so I really couldn’t say.
*Kane* strikes me as all technique, no heart.
luther, give me a fucking break.
i don’t know shit about opera, therefore from the little i’ve seen and don’t like opera can never equal joyce. or to not make hasty judgements, i don’t like opera, as such opera fucking sucks in comparison to the great works of literature and nothing produced in it can ever be on the quality level of the best books. a faultless argument not to mention a ridiculous one that claims literature to already be operating at a greater level than movies inherently.