Up on my youtube channel, I’ve recently started a new series of analytical commentary tracks for the major episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "Commentary track” is a bit of a misnomer, since there’s editing throughout. But each video will follow along the entire episode nonetheless. Since this is the 25th anniversary of when the first episode aired, it seemed like a nice time to finally share the project here.

It’s a self-indulgent project, but also one I’ve wanted to do for a while. Largely because, despite the fact that Buffy remains widely beloved, and has exerted an incredible amount of influence upon the pop-culture landscape, it doesn’t actually seem to be a very well-understood show. Which is perhaps the reason that its influence has not necessarily been for the best. To me, the core of Buffy is not things like cute dialogue, superpowered characters, or a supernatural premise. It isn’t things like found family or a musical episode. None of that is what makes it good. At least not in and of itself. What makes it good is what makes anything I like good: its ability to consistently and coherently express a complex thematic level via the medium of film.

So whether or not you’ve seen or like the show, if you’ve ever been curious about what is worth taking away from it, and why it’s stuck so persistently in the craw of pop culture--even now--you might find the series of interest. 

[video] Willy Wonka and the Inventor Mindset

It has been a very long time since I last posted! But I’m happy to finally be able to share something new. Decided to adapt one of my favorite old posts, willy wonka and the inventor mindset, into a video essay. It’s a pretty close adaptation, with some minor changes to correct errors in the original post and to make it flow better in video format. Hope you guys enjoy.

Dead Things, Part 2

This is the long-delayed continuation of my analysis of the intratextual parallels in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Dead Things.” I made some edits and added a section to that first part, so you might want to revisit it before reading the rest. In this half I’ll be discussing: (1) the issues of personhood and self-possession that the parallels to Faith bring up during the alley beating scene, (2) the context being used to frame Buffy turning herself in as a pseudo-suicidal act, (3) how the episode’s takes on identity and romantic love expand on the takes in the earlier seasons, and (4) why this sort of parallelism is interesting and valuable. More discussion of the episode’s themes around moral responsibility, agency, and identity is threaded throughout.

[Warnings: (1) This post assumes knowledge of the episode and show. (2) I discuss pretty much everything that happens in season six, which means there will be references to rape/assault. In addition to all the other unpleasant things that happen that season that one might not want to read about. (3) It’s about 11,000 words long.]

planning ≠ coherence

I talk a big game about liking coherence in art, and it’s probably clear that I have an apophenic tendency to enjoy textual interpretation. And this might lead people to think that I have a preference for carefully planned and plotted art, or that I look down on the messy and improvisational. But this is actually almost the opposite of the case. Not because I don’t really like coherence, but because artistic coherence is something more complicated than planning, and isn’t even necessarily possible to achieve with planning.

The thing about improvisation, is that at its best it’s about finding the choice that feels right. I listen to jazz more than any other kind of music, and one of the reasons I like it so much is the exhilaration of someone landing on a musical idea that simultaneously makes a song feel bigger and more complete. A solo isn’t fun if it’s just a bunch of disconnected ideas (similar to how whimsy isn’t fun if it doesn’t also “work”). It’s fun if it picks up on the things that the other players are doing, or ideas that showed up earlier in the song, and then makes them feel like they go together. Even if they “go together” in the sense of being coherently discordant, eg repeating ideas that don’t work multiple times. If beauty is fit, then the joy of improv is finding fit in unexpected places.

This goes for narrative too. In long-running stories like comics, book series, and TV shows, much is often made about whether certain choices were planned from the beginning. If things were planned, that’s a reason for praise, and if things weren’t planned, that’s a reason for derision, either towards the showrunners or towards people attempting to interpret the work. Say, “This plot point only happened because an actor wanted to leave the show. Therefore it has no meaning to read into.” But making things up as one goes is not what makes a story lose its plot, so to speak. Making things up is only a problem if the things the artist makes up don’t go with what came before.

In Impro, a very excellent book about the craft of improvisation, Keith Johnstone calls this process of making-things-go-with-what-came-before “re-incorporation”:

Johnstone is big on the idea that satisfying narrative depends on a sense of structure, and that reincorporation is one of the most important tactics for creating structure. To paraphrase him, a story where a character runs away from a bear, swims across lake, and finds a woman in a cabin on the other side, and “makes passionate love” to her has no structure. It’s just a series of events. Whereas if the bear then knocks the cabin’s door down and the woman cries out that it’s her lover, then suddenly it feels like a story. Because not only has the bear been reincorporated, it has been linked to the woman. From this perspective, if a story has no sense of reincorporation, or new developments don’t make sense with what came before, then it will feel incoherent, no matter how planned out it was.

I also keep thinking about Paul Bouissac’s discussion of gags and narrative in The Semiotics of Clowns and Clowning. He explains that what makes a scene funny is not whether it strings a bunch of gags together, but how those gags are organized. To use an example from the book, it’s one thing for a clown to pretend to hurt its thumb, and ask for an audience member to kiss it. It’s another thing for it to keep hurting different parts and then finally hurt its groin and act scandalized at the idea that someone might kiss it. Bouissac calls this sort of repetition “anaphor”:

One of the things that fascinated me about Farscape as a teenager, was that in contrast to other scifi of the time, it made no pretenses of having been planned—unlike say, Babylon 5. Or even shows like The X-Files, Lost, or Battlestar Galactica that gave you the “feeling” of a plan whether or not they had one, or were capable of following through. Farscape felt incredibly coherent, both in terms of theme and plot, but this coherence came about purely on the strength of the writing’s ability to ideate and then reincorporate. It would take someone’s weird costume idea, like the villain having glowing rods that screw inside his head, and snowball that into a whole storyline where the villain is a half breed of one hot-blooded race and one cold-blooded race, and can only stay alive by thermo-regulating the inside of his brain. And then decide that his vendetta against the hot-blooded race has motivated his obsession with the protagonist since the first season. Yet these twists never feel like “ret-conning” in a pejorative sense, because it all feels narratively and thematically sensible. (Unsurprisingly, making the show was described as “more like improv jazz than plotting out a symphony”).

None of which is to say that I dislike planning or polish, either. Stephen King, as a so-called “discovery” writer, famously writes off the cuff, without outlines. As he puts it in On Writing:

But his best stories feel like whatever bloat might have been generated from this narrative improvisation has then been pared down to what that improvisation was really getting at. And I can’t lie, I get a particular joy from reading or watching something and feeling without a doubt that the artist is in complete control of my experience. It was one of the most gratifying aspects of rewatching The Wire recently: the feeling that the little meanings and foreshadowings I was seeing in each choice were almost certainly intended. Nothing is more satisfying to an apopheniac than feeling like the patterns you see are actually real. And nothing is more annoying than a story that tries to pull some sort of reveal on you (“Dan is gossip girl!” “Angel is Twilight!” “Rey is a Palpatine!”) that doesn’t make any sense because it wasn’t intended from the beginning. Just because those characters existed in the story before, doesn’t make it good reincorporation. So if a story is a story because of structure, then if the choice is between a planned structure and no structure, the former is almost certainly going to be better.

Point is, it’s not really the process that matters. All creativity is improvisational in a sense, because all creativity involves making things up. What matters is how dedicated an artist is to the integrity of their work. If a writer has carefully planned their whole story out, with every twist and every theme clearly in mind, but can’t adapt if they start writing and find out that something they planned doesn’t actually work, that’s one kind of failure mode. The narrative equivalent of designing a perfect castle and then building it on a swamp. On the other hand, if a writer tries to go with the flow, but can’t reincorporate that flow, then that will be another failure mode. To the extent that I respond to improvisational art, it’s because improvisational art is often more attuned to these questions of whether something is moment-to-moment right. But what matters, above all, is the rightness. That’s what defines coherence. Whether there is a sense in the work that it is oriented around something, and whether the choices contribute to that something.

on reviewing

Watched a documentary on Pauline Kael a couple nights ago. It clarified for me why I always find her reviewing refreshing and frustrating by turns. Refreshing because she doesn’t tend to treat genre or subject matter as something sacred. She will watch many kinds of movies with the same degree of curiosity and judgment. Her instincts about whether a movie is working, or lying, or doing something new are also often very on point.

But she falls prey to the two big things that I think make reviewing a flawed, sometimes maybe even useless endeavor. Especially if the goal is to accurately describe what a work is.

1) An inability, or disinterest, in modeling why artistic choices work or don’t. For instance, at one point in the documentary she complains about artists and critics equating repetition with lyricism, and states that repetition in movies simply annoys her because it feels like belaboring a point that she’s already gotten. But that complaint misses out on an opportunity to explore why people would think that repetition is lyrical, or why an artist would reach for it as a choice. And whether, once you’ve modeled what the goal of repetition actually is, maybe there are good and bad versions. If it were me, I would argue that when repetition is good, it doesn’t actually feel like repetition. It feels like riffing. The artistic impact comes not from reiteration, but from reframing—and if it does feel like reiteration, then it’s probably weak repetition. If I were to make a similar complaint about a movie, I might instead complain that a motif did not add or gain complexity each time it appeared. Or I might complain that an attempt to convey monotony by unchanging repetition did not feel worth it, because I didn’t find the underlying point insightful enough to justify the experience of slog. Whatever my exact argument though, the point is that there would be a curiosity and emphasis on what the artist was trying to accomplish. And a generosity about what they could accomplish. As well as a self-awareness about my own values (like “density” and “coherence”) and the fact that I judge works by those values. Without this sort of meta-level mindset, reviews seem to quickly descend into authoritative subjectivity. Kael was good at viciously panning things, but how can a pan help the artist make better work unless it’s accompanied by some sort of model or rationale? Why would an artist listen to your opinion unless you first prove that you understand what they were trying to do? Without a level that exists outside of the reviewer, a review runs the risk of simply being an exhortation to appeal to that reviewer’s taste.

2) A love of saying things that sound good, regardless of whether they’re actually meaningful. At one point in the documentary, Renata Adler, another writer, attempts a takedown of Kael. But ends up making the exact mistake that Kael does.

Compare to Kael’s own style of evisceration. Here’s her on The Sound of Music.

Having read both pieces, I think both writers identify something true about their subject (Adler even makes remarks similar to what I’ve already said). But are the pieces useful? Or accurate in a more total sort of way? Kael had particular kinds of movies she loved, it’s true, and tended to be bad at self-criticism about whether her preferences actually indicated any sort of objective reality. But Adler’s criticism of Kael is no more interested in modeling than Kael’s reviews are. It isn’t interested in an evenhanded consideration of what Kael gets right and wrong and why. What unites Adler’s takedown of Kael and Kael’s takedown of The Sound of Music is that they want to be takedowns. They want to be stylistically rollicking reads that create the aesthetic experience of nailing something to a wall. But the thing about wanting too badly to make an argument “aesthetic” is that it becomes tempting to gloss over anything that would ruin the aesthetic flow. Adler devotes a long paragraph to identifying all of Kael’s tics, and the wall of text is certainly rhetorically effective at making you feel like Kael is some sort of dirty-minded one trick pony. But at the end of the day, it’s rhetoric. Not really argument. Similarly, Kael is so delighted to be able to use phrases like “glockenspiel routines”, that it gets in the way of saying anything more considered. Which isn’t to imply that I think the writers don’t actually believe what they’re saying. On the contrary, I think they hold their opinions powerfully and sincerely, and are trying to identify something wrong in their culture by singling out and drilling down on the sins of one thing in particular. But nonetheless, by caring so much about being good bits of writing—and they are good bits of writing; there’s something juicy and relentless about Kael that sticks with you—they end up empty on the level of argument.

These two failure modes highlight the central problem of reviewing, I think. Which is that reviews tend to be three things at once: ekphrasis, analysis and evaluation (which implies some sort of rubric of quality, whether personal, cultural, or “objective”). This is partly understandable, given that art is an abstract, experiential thing and therefore difficult to evaluate or analyze without some degree of ekphrastic description. It if was easy to say what a work was doing, the artist wouldn’t have needed to make art of it in the first place. So it makes sense that the process of making a work legible enough to opine on would have to trade in artistry itself. It makes sense that in order to show an audience what a work feels like, a review would have to poetically reproduce that feeling. Similar to the way that the translator of a poem needs to be a good poet themselves in order to make the meaning and experience of a poem accessible to an audience in a different language.

The problem is that ekphrasis, being expressive, is also necessarily subjective, and not primarily concerned with logic. Which on its own, is perfectly fine. I’ve written a ton of ekphrasis on this blog. I’m pretty pro-ekphrasis. When it’s done right, there isn’t much like a bulls-eye poetic description of a work to make you feel like you get it on a level you didn’t before. But when that sort of writing is also trying to say whether or not a work is “good”, the expressiveness frequently gets in the way. It’s easy to state or promote an opinion expressively. It’s harder to defend an opinion that way. In good faith, anyhow. Which results in all of these reviews that succeed in observing true or true-feeling things about art, and do so in a sometimes deliciously readable way, but don’t leave me with the feeling that the writer has any consistent or defensible take on how art works. I can’t help thinking that I much prefer reading writing about art that keeps its purpose siloed. So either a piece that tries to poetically explain how a work affected them, or an academic work that tries to argue for an interpretation, or something more philosophical that puts forth a theory of what makes things good and bad and explain why a work does or doesn’t live up to that. I don’t want this to be the case. I think writing that can blend those three modes together is some of the best possible writing about art. But the average reviewer is not really up to the task, despite the fact that the review is probably the most common and widely-read type of writing about art.

(None of which is to say that I’m free of sin these regards. One of the reasons I try to keep the tone of this blog casual is because I want to be able to be able to play with these different modes of writing about art. And see where and when and how I can get away with blending them. It’s a practice space.)

more brief responses to movies. one good, three flawed.

May as well post these here instead of keeping them private.

The Firm (1989). Directed by Alan Clarke. Good old solid British realism. Pleasantly short and to the point. More movies should be willing to be short, instead of padding with story. Gary Oldman very good.

City of Joy (1992). Directed by Roland Joffé. Some beautiful photography, but dull and stilted storytelling, and erratic in tone. Gave up after 20 minutes. Hideous Kinky had similar ideas and elements but addressed and executed them a thousand times better. I enjoyed Hideous Kinky because it was almost an anti-Eat, Pray, Love: a white woman goes to India to escape Western life and a disappointing partner, but it turns out that the “east” or a more “authentic” and “exotic” life cannot provide any more spiritual insight than any other. Because people are people everywhere, spiritual hypocrites included, and you bring your problems with you wherever you go. Whereas this movie was a more boring “white person seeking enlightenment in India grows up by learning that hardship is real.”

A Dark Song (2016). Directed by Liam Gavin. Had a solidity to it and went some interesting places in a way that is unusual for contemporary horror. But ultimately felt too student-film for me to really like. I wanted more use of visual language to give it thematic focus. Kept comparing it to The Exorcist, which also tackles religiously-flavored horror, but with very tight and thematic visual language. Martyrs too, since that movie also features the long, brutal stripping away of a female character, followed by transcendence, except that whole movie is a commentary on the human yearning for those kinds images and stories. And so you leave it feeling purged of something and somehow…extruded by the work. In that artistic way. Whereas this movie got nowhere near my guts and so it could not provide that sort of transformative experience.

The Little Drummer Girl (1984). Directed by George Roy Hill. Screenplay by Loring Mandel (who also wrote Conspiracy). Based on a Le Carre novel. Starring Diane Keaton. A good movie, though ultimately missing something to really compel me. Some kind of aesthetic oomph. Didn’t help that the romantic connection at the heart of it was too limp to give the movie an emotional center. I most appreciated it on the structural level. The evolution of the story goes through a pleasant number of twists and turns. Despite the fact that the ending is inevitable (the Israelis killing all of the Palestinians), you’re still interested in how it will get there, and hold out some hope that something or someone will be spared.

three movies that should have been boring, but weren’t

I’ve been doing short write-ups of movies as I watch them lately, and I realized that the last three I watched were all united by the fact that they seemed like the kind of thing that should have seemed slow, or uneventful, or overdone, yet managed to compel me anyway. So I thought I’d compile them, in the interest of finding similarities.

Girlfriends (1978). Directed by Claudia Weill. A very good movie. Most impressive for the way it does so much with so little. A good example of how even in a genre that I should find insufferably overdone at this point—the struggling young NYC artist figuring themself out genre—can still be great if the artist has a strong, individual attitude and the guts that come with it. All it really takes for an “ordinary” topic to be interesting is for the artist to know what they want. I loved how unselfconscious it was. There was no sense that it was performing to what some imaginary audience would find cool, which is so often the problem with these sorts of stories (unless it’s something like Girls, which makes performativity its subject matter). This is one of the things that I think allowed all of its seemingly simple scenes to not be boring. Even if simple, the character tension in them was real and important to the writing. Whereas in writing that is looking for approval, the characters become vehicles for that approval instead of actual characters. And if they’re not actual characters, then they lose their ability to generate tension. Because tension is generated by things like “I have a model of what this person wants. When they face a new situation, I feel tense because my model predicts something about how they’ll behave.”

The Apostle (1997). Written and directed by Robert Duvall. One of those movies where it seems like nothing happens and yet you’re absorbed anyways. At least I was. It actually seems like an artistically perfect reaction to have because the point of the protagonist is that he’s a charismatic figure that makes people believe in God, but doesn’t actually have any real spiritual insight. Not unless you go in for his brand of born-again Christianity, anyhow. The movie could have chosen a much more intellectually tempting or palatable version of Christianity, so I think it matters that it focuses on a version that needs emotion and charisma to distract you from the theological emptiness. A version that comes off as nothing but a bunch of repetitions of slogans and platitudes, as if saying things enough times and with enough fervor makes them true. Yet you get to the end of the movie and you realize you’ve watched more than two hours of this religious bombast. It feels like something has happened, even though nothing has. The man is still a murderer, still preaching away. He hasn’t really progressed, even though he probably thinks he has. His “ascension” at the end is into the lights of the police cars rather than the light of heaven. Basically, it feels like there’s this question throughout, echoed by the “empty”-yet-absorbing nature of the narrative itself, about whether meaning created in the mind corresponds to anything real outside of it.

Also: Duvall is incredible in the role. His character is one of those characters that could so easily descend into caricature or pantomime, where the bigness of the deliveries is more about flattering the actor’s ability to be big than portraying a character who talks that way. But Duvall gets it exactly right. Every delivery feels totally embodied and character-driven, which is vital for making the movie feel like a thoughtful exploration of something, instead of something with an opinion it wants you to know. It’s a great example of not-needy acting and movie-making. A caricaturish depiction would let the movie off the hook—would be about giving the audience something obvious to approve of (there’s that issue of approval again). Whereas depicting a person with a huge personality in neutral way forces you to think about them in ways that aren’t simple or easy. The way you’d think about a real person if you had more information about them.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring (2003). Directed by Ki-duk Kim. A very good example of a movie that is both successfully meditative and successfully absorbing. I’m not sure why it succeeds so well on those fronts. It has many many beautiful images, but there are plenty of beautiful dull movies out there. I suspect it’s because first, the seasonal structure of the movie gives it an excuse to change tones and build on itself, which prevents boredom. It puts you in the mood of a puzzle box. Second, and probably more importantly, each section basically plays as a fairy tale, or parable. And fairy tales and parables are a very compressed form of storytelling that play on very basic human truths. Which means that all of the beautiful images and meditative moods have something narratively and philosophically precise to hang on. They’re not there as compensation for the fact that the artist doesn’t actually know what they want or mean. The fairy tale quality is also probably what allows the movie to get away with such obvious symbolism without feeling trite. Because you expect the symbolism in a fairy tale to be obvious. But that obviousness also doesn't feel annoyingly didactic because the point of a fairy tale is not just to teach, but to convey some sort of truth along with it.

Setting aside the formal competence of each of these movies, which is definitely a factor in what made them able to keep my interest, I notice they all shared one important quality: they all knew what they wanted. And if an artist knows what they want, then the pace of a movie can be superficially slow, or the content can be superficially empty, or subject matter can seem overdone, and it will feel focused anyway. The artist knowing what they want also seems to go along with not trying to perform to an audience, which also gives the movies focus. A lack of pandering--even subtle, subconscious pandering--means that there’s nothing to pull you out of the narrative spell by reminding you that you’re audience member and an outside world exists. It also means that only the artist is driving the artistic decision-making, instead of both the artist and some model of the audience in the artist’s head, which means there are no conflicting visions to add bloat. Lastly, the thing about performing to audience is that it makes a movie predictable, because the whole point is to anticipate what an audience already knows it wants. But in a slow or overdone genre, predictability of execution (though not necessarily subject matter!) will generate impatience and kill the pace in the water. If you already know how a certain story goes, then the pleasure comes from the artist’s take on it. And if the artist is trying to give an over-familiar take as well as an over-familiar subject, then what is the point? This is why an individual style will make an action movie feel fresh, but a shocking twist will not, necessarily. The individual style derives unpredictably from an artist’s personality, whereas the shocking twist derives predictably, ironically, from a desire to not come off as predictable. Of course, this theory also means that shocking twist is its own form of overdone content that could still feel exciting and new if it came from a confident artistic place.

been rewatching the wire and just finished season two. honestly baffled that it was ever considered a bad season. it’s gorgeously, classically tragic and rich with literary parallelism and other arty, thematic stuff. but also never stops being grounded in the real-world nuance of its subject matter.

you’ve got this focus on family. the sobotkas, the barksdales, d’angelo and his ex and son, nicky with his girlfriend and daughter, jimmy trying to reconnect with his wife and children, kima and her pregnant partner, beadie being a single mother, the fact that it’s prez’s father-in-law that drives the case, nicky being “like a son” to spiros and the greek telling him he should have had a real son. 

you’ve got a focus on unseen labor, dying labor. the dockworkers and their dwindling jobs. the container of murdered prostitutes. herc and carver being ignored by the squad. the westsiders struggling to push shitty product and having to lay people off. working-class jimmy in his boat, towing a party yacht of rich people. there’s a question of who owes what to whom. is a union like a family, where you take care of your own by default? or are the barksdales like a union, where d’angelo pays his dues with jail time and is owed support from his family as a result? is society a union or a family, and what does it owe to struggling, unseen populations? what’s the point of being like a family if families fail their children all the time?

you’ve got a focus on stupidity. the tragedy of stupidity. where the characters all come off as cool and competent in season one, playing clever cat-and-mouse games, in season two it’s just one fuck-up after another. ziggy and his endless, clumsy schemes. stringer bungling the attempt to sic omar on mouzone. bodie failing to toss the guns. beadie tipping the squad’s hand by stopping the truck. nicky telling frank to meet with spiros and the greek. herc and carver dropping $1250 on the microphone. landsman not telling the detail about the glekas murder. the fbi guy accidentally giving tips to koutris. bubs trying to rob an ambulance. the boy getting shot through the window. over and over characters are forced to admit that they fucked something up. maybe it was their fault, maybe it was bad luck. but no matter what, something harrowingly stupid went wrong. it’s completely fitting that the detail of the season gets started because of something as petty as valchek having a grudge over a stained-glass window.

but that’s tragedy in a nutshell, isn’t it? half fate and half fallibility. half big sweeping generational drama and inexorable economic trends, and half individuals making individually terrible choices. it’s a duality one has to wrestle with when making sense of the broken systems that the wire is so concerned with. when people end up dead, or jobless, or in jail, it begs the question: what caused this? did society fail them? did their family fail them? were they born into a bad circumstance? were they doomed by their genetics? were they victimized by evil-doers or malign forces? were they trying their damnednest and with noble intentions, but were surrounded by too many fallible people, and failed to predict too many unpredictable events, and so they failed anyway? did they have the hubris to think that they could beat the infinite complexities of the world, and end up punished for it?

that’s the key of the season, i think. the hubris of engaging with complexity. the hubris of thinking you can make a quick buck with drugs, or talk your wife into taking you back, or stop your job from becoming irrelevant, or uncover an international smuggling conspiracy, or explain why baltimore is the way that it is. it’s the attitude that makes the show such an effective critique of broken systems in the first place. it understands that trying to convey the true complexity of things is a fundamentally hubristic exercise, and that trying to lovingly critique a system into fixing itself is probably as doomed as trying to fix a broken marriage. and yet it can’t give up on the stupid, tragic, inevitably quixotic hope of that.

quarantine has led me to use youtube more. food videos for recipes, yoga videos for exercise. but i find myself unsettled by it all, even as i consume it. aside from things like music, it all feels like porn. call it educational, call it asmr, call it clickbait, but the structure is still pornographic. each video promises some specific relief, and the comments get mad if the uploader skimps on the money shot. you watch a single video and suddenly your home page is full of youtube trying to guess what gets you off. oh you liked that shit? don’t you want to see this food get made? this house remodeled? this pimple popped? this package opened? this car detailed? this knife restored? don’t you want to see this person laugh at the same part of a tv show that you did? don’t you want to see them rant about the same things that you’re mad about?

i highly doubt this is a new thing to observe. and it’s not that i have a problem with videos dedicated to some abstract gratification, per se. the unsettling part comes from the way that this pornographic behavior is not generally labeled as such. even jokes that a video is “like porn” or that the uploader left out the “good stuff” seem to miss the connection that…no it’s not “like” porn, it pretty much just is. which means that the uploaders themselves are in the business of being pornographers. they act like camgirls, they’re just selling a slightly more esoteric satisfaction. while doing yoga to a video i have to turn off the part of my brain that thinks a pretty girl talking gently about relaxation is probably getting someone off in a literally sexual way. and it’s not that i think that’s a yoga instructor’s goal. it’s more like, by virtue of existing within youtube’s norms their style was bound to converge on something ineffably sexual. i’m aware of the series “fake friends” that gets into the so-called parasocial nature of the relationship between youtube personalities and their audiences. though i’m not sure if that series makes the connection to camming (i’ve only seen part of it). or to the content structure of the videos themselves. not just the fact that youtube personalities act out a social relationship with their followers, but that the access to intimacy is in fact what the person is selling—literally so, often enough. not just intimacy either. sometimes authenticity, sometimes narrative, sometimes both. i wore the same shirt for thirty days! i bought my dream house! an apology to my followers… the point is that the person is turning themselves into a source of gratification, and this affects the structure and presentation of the videos.

it’s something beyond pure sensationalism too, although sensationalism is a factor. sensationalism hijacks a person’s attention by leaning on their feeling that something is important. it often takes advantage of the instinct to gawk, and the promised voyeurism of that can indeed feel like a pornhub thumbnail. BAT CHILD FOUND IN CAVE! etc. or say, a headline indicating that a minority demographic committed a crime might promise the validation of a bigoted mindset. but youtube also feels like walking through a market full of people hawking their wares. it’s a competition to sell you the thing that you want. but in that amateurishly unsubtle way that i associate with sexual content.

to the extent that i have a “problem” with the way that youtube, and really, so much of the internet, seems to encourage this sort of content, it’s probably that it prioritizes the audience instead of the creator. i don’t particularly care that people get off to things. so do i. i also admire the ability of internet content to get to the point, and therefore reward attention. but it does make me uncomfortable to see content become about satisfying an audience potentially to the exclusion of a creator’s own impulses. it’s the content-ification of content, in general. you don’t want a recipe, or a story, or a song, you want content. it’s the same reason that visiting netflix tends to nauseate me lately. because everything feels so calculated to appeal. there’s always been gratifying media. it’s the bread and butter of reality tv, hgtv, etc. “do you want to find out what happens, and will we make it worthwhile?” is a basic, understandable question to ask. as i’ve talked about before, almost all art has a relationship to attention and gratification, and so to some extent the label of “pornography” is just a matter of a work’s location on a spectrum. the difference between youtube and other red light districts, is that it’s at once more unsubtle than netflix, and less explicit than a cam site. and the difference between youtube and the average cooking show or blockbuster movie, is that it’s motivated to be more purely oriented around whether the viewer is satisfied along some very immediate axis. instead of something that rewards attention, but has concerns besides whether the content is moment-to-moment acceptable to some specific audience.

constipation

there are things that you say to make people feel thought of. things to make them feel loved. happy birthday. how’s your mother? it’s good to see you. that meant a lot to me.  

i don’t know why i can’t do these things. i know what to do, and i do not do it. there’s a vulnerability to social gestures, but a fear of vulnerability doesn’t quite feel like the problem. it feels like being stuck.

thinking about emotional intensity. not specific to a kind of emotion. different people are differently prone to love, hate, fear, awe, obsession, disgust. i’m thinking about the feeling of being filled up with something, buzzing with something, bursting with something. the feeling that you’ll go insane if you don’t do something about it. true-cliche phrases like that.

something instinctive, reflexive about how it makes you react. the desire to hurt someone who’s made you angry. touching someone you love. possessing merchandise. speaking in tongues. intensity wants outlet. wants compression, perhaps. management. they say that’s why people can cry from any kind of strong emotion.

hard to explain how much time i spend feeling like that. like emotion, about everything, is water in the lifeboat of my mind that i’m constantly trying to remove. like every act is a leap from a precipice. medication didn’t stop me from being depressed so much as it stopped me from feeling so much, period.

which was a good thing. a relief. it’s easier to be happy or productive when you spend less time bailing out a lifeboat. easier than when there’s no ethical place for emotion to go so it just goes in circles and circles…until it doesn’t.

i can see the argument for mental illness leading to creativity. not because of romance. not because it makes someone have better ideas, let alone more ability to execute them, but because necessity is the mother of invention. the times i’ve been at my most creative, my most poetic, have been the times i was most full up with something. writing less out of creativity than sheer desperation. writing as emetic. as a spinning wheel. a way of getting emotion to take up less space.

creativity can flow from feeling a lot, is what i’m saying. whatever it is that one is feeling a lot about, and however it came about. why draw a horse if you’re not preoccupied with the idea of drawing that horse? i once said that you could think of sexual attraction as something more like sexual inspiration. the feeling of wanting to do something to someone, or have them do something to you. having ideas about it. even if the ideas are nothing more complicated than putting one body part into another.

talk about the word “process.” processing feelings. the same thing you’d do to a tree or a hunk of ore to make it useful. break it down, refine it. compartmentalization, refragmentation. the stuff you do to food not so much to make it palatable, but edible.

talk about why i’m drawn to the concept of compression in art. the idea of packing meanings and phenomena into a space that is small enough to look at. to use. taking death and beauty and betrayal and that way you felt on a rainy morning ten years ago and giving them names. not just to free your brain to think about other things, but also to expand its capacities. like learning new vocabulary. like reading a book and realizing that something you think about has been thought about before.

i think about why i get obsessed with things. it’s the feeling of trying and trying to squeeze a meaning down, and not being able to. sisyphus, tantalus, a dog chasing its tail. true-cliche metaphors like that.

(i sometimes think that if i were to ever truly be in love, it would feel like that. not obsession per se, but a feeling for a person so big and so compelling that i could spend a lifetime trying to process it and never be done. like a traumatic event, but with an opposite emotional polarity.)

isn’t it unfair how bigness leads to blockage as much as flow? something in the way versus something pushing from behind. my sister got married a couple years ago. at the wedding, people were asked to say something for the couple, a blessing of sorts, but as more and more people got up to speak the less i found myself able to. i loved her so much that the words wouldn’t even come. they just went around and around in my head, making me more and more emotional, and the end result was that i said nothing at all.

i care about things, and i do nothing, and it makes me furious with myself. or is the problem that i don’t care enough about the things i think i care about? or is it just that doing things is hard? is there too much in the way or is there not enough behind? how does one learn to tell the difference?

i’ve had trouble writing for months. for the whole last year, more like. if not more. but i couldn’t tell you why.

thinking about shame. about how my father retreated from my life when i was young, too ashamed of the failure of his marriage and business. about how he sublimates every strong emotion of his into politics and conspiracy and obsession because it’s somehow easier to sit with. your jewish wife divorces you? guess the holocaust must be fake.

thinking about insecurity. about how my mother believes so fundamentally that her emotions will not be accepted, that she cannot state them directly. how even her most basic expressions of opinion and thought must be couched in some way, armored with approval. she can’t just tell you about her day. she has to frame it as “i think we should go around and tell each other about our days.” this pressing need to narrativize, ritualize, because it adds order to something that otherwise feels precariously intense.

shame and insecurity as motivation versus shame and insecurity as obstruction. doing things because you don’t want to be loser. doing things because you don’t want to think about the fact that you’re a loser. doing nothing out of fear of being proven a loser. something in the way versus something pushing from behind.

i’m not so different from my parents. but i at least have the self-awareness to know that my lifeboat is full of water. and to practice emptying it in ways that don’t reek with pathology.

talk about why i’ve written this in a scattershot and pseudo-poetic manner. talk about why i don’t have a conclusion. when you try to encircle something big, there will be gaps. when you try to shift something big, sometimes you can only do so in pieces. the vague and figurative and obvious as levers that help you carjack unwieldy realities. to be a little less stuck than before.

Jungle Fever (1991)

Watched Jungle Fever (1991) the other night, Spike Lee’s take on the (1991) state of interracial relationships. It didn’t feel as ruthlessly focused and still-relevant as Do The Right Thing, although several parts of the movie do feel like watching a present-day twitter debate. I’m not the right person to make calls about relevance, really. But it was compelling to me as an example of how to make art about a social issue in a way that feels complicated and challenging, regardless of what the issue might be. I’ve rarely seen a movie so explicitly political that was also so determined to not draw an exact conclusion. And yet it still leaves you satisfied that the movie did what it set out to do. The lack of conclusion didn’t feel aesthetically cowardly or morally wishy-washy. It felt right.

And a lot of that, I think, is down to the set-up of the story. The premise is that a well-to-do (dark-skinned) black man, happily married to a (light-skinned) black woman, with a kid, cheats on his wife with his white (Italian) secretary. The affair is quickly discovered, provoking everyone around them to air their many and various grievances about race and relationships. Meanwhile the protagonist’s older brother, a shiftless drug addict, lurks around the edges of the movie making increasingly desperate and invasive demands for money.

The reason that this set-up is so smart, is that it starts everyone—including the audience—from a place of judgment. It’s easy to use art to argue that interracial relationships are obviously good, and that people who judge them are obviously bad, when the relationship is a pretty Hollywood story of two people in epic, star-crossed love. It’s harder when you’re talking about an adulterous affair that is based, in large part, on racially fetishistic desire. Similarly, it’s easy to say that a family--or more broadly, a society--should support their children when that child is a successful architect who has made a single sexual mistake. It’s harder when that child is a chronic liar on a downward spiral that threatens to bring his instability into a family’s superficially safe, middle-class home.

In other words, the movie deliberately focuses on characters that its audience might not immediately find sympathetic, that people might have legitimate reasons to think are disturbing some social order. And doing this accomplishes two kind of amazing things. First, it gives all of the characters permission to speak their minds about what’s going on. If someone is racist, the unsympathetic circumstance gives them an excuse to be racist. But it also, for example, gives the protagonist’s wife, Drew, an opportunity to articulate the raw pain of her particular socio-sexual experience with race. It means that multiple realities will be true. Multiple perspectives will sound sort of wrong, and sort of right. You find yourself thinking that what someone is saying is a real, fair point to make, but not necessarily relevant to event that prompted it. Second, using unsympathetic characters means that any humane conclusions that the audience ends drawing will have been fully earned. People don’t need to be virtuous to be human. An interracial relationship doesn’t need to be perfect to be something that’s fine to do, or at the very least, something that one should not be legally or socially punished for solely for being interracial. The juxtaposition of adultery with an interracial affair forces one to articulate the difference between something that is unethical, and something that is merely, in a particular time and place, taboo. 

(I say unsympathetic, but it really should be “unsympathetic.” The characters actually are sympathetic, but they’re sympathetic because they’re complexly written, not because the audience has been cheaply manipulated to like them.)

It also helps that the movie understands and addresses the bigger anxieties that cause human beings to be so damn tribal in the first place. If the movie were purely about interracial relationships, it would not have featured Gator, the drug addict brother, so prominently. Instead, the movie seems to be more about questions of security and belonging. It’s about both the fear of being cast out of society, and the fear that something will undermine the society that exists. It seems to suggest that the reason that people are afraid of interracial relationships is similar to the reason they’re afraid of adultery, and afraid to admit to adultery--and also, afraid of addicts and the otherwise abject. It’s the fear that your unit will be disrupted. That base human instincts and outside influences will corrupt the social fabric. Though the movie also loves pointing out the irony of the way that the fear of social disruption leads families to destroy themselves more than they ever would otherwise. Angie’s father throws her out of her house. Flipper’s father, who is heavy-handedly named The Good Reverend Doctor Purify, ends up shooting Gator. On the other hand, when Drew kicks Flipper out of their house, or sobs while having sex when he finally comes back, it’s clear that this damage to his domestic unit is entirely his fault. In other words, the movie treats the fear of instability as simultaneously rational, misplaced, and as a destructive, self-fulfilling prophecy. 

(Really there are so many levels and instances of on the other hand with this movie, that you could just keep going. I’m not doing justice to how much ambiguity there really is, especially when it comes to Flipper’s anxieties about status and belonging. One of the reasons he gives for ending the affair is that he doesn’t want to have mixed-race kids who don’t fit in anywhere, who won’t belong. On the one hand, given the speech his wife gives about being mixed, and given Flipper’s outcast state at that point in the movie, that fear is not necessarily irrational. But on the other hand, the actual reason he ends the affair is because he doesn’t love Angie. And if he isn’t around for the child he already has, that’s on him. On the one hand, Flipper claims that he and Angie were really only interested in each other because of their race, but on the other hand, Angie is genuinely taken aback at this suggestion. Or, at one point in the movie there’s a very hard-to-watch scene in which Flipper and Angie are playfighting against the hood of a car, when the police suddenly show up and try to arrest him, saying that someone had reported an attempted rape. Flipper of course is scared out of his mind, shouting at Angie to stop telling the police that they’re lovers. On the one hand, Flipper’s fear is completely justified--the officers in the scene are the ones that killed Radio Raheem in Do The Right Thing--and it’s clear that Angie can’t even conceive a world in which the simple fact of them being lovers would be equated with rape, and punishable by death. But on the other hand, the playfight is shot in a genuinely ambiguous way, and the police accept their mistake pretty quickly. The dual reality that police can fail society by being violently racist and by being negligent is allowed to just sit there. On the one hand, you add these examples up, and you could say that the movie implies that a lot of Flipper’s racial anxiety is only in his head. But on the other hand, the beginning of the movie shows Flipper failing to get a very deserved promotion, and it’s pretty clear that the main reason he doesn’t is because he’s black. There’s a reason his name is Flipper: this is a movie and a character that flips between sides.)

Point is, whether or not Jungle Fever is a movie that people would still see themselves in, it is a fine example of how to make a movie that tackles contentious social issues in general. My takeaway was that, when making art about a social issue, consider:

1. Using ambiguous examples, and/or examples that an audience is not likely to be charitable towards. And then finding the human side of that example.

2. Using more than one example.

3. Letting people with different stakes in the issue articulate those stakes.

4. Having people be right, but wrong, and wrong, but right.

5. Going a level up, and seeing what bigger ideas encompass the issue you’re exploring.

All of which, really, are probably good ideas for any sort of story, political or not. The failure-mode of social issue art is propaganda, when the desire to persuade leads an artist to depict the world in a moralistically simple way. Watching the movie, it’s clear that Spike Lee has his own attitudes about what he’s depicting. But by complicating and contextualizing those attitudes, he avoids propaganda and creates something that is entirely literary. And ends up potentially more persuasive as a result.

kinds of games

I made a half-joking comment a couple Christmases ago that it seemed like every family had a certain genre of game that they would play together, if they ever happened to play games. And that you could probably infer something about the family culture as a result. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same principle applies to other groups as well as individuals, but the family-game dynamic is the one that’s most interesting to me. The genres were:

1. Luck. Bingo, Yahtzee, and many other things involving dice. Go Fish. Games that at their most advanced are a matter of playing odds, and at their least advanced involve no skill whatsoever.

2. Trivia. Trivial Pursuit, variations on Jeopardy. There’s some overlap with pattern-matching (below), but failure or success at these games depends most of all on whether you have a diverse and detailed knowledge base that you can easily bring to bear.

3. Pattern-matching. Set, boggle, scattergories, many other kinds of word games. Charades might count as well. There’s some overlap with trivia, but the competitive fulcrum is primarily about who can recognize a pattern or solve some clue. 

4. Strategy. Chess, Monopoly, Othello, Stratego. Strategic thinking often requires the ability to notice patterns and think probabilistically, but it’s about doing so in an iterated way. If you’re playing Set you don’t need to think ahead to what might happen in the next round. You just need to match the shapes in front of you.

5. Skill. Many sports, video games, and games with a physical component. The skill in question varies--it can be a matter of strength, agility, finesse, or something else. But what the games have in common is that you can get better at them if you practice the game itself. If you build muscles and reflexes. To get better at a trivia game you’d need to study, and to get better at chess you’d need to learn a thousand different strategies, and possibly just become smarter. But to get better at Mario or football you’d mainly have to play a lot of Mario and football.

6. Social. Not sure if many families play social games, but it’s still a category. Things like Truth or Dare, Never Have I Ever or Two Truths And A Lie. Games where the point is about learning social information, and playing with personal dynamics. BS (or Bullshit, the card game) is a kind of social game, because the competitive, non-luck aspect has to do with whether you can read or trick people well.

Obviously, many games have overlapping qualities, and things like talent and skill can affect success at all kinds of things. Obviously, families might play a variety of games. But what’s interesting to me is the idea that what a family most often likes to play (or chooses to play) doesn’t merely or necessarily reflect what members of that family are good at, but also potentially what those families value.

For example, one family might play a lot of luck games or social games because they have young children who can’t compete very well at other kinds of games. Whereas other families (I’ve known multiple families like this) might throw their kids in the deep end of Monopoly or tennis because they want to cultivate business thinking or physical ability. In a family that contains people with very different sensibilities, the games they agree to play can reveal what sensibility tends to dominate. Or can be compromised upon.

(My family’s a pattern-matching family. We all have associative, apopheniac tendencies, and like the zing of cheap intellectual competition. But none of us have the kinds of knowledge bases that make trivia fun, and none of us have the patience for sustained strategic thinking. At least not when “having fun.” The fact that my family likes pattern-matching fits very well with the way that I was raised to value creativity and intellect, but rarely hard work.)

Fun is like humor. It’s individual, cultural. It reflects what’s interesting, important, difficult or unpredictable in someone’s world. Social faux pas are often funny to people preoccupied with social presentation, and luck might be fun to someone who finds the magic or danger of fate exciting. Or to someone who’s averse to competition or control. Strategy games might be fun to patient people, or people who think that wins should be “earned.” Trivia games might be fun to people who value knowledge, whether or not they know things themselves. Skill games might be fun to people who want a reprieve from more cerebral concerns.

My taxonomy is tongue-in-cheek, but the broader idea that “fun” is a complicated, revealing phenomenon is not.

songs of impotence and experience

In the last couple years, I’ve revisited a lot of the things that were meaningful to me when I was younger. I’m not exactly sure why I did that. Some nostalgia. Some curiosity about whether they held up. Some sense that maybe I could get some insight into myself. Why did I love the things I loved at a time when my id was more unfiltered? What did the younger version of myself need art about that maybe the adult version doesn’t?

A lot of the works are superficially goofy genre shit, but space ships, aliens and made-up words never really felt like it was what I loved about them. My taste was just as indiscriminate as a kid as it is now, which meant I read and watched and liked a wide variety of things. Proper literary things, even. I don’t think it’s an accident that I often connect(ed) with superficially goofy genre shit. Just like I don’t think it’s an accident that a different person might connect with musicals or period movies. But that’s an aspect of my personality to analyze another time.

No, what I realized was that all of these space-and-aliens-stories…on some level, were impotence stories. They’re stories about being manipulated by outside forces, or having shit stuck in you against your will. Stories about parasites. Stories about going insane. And while those might sound like “intense” themes for a child or teenager to be preoccupied with (as if children and teenagers don’t feel things intensely), I realized that it actually made complete and utter sense. When you’re young it feels like things are constantly just happening to you. Adults make decisions for you. Society makes demands of you. It’s hard to know what power you even have, let alone how to use it. Of course I’d relate to impotence.